Angels in the Architecture Read Online Free PDF Page B

an old one. And it seemed like a reflection of himself in the far distance and he thought perhaps he might respond to this mirror image in some way, as indeed it seemed to want to connect with him also.
     
     
                  History would record that day the almost complete collapse of the cathedral at Lincoln and the multiple ruptures in the Foss Dyke. The practices of God and Commerce were equally disrupted. The rational called for repairs, the ignorant called for heads, and it was never a simple matter to predict from whence the powerful holders of such divergent views would emerge.
    The social fissures exceeded the earthen ones, and their tremors ran for weeks, months , and even years. Some women and children whose husbands and fathers were lost to the earthquake, or called to the mason’s lodge at Lincoln for work, were taken in to some of the kinder homes of Lincolnshire, although it was a struggle to feed more bellies. Others were less fortunate and were forced to a wandering life, lucky on occasion to find company with some younger roving labourer, less lucky to find an older one, having only themselves to give alongside their own pair of working hands and those of their children.
    Families were rent, and new embitterments would be sure to keep them divided for a generation’s memory and more. God Himself became a particular victim of rancour among those less inclined to fear Him, and even among those who did.
    There was no logic to the varying physical effects of the earthquake. Some things fell and some things stood. In a single street in Lincoln, among an entire row of houses all exactly the same, one house fell completely and not another. In another street, almost the opposite: all fell but two or three. When the news was heard of the cathedral though, there was not an inconsiderable fear and superstition as to why God would allow such a thing to occur, and ordinary folk wondered what they or someone else had done to offend the holy order of things and whether enough retribution had been exacted by the earthquake or whether there may be more of such to come.
    Gamel Warriner had no care for this superstition any more than he did for dead swans or the like. He sought simply to get his boys, his horse, and his cart home again to their small holding, along roads whose obstacles were previously only well-trodden ruts in the clay, but which now offered up no-longer-bridged streams, and bottomless clefts in their once familiar and worn track now filling with silt and water from countless creeks and streams whose courses had already shifted. Gamel offered no peace of mind to his children; he had little himself, and he used a great strength to maintain the sort of composure suited to a man before his sons, despite his own unnerving. Besides which, life held fear aplenty, and the sooner boys became men the better for them. Best they learn that to carry on with a view to protecting one’s own and putting one’s fear aside was the best course.
    Still, the shaken earth rendered up shaken hearts and minds and bodies , and each fresh rumbling heard from the distance set the guts of Lincoln and Torksey and their surrounds to shiver anew.
     
     
    At the ruins of the cathedral in Lincoln, all that remained was a part of the limestone west end of the great Church. It had been consecrated nearly a hundred years before by Remigius, a Benedictine monk and a supporter of William the Conqueror.
    The new Bishop, Hugh of Avalon, a Frenchman, away at his palace at Stowe, forsook any thought of prayer for the ruins he was soon told of and prayed instead for the souls of Lincolnshire. Walking from his manse to the Minster Church of St Mary – or Stowe Minster as it was generally referred – he was frustrated by the fawning of young monks from the Abbey, offering their assistance to him. He would soon return them all from whence they came in Oxfordshire and be rid of the daily reminder of the multitudes of useless clergy