London (36 page)

And here was the strangest thing. Despite the fact that he was being sacrificed to the building of the Tower, whenever he entered its grim walls, Osric found that he was fascinated.

The great cellars were finished now, covered over with huge rafters and floorboards, except for the south-eastern corner, which had a vaulting of stone. The spiral stairs down to the cellars were already sealed off with a massive, iron-studded oak door locked with a large key made by Alfred the armourer. “The arms for the whole garrison will be stored down there,” the foreman told Osric.

The walls of the main floor were growing rapidly. As was usual with such Norman strongholds, the main entrance was on this level, a handsome doorway in the south wall, reached by a high wooden staircase on the outside. Though almost as thick as the cellar’s, the walls of the main floor were punctuated with numerous recesses leading to narrow windows and other apertures. Two of these especially intrigued the young labourer.

The first was about ten feet across, in the western wall of the main hall. One could walk right into it, as though it was a small room, and looking up inside, Osric could see that it went up about twelve feet, and that just below the top there was a small hole in the wall leading to the outside.

“Whatever is it for?” he asked the masons.

They laughed. “It’s for the fire,” they explained. And when he looked mystified: “The king’s hall will be above this room, so instead of a brazier in the middle which will send smoke up through the floorboards, he wants these fireplaces. They have them in France, you know. There’s to be another in the eastern chamber.”

And so it was that in the Tower of London the kingdom of England received its first fireplaces. They did not have chimneys, however. The smoke just went out through a hole in the wall.

Two other cavities, these ones in the northern wall, also seemed curious. Each narrow little passage led to the outer edge of the wall, where, in a nook, there was a stone bench with a hole in it. “Look through the hole,” one of the masons suggested, and when he did, Osric found himself gazing down a short, steep chute into open space with a twenty-foot drop down the outside of the north wall. “The French call it a
garderobe
,” the mason explained. “You’ve guessed what it’s for?” And when Osric nodded: “We fit a wooden gutter down the chute that overhangs the wall. That way you get a clean drop to the cesspit below. You’ll be digging that later.”

Osric considered the thing. “Draughty on your backside.”

The mason laughed. “Encourages people not to hang about.”

It was in June that the incident occurred. It was nothing really. One warm evening, a group of men who had been drinking were sitting by the riverside when little Dorkes came down to the water. She did not stay there long, only scooping up the clear water to wash her arms and face before returning. But as she passed the men, her eyes carefully looking at the ground, one of them, a little drunk, tried to grab her round the waist, calling out: “I’ve caught a mouse. Give us a kiss.”

Another girl might have laughed it off, but Dorkes did not know how to handle a drunken man. Burying her chin in her chest, she shook her head and tried to break free. The man’s hands felt for her small breasts as he grinned at the others.

And then something hit him.

Osric, coming on the scene, did not wait to argue, but threw himself so violently at the fellow that although the little labourer was only half his size, the man was knocked to the ground. For a moment after, Osric thought the bigger man or his friends might go for him or throw him in the river. Instead, a cry of laughter went up.

“The little craftsman’s a fighter!” Then: “Osric, we didn’t know she was your girl!” From that day it was a regular joke on the building site. “How’s your girl, Osric?”

It caused him, for the first time, to look at her.

There were plenty of opportunities. Sometimes he would watch her when she went down to the river in the early morning. As it was summer, she wore only a simple shift, so that when, like most of the women, she stepped into the stream fully dressed to wash, he got a good idea of her body as she came out. He discovered that she was not, as he had imagined, flat-chested, but had small, nicely formed breasts.

At nights, as she sat with her mother by the fire, he would sit a little way off and study her face. Before long, what had seemed a pale, unremarkable profile became beautiful.

But more even than these features, he now saw something else. Timid she might be, but with what quiet determination she defended her mother as, with every passing month, the poor woman became more useless thanks to her crippled hands. Always keeping her dignity, never begging, Dorkes would do little jobs for people for which she would be paid with food or even an item of clothing, thereby keeping herself and her mother from destitution.

Ever since he had defended her, the girl had been friendly towards Osric. Quite often they would chat together, or walk about. Sometimes he would see her gaunt mother with her helpless, gnarled hands watching them, but it was hard to tell what she was thinking, and since she never granted him more than a sad nod, he seemed unlikely to find out. Dorkes knew, of course, that the men teased him about her, but she did not seem to mind. But Osric noticed that despite her quiet smile, she was still guarded with him, whether from timidity or for some other reason he was not sure.

He fell in love in July. He could not say exactly why. One evening he was watching her and he felt a sudden wave of protective tenderness. The next day he kept looking about to catch sight of her. That night he saw her in his dreams, and by the following day it seemed to him that his entire life would somehow have meaning if he could live with her.

“And then,” he murmured to himself, “I could look after her.” The thought was so exciting that even the miserable sheds where they lodged seemed to the little fellow to be bathed in a warm new light.

A few days later he and Dorkes met Ralph Silversleeves together.

It was Ralph’s habit to walk around the site early in the morning, before work began. Sometimes he stopped to investigate the lodgings; usually not. Always, though, as if it were his personal castle, he walked proudly round the outside of the growing Tower. He had just done this when he encountered the two young people walking up from the river.

Ralph had heard the men’s jokes about Osric and the girl, but as he considered the little labourer such a miserable object, he thought it hardly likely that any girl would look at him. Now, seeing them together, he suddenly wondered: could it possibly be true? Could the miserable Osric have a woman when he, Ralph, had none? Seized with a sudden fit of secret jealousy, he gazed at the girl and then remarked: “Whatever are you doing, walking round with this poor little runt?” And to Osric: “Why don’t you leave this pretty girl alone, Osric? You’ll embarrass her with your face, you’re so hideous.” Then, giving the boy a quick cut across the back with his whip, he moved on.

Neither of them spoke. “I always ignore him,” the girl whispered after a moment.

But though he knew Ralph was his enemy, the Norman’s words had given Osric a shock, and he kept silent.

At low tide, there were several places along the banks of the Thames where the clear water collected in pools. That same afternoon, when the sun was shining so brightly that you could see the sky in the water, Osric slipped down to the river alone.

As the years had passed, once he had forgotten the pain of having his nose slit and grown used to his awkward breathing, Osric had not thought much about his appearance. Nor, in a world almost without glass, was there much likelihood of him catching sight of himself. But now, in one of these pools, he gazed in surprise at his own reflection.

Then he burst into tears.

He had not known that his hair was already thin. He had forgotten how the little mess that had been his nose was a smudge of purple which made him look ridiculous. As he stared at his overlarge head, his bent little body and the disfiguring blotch in the middle of his face, he wanted to wail out loud, but for fear of attracting attention he choked it back and instead, in a stifled little whisper, told himself, “It’s no good. I’m a freak.”

Duly humbled, he went sadly to his work.

Yet in the days that followed, though at first he wanted to put his hand in front of his unsightly face whenever he saw her, he was never able to detect the revulsion he supposed the girl must feel. If she was hiding it, she did it very well. She smiled at him quietly, just as she always had.

He began to look at other men, assessing their disadvantages. One had a limp, another a crushed hand, a third a running sore. Perhaps, he consoled himself, I am not the most ill-favoured of all.

If only she could love me, he thought. He would protect her. He would die for her. In this state of mind, three more weeks of his life passed.

The masons were working on what would become the chapel crypt now. It was a large space, about forty-five feet long into the eastern apse. Already they had started to build the vault.

Osric enjoyed watching this. First the carpenters made big, semicircular arches of wood that were raised on scaffolding like a series of humpback bridges. Then the masons would clamber on top and lay the stones, each carefully cut into a wedge shape with the broad end upwards, so that when the stones were all slotted into place, the arch held itself up with tremendous strength.

But before long, he was witnessing another new feature of the Tower.

One morning he arrived to find the masons grumbling about “another cursed change”. Moments later Ralph appeared and angrily told him to go and fetch his pick. Soon he was hard at work.

The wall between the crypt and the chamber on the eastern side of the Tower was over twenty feet thick. After the masons had cut a narrow entrance into this wall from the crypt, Osric and three other men were told to dig into the rubble filling within the wall and hollow out a chamber. And so, with the carpenters providing props to hold up the masonry over their heads, they dug away for days, like miners going into a rock face, until they had created a hidden chamber about fifteen feet square. “It’s like a cave,” Osric said, and grinned. And the analogy was apt, for the walls of a medieval castle were not there simply to divide spaces. They were complete entities, into which men could cut and burrow as into a mountain.

“This will be the strongroom,” Ralph told them, “where valuables will be kept.” It was to be fitted with a massive oak door.

On an overcast Sunday morning at the start of autumn Osric declared his love.

Along the old Roman wall beside the Tower there were stairs leading up to the battlements, and since there was no work being done that day, Osric and the girl had gone up there to enjoy the view of the river. It was pleasantly quiet, and finding himself alone with her, the little fellow was suddenly so overcome with tenderness for her small pale form that he gently put his arm round her waist.

And immediately felt her freeze. He turned to look at her, but she drew away. Then, as she glanced up nervously at his face and saw his sad, solemn eyes, she shook her head and gently but firmly removed his arm.

“Please don’t do that.”

“I thought, perhaps . . .” he began.

Again she shook her head, then took a deep breath.

“Osric, you’ve been very kind to me, but . . .” Her brown eyes gazed at him calmly. “I do not love you.”

He nodded, feeling the hot misery rise in his throat. “Is it because . . .?” He wanted to say, “Because of my face?” but found he could not.

“Please go,” she said. And when he hesitated: “Go now.”

Of course. He understood. Osric went back down the stairs and into the lodgings, where, for a long time, he sat quietly on his straw bed and wept silently because he was ill-favoured.

He would have been surprised to know that, if anything, the grief of the pale little girl still staring out from the wall was greater than his, for her dilemma was not at all what he supposed.

Indeed, though Dorkes had noticed his disfigured face at first, she had scarcely thought about it after that. She admired his courage and she liked his kindness. But what, she calmly and sadly asked herself, was the use of that? Osric had nothing. Even the meanest serf in a village had a hut to live in and a plot of land to work for himself. Osric had only a bed of straw. What would his life be? Hauling stones for Ralph Silversleeves who hated him, until he dropped. And what had she? A crippled mother to look after. With a man in her life, how could she care for her? Osric certainly couldn’t. Anyway, she had seen the crude couplings that took place in the lodgings, the ragged, half-starved children who scrabbled about in the hay and mud. “They live like vermin,” her mother had once remarked. “Don’t you do that.”

Her only hope was that a craftsman or one of the serfs sent temporarily from an estate might like the look of her. If not, she would provide for her mother as best she could. And after that? Perhaps I shan’t live long, she thought.

Consequently, she had been cautious with Osric, anxious to give the poor little fellow kindness but not too much hope. That morning, she had done, quickly and firmly, what she must, and had sent him away. Now, gazing out over the long city walls and back at the massive, rising Tower, she cursed the fate that had locked her in this grim prison.

Above all, Osric must not guess the secret she had been living with now for all these weeks, which was that she loved him.

In the days that followed, when Osric and Dorkes saw each other they smiled as usual but rarely spoke. Both kept their feelings to themselves. Here, it seemed, the matter rested. But not quite.

It was Alfred’s wife who first noticed the change in Osric. Normally his weekly meals with the armourer and his family were happy occasions. Alfred had built a new house for himself adjoining the armoury, a stout, timber-framed structure consisting of a large main room with a loft divided into two parts, one for himself and his wife, the other for their six children. The apprentices slept in an outbuilding at the back.