Ashenden by Elizabeth Wilhide Read Free Book Online Page B

waiting.
    Woods could work anywhere. Upstairs, in the bedchamber, where he had been worrying over the accounts books the previous evening, or downstairs, here in the great hall, which was where the daily site business was conducted; if need be, he could work on the road in jolting carriages and stagecoaches (he had often found movement conducive to design thought). Now he sat at the midpoint of the long refectory table that bisected the great gloomy hall of the manor, an orderly chaos surrounding him, and reached for a scroll of drawings. The drawings were of a smaller, simpler commission, a design for a little classical pavilion or temple, a trifle to standin the grounds of a house he had built fifteen years ago near York. When he unrolled them, his right hand knocked against a shard of pottery resting on the tabletop and sent it flying. He just managed to catch it before it fell and smashed on the floor.
    The men were always bringing him such things, relics that they unearthed during the digging of the foundations, wanting to know what they were, or imagining that he might find some inspiration in them or use for them. Most of their findings were unremarkable: bits of broken tiles, old sections of beams, rusting metalware. This pottery shard was of a different order of discovery and he had brought it to the attention of Joshua, who had humored him by pretending an interest in it. The fragment was irregular and of varying thicknesses, a segment of an earthen vessel made of coiled, fired clay. Into its rough unglazed surface a hand had pressed a pattern of indentations with some sort of blunt-ended tool. His fingers traced the spiraling lines. The shard was ancient, he was certain of that; how old he did not know. In the regular pattern he recognized a tension that was familiar. Material knew how it wanted to be shaped—that was form. Material told you how to embellish it—that was decoration. Sometimes the marriage was perfect.
    Woods laid the pottery fragment back on the table. At the same moment the door was pushed open and Joshua appeared with news on his face.
    Despite himself, Woods felt anticipation tighten his chest. “The stone?”
    Joshua nodded. “It’s come.”
    *  *  *
    Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture and Sebastiano Serlio’s Seven Books of Architecture: these two treatises were Woods’s constant companions and his teachers. The rules and proportions set out in their pages formed the guidelines by which he built and the ideals to which he aspired. As he accompanied Joshua down the slope to the river, he thought that even the masters, Palladio and Serlio, would have been struck by what he saw in front of him. Herewere the building blocks of the classical order; here, in raw form, were plinth, column, architrave, frieze, and cornice.
    Sometimes when Woods looked out over the trenches and earthworks of the foundations, as he had done earlier that morning, he was surprised not to see the house already complete, it was such a fully formed thing in his mind. A thing, moreover, of inexpressible joy and delight. Of love. During his life he had known love twice (one of the women had died and the other had married someone else) and the sensation of building was the closest he had ever come to that enraptured state. Building was a voluptuous pleasure; taste it once and you wanted more. Now as he saw the stone waiting to become architecture, waiting to become what he held in his head, he was gripped by desire. It was nothing to do with ownership. This type of possession was entirely imaginative, and so the longing was infinitely renewable. Patrons, who inhabited your buildings once they were finished and sometimes spoiled them, were a small price to pay for it.
    Men were swarming around and over the barge, making it fast to the landing stage, removing the canvas covers from the stone and hitching the blowing draft horses that had pulled the barge up-river. On the bank, two wagons were drawn up, fresh