The Donors’ Stone Laid Face-Down

Wynn Treloar came up the quarry path at noon with the lodge’s tally under his arm and a face like wet slate. The pledge for Longmere had crossed, he said. Fishpond had caught it, Tamsin Reedwater’s lamps, at a drop a span. But it had come inside a great grey band: hundreds of travellers cloaked alike, their purses folded together, so that no gate could say which hand had sent the builders their money.

“The donors’ stone,” he said, as if Idony might have forgotten it. It leaned against the shed wall, smoothed a month ago and waiting for names. Benefactors liked their grandchildren to find them in a church. “I can write to the band-leader. Ask them to step out of the grey, just for us. It’s a cathedral, not a debt.”

Idony Forrest set her mallet down on the tracery block. She had walked the old abbeys as a girl and read their donor walls: lords nobody remembered, misspelled, half of them crumbled to a cough of grit. The names had lasted no better than the men. The vaulting had lasted.

“They paid not to be counted,” she said. “Leave them be.”

Wynn opened his mouth, then shut it when she called two lads with levers. They tipped the slab onto a sledge, smooth face down, and dragged it to the north door. By dusk it was bedded as the threshold, where every pilgrim for three hundred years would wear it hollow and never know whose feet it was for.