London (39 page)

“And where will you store all the arms, finally?” Hilda asked.

Ralph grinned. “In the Tower,” he replied.

It would be the first time the Tower had been used. While building was in progress, the garrison of London remained dispersed at the Ludgate forts and other places, but the great cellar, sealed off from the rest of the Tower, could serve as a store. Ralph had already had another mighty door placed at the bottom of the spiral stairs for extra security, and this, too, Alfred had fitted with a heavy lock. “A guard at the top door to the staircase, that’s all I need,” Ralph remarked. King William would be pleased to know that his great castle was already in use.

By the following day, Hilda had told Barnikel everything.

If the threat of having the armoury searched made Barnikel and Alfred nervous, in the end it was the armourer’s wife who brought the crisis to a head.

Wandering into the armoury late one night, she had surprised her husband just as he was concealing a sword in the hiding place under the floor. When, after her initial horror, she had forced him to tell her everything, she had given the armourer an ultimatum: “How could you put us all at risk? You must stop helping Barnikel. For good. And the arms must go.”

Alfred soon discovered that on this matter, his usually comfortable wife was implacable. “If not,” she told him, “I go.”

Here lay the problem. Although Alfred was secretly rather relieved at this excuse to end the dangerous business, there remained an obvious difficulty. “Ralph’s men guard the outside of the armoury. His spies are everywhere. Where can we hide the arms now? And even if I wanted to dump the arms in the river, how would we smuggle them out?”

Neither he nor Barnikel could think of what to do until the Dane, remembering Osric’s ingenuity when they had smuggled the arms before, at last suggested: “Let’s ask our little carpenter. Perhaps he’ll have a bright idea.”

And it was after listening to them carefully and thinking for some time, that Osric came up with a suggestion which caused the huge old Dane to gasp and then roar with laughter before crying:

“It’s so outrageous, I do believe it might work.”

Tap. Tap. As softly as he could. The little hammer and chisel echoing around the huge, cavernous cellar in the darkness. Tap, tap. Sometimes he held his breath, hardly able to believe that the short, sharp sounds could be muffled even by the thick walls of the Tower.

Tink, chink, he softly dislodged the mortar. Tap, scrape, he gently removed a stone. All by the light of a little oil lamp in the pitch-black cellar below the crypt. Tink, tink, like a busy gnome Osric burrowed in the bowels of the mighty Norman keep.

It was the strongroom he had made three years earlier that had given him the idea. “The wall beside the crypt was about twenty feet thick,” he pointed out to Barnikel. “So if there was enough space in there to make a strongroom, then there must be the same amount of space in the wall of the cellar directly below.” After careful calculation, Barnikel and Alfred had told him that they needed a space about five feet by eight feet to store all the illicit arms they had. Could he create such a thing?

“I’ll need a week,” he replied.

Tink, chink. All through the night, Osric eagerly went about his work.

It was not difficult for him to sneak into the empty Tower at night. Alfred had provided him with keys to the cellar doors. But there was very little time. As soon as he started to take arms into the cellar, Ralph would post guards on the door. Each night, therefore, until an hour before dawn, the little labourer worked, carefully loosening the stones to create a small space he could crawl into before cutting into the softer rubble behind.

This rubble he carefully placed into a sack, which he dragged from the crypt cellar, down the eastern chamber, round into the bigger western chamber and then over to the well, dropping it in there before returning. At the end of each night, he replaced the stones in the wall and fixed them with a shallow layer of new mortar that he hoped would not be noticeable in the cellar’s darkness. Tidying the floor carefully, he then departed.

And so he continued, night after night. Apart from the fact that he sometimes seemed sleepy at his daily work, no one was any the wiser.

Only one thing worried him. “I’m going to put so much rubble down the well,” he told the Dane, “I’m afraid I might block it.” But each night when he let down the bucket, it continued to enter the water easily and come up clean. And by the end of the week, as he had estimated, there was a small secret chamber just high enough for him to stand up in hidden within the cellar wall.

Which left him one, final task.

On the last night, instead of going to the wall, he went to the big western cellar. In the corner, over the great drain, was the stout iron grille Alfred had made. So that the drain below could be cleaned and repaired, this grille opened on a hinge and was locked in place. Using the key Alfred had provided him with, Osric unlocked the grille and let himself down with a rope. Entering the long passage, he bent almost double and worked his way down it for fifty yards until he came to the outlet in the riverbank. This, too, was guarded by a thick metal grille.

His timing was good. It was low tide and the passage was nearly dry. He encountered nothing except for a few rats. The great bars of this grille could not be opened with a key, however, and so for the rest of the night Osric worked around the masonry until he had prised it loose. Then he carefully fixed it once more, but this time with thin mortar so that with accurate hammer blows in the right places he would be able to push it open from either side. Finally, he returned to the cellar, locked the grille, and left.

From now on, he would be able to get into the Tower cellar from the river, through the damp and narrow tunnel.

“Ralph won’t think of that,” he had pointed out to his friends. “After all, who wants to get into the Tower cellars except me and the rats?”

Three days later they stored the arms in the Tower. Everything went smoothly as, under close armed guard, three carts went from each of the several armouries to the Tower.

When they came to Alfred, however, he was not ready, and with some irritation they went away, to return later. In fact, it was not until the very end of the day that Alfred was ready to load all the arms, carefully wrapped in oiled cloths, on to the carts.

Noticing that there was an even larger quantity than they had been told to expect, the guards, accompanied by Alfred himself, went as quickly as possible to the great keep.

A number of men were needed to carry the heavy loads up into the Tower and down the spiral staircase into the cellar, where they were stacked against the walls. When Alfred peremptorily called to Osric, who was standing nearby, to help, nobody took any notice. Even Ralph, as he watched the arms go into the great fortress, was not suspicious. After all why should he be, when the weapons were going into the Tower?

Nor, at the end of the day, when they locked the two doors to the cellar and set the guard on the main floor, did anyone notice that Osric had vanished.

All night he laboured. It had to be done carefully. As quietly as he could, using the tools Alfred had smuggled in for him, he worked the stones loose to gain entry to the secret chamber. Then he began to move the arms.

Alfred had arranged everything cleverly. Each rolled cloth contained a second in which an illicit weapon was wrapped. Even after all the illegal weapons had been removed, therefore, there appeared to be just as many arms as before. One by one, Osric extracted the swords, spearheads and other arms and took them round to the hiding place. Two hours before dawn, he had stacked everything in there. Then he put the stones back in the wall and, as before, fixed them with a little mortar.

After this, the plan was simple. All he had to do was unlock the grille over the drain and clamber in. Putting his hand up through the bars, it would be easy enough to lock it after him and make his way out to the riverbank, opening the grille there and then fixing it behind him.

He tarried, though. First he threw dust at the freshly rebuilt wall to conceal the wet mortar. Then, lamp in hand, he checked round again and again to make sure that there was no other sign of his having been there. Dawn was approaching when at last he satisfied himself he could go. He was just halfway down the great western cellar when, suddenly, he heard the heavy oak door at the bottom of the stairs creak open behind him.

Ralph had been unable to sleep. He was too excited. The king himself had already expressed his pleasure about the arms operation and now, in the early dawn, Ralph had decided to survey his work.

Holding a torch high over his head, he walked down the huge western cellar where the arms had been stacked. With a smile he looked at them. A fine collection, all secure.

Then he saw Osric. The little fellow was asleep, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. What the devil was he doing there? Ralph lowered the flaming torch near Osric’s face until his eyes blinked open. And then Osric smiled.

“Thank God you’ve come, sir,” he said.

He had been left down there, it seemed, the evening before. “I hammered on the door and shouted,” he explained. “But nobody came. I’ve been here all night.”

Suspiciously Ralph looked around, then searched him.

All the time, Osric was inwardly thanking the Lord that, as well as all his tools, he had thought to throw the key of the grille into the well behind him.

Finding nothing suspicious, Ralph considered the situation. The fellow must be telling the truth. How else could he have got there? Besides, what could he do down there anyway? And then, because the long-nosed Norman was in such a good humour anyway that morning, he did something most unusual. He made a joke.

“Well, Osric,” he said. “This makes you the very first prisoner of the Tower.” Then he let him out.

Later that day, Barnikel murmured with even greater satisfaction: “The arms are in the one place in London where no one would ever think of looking for them. And thanks to that drain, we can get them whenever we want.”

But the Dane’s satisfaction at this triumph was short-lived.

By the month of June, London was full of mercenaries. Every day the invasion was expected. The city was more nervous than it had been since 1066. July came. August. Soldiers came and went. Every sail upon the estuary seemed a threat. Rumours flew. “Yet still they don’t come. I can’t understand it,” Barnikel grumbled. And then, gradually, word began to filter through. “Something’s happening. There’s been a delay. He isn’t coming.”

England waited, but still no Viking ships hove into sight.

The collapse of the great Danish expedition of 1085, which might, indeed, have meant the end of Norman rule in England, remains a historical puzzle. The vast fleet was assembled. The new King Canute was ready and eager to sail. And then some kind of disagreement took place. Exactly how or why has never been entirely explained. Certainly the next year Canute was murdered. Whether the disputes were genuinely internal or cleverly fostered by the agents of William of England will never be known. But whatever the true reason, the fleet did not sail.

Autumn departed and the Tower grew. Cold Christmas came, and as the Dane trudged down to the riverside, he saw only the bleak outline of the great stone square, dark in the snow. A sense of uselessness and lassitude descended upon him.

But it was for spring that fate had reserved her grim surprise.

Even in the autumn, Barnikel had suspected he was being cheated. Just after Michaelmas, when he had asked for the rents from his new estate at Deeping, the steward there had sent a derisory amount. When he demanded an explanation, the man had returned a message that made no sense at all. “Either this fellow is a fool or he takes me for one,” swore the Dane, and if it had not been for a heavy fall of snow he would have gone to sort him out there and then. As soon as the snow cleared in early spring, therefore, he set off.

It took him several days. First he had to pass through the thick forests beyond London, then travel across the huge, flat wilds of East Anglia. The east wind was damp but bracing.

On the day he arrived, however, it had dropped to a light breeze and the sky had partly cleared. It was a pleasant March morning by the time he came to the coastal hamlet of Deeping.

Where he was unable to believe his eyes.

“What the devil happened?” he asked the sullen steward. The fellow only answered: “You can see.”

For the hamlet and its green were standing alone, not amid broad fields, but marooned, surrounded on three sides and gently lapped by the salty waters of the grey North Sea.

“It came in another fifty yards this year,” the steward told him. “Another two years and we reckon the whole village will be gone. It’s like this for five miles along the coast,” he explained. And then, with a kind of dour satisfaction on his long, pale face, he added: “There’s your estate, sir.” He pointed eastward. “All in the sea.”

Seeing that it was so, poor Barnikel bellowed: “I’ve been cheated by that damned Silversleeves!” And then: “I’ve been cursed.”

But why, he wondered in bafflement, why was the sea rising?

In fact, it was not. Or hardly. Although, even now, the final thawing of the last Ice Age was still fractionally raising the sea levels of the northern world, the true cause of this flooding lay in that other long-standing phenomenon; the tilting of England. This was what Barnikel really saw, the slow geological tilt that drives the coast of East Anglia down and raises the water level in the Thames Estuary. It was because of this that, here and there along the low-lying east coast, the land was being waterlogged and taken back by the northern seas of his Viking forefathers.

He stared east and shouted curses at the sea, still more at cunning Silversleeves, but knew there was nothing he could do. “I made my mark and seal on it,” he cried. The document was legal. He had been duped.

He would have been even more bemused had he understood the true origin of his misery.

When, long ago, Silversleeves had taken over Leofric’s debt to Becket, the merchant of Caen, he had simply been continuing the long process by which he secretly came to control all his old rival’s trade with London. Only last Christmas, when Becket was owed for six separate shipments, the subtle Canon of St Paul’s had suddenly stopped all payments and refused all supplies. “And that,” as he explained to Henri, “should ruin them by Easter.” Thanks to his foolish insult of twenty years ago, Barnikel had been added to this process, rather as an architect might add a side chapel to complete the symmetry of an otherwise perfect building.