London - Edward Rutherfurd [111]
Then, one night, Barnikel had come with packhorses and removed the arms. Where he was going he would not say. Soon afterwards, however, a huge rebellion had broken out in the north and east of Britain, the Danes had landed in support, and in East Anglia a brave English noble named Hereward the Wake had led a revolt.
On that occasion, King William had ruthlessly crushed the rebels and devastated much of the north. Four years later, the Danes had tried again. This year, with William’s son in rebellion in Normandy, more rumours were flying.
Alfred had also noticed something else. Each time, the request for arms had come not at the time of the revolt, but many months before.
Yet this should not have surprised him. After all, the great Nordic network – that huge pattern of Viking settlements linking traders from the Arctic to the Mediterranean – was very much alive. Beyond the Thames Estuary lay the vast highway of the northern waters, where the voices of the sagas echoed still, and scarcely a month passed without some new whispers stealing around the seas. Barnikel the Viking trader still heard many things.
And now, with the king over the sea in Normandy, it seemed that Barnikel knew something else. In the last three months they had made spears, swords and a huge quantity of arrowheads. Who were they for? Was Hereward the Wake still at large in the forests, as some believed? Were Norsemen even now making ready their Viking longships? No one knew, but the king was rebuilding his Tower in stone, and Mandeville, it was said, had spies in every street. No one, so far as he was aware, suspected the armourer, but it was plain that, this time, Barnikel was concerned.
The last decade had changed Alfred too. He was a fully fledged armourer now. Before long, he would take over from the old master. Four years ago he had married; already there were three children. He was more cautious nowadays. Of course, if Barnikel was right, if King William was ousted by a revolt and replaced, perhaps, with a Danish king, then his secret work would, no doubt, be well rewarded. But if he was wrong . . .
“The trouble,” Barnikel had explained, “is that I daren’t risk the packhorses any more. There are too many spies. We need something else.”
It was then that Alfred had made his suggestion.
Now, having considered it, the Dane nodded his huge red beard. “It might work,” he agreed. “But we’d need a good carpenter we could trust. Do we know one?”
Two days later, on a quiet summer evening, Hilda made her way down the hill from St Paul’s and passed out of the city through Ludgate.
The Tower was not the Conqueror’s only new castle in London. Though on a much smaller scale, here on the city’s western side a pair of new forts were being erected beside the gate nearest the river. But their looming presence did not affect Hilda’s mood. Indeed, she was smiling, for she was going to meet the man she called her lover.
It was fortunate, Hilda realized, that she had never loved her husband. Thanks to this, she had suffered no great disappointment, since she had always seen him for what he was.
And what was he? Henri Silversleeves was clever and hard-working. She had observed him in his business dealings. If he lacked his father’s sense of strategy, he was a master of the swift stroke. He despised Ralph, though he had learned to be polite to him. “Why Father insists he inherits half the family fortune, I can’t think,” he had once remarked to her. “At least, thank God, he hasn’t any children of his own.” Henri’s passion, she knew, was for the Silversleeves fortune. It was like a fortress of which he was the constable, and which she knew he would never surrender. And so competent was he that nowadays his father frequently spent time at an estate he had obtained near Hatfield, a day’s journey north of London.
For Hilda’s family, the marriage had achieved its objective. When the Conqueror confiscated most of the