London - Edward Rutherfurd [116]
So intent was he upon this important task that Ralph Silversleeves did not take any notice of the other people standing around. Even if he had, there was nothing remarkable about the presence of Alfred the armourer.
In fact, Alfred was inside the Tower for a good reason. He had been told that he would be making the great metal grilles that would fit over the drain and the well, and he had come by to get an idea of the size of these cavities.
With mild interest he had watched and listened as Ralph raved at the solemn little fellow. After Ralph had gone, he walked over to the tunnel entrance. On the ground he noticed the little example of Osric’s woodwork, which had fallen when Ralph had thrown him down. Alfred picked it up thoughtfully.
And that night, following a long conversation with young Osric, he told his friend the Dane: “I think I’ve found the little fellow we need.”
“Can you trust him? With your life?”
“I think so.”
“Why? What does he want?”
Alfred grinned.
“He wants revenge.”
Revenge was sweet. The plan was not without risk, but Osric felt confident. Above all, he felt proud.
Secretly, at night, he would sneak out of the labourers’ quarters by the Tower and make his way to the Dane’s house nearby. There, in a storeroom at the back, he and Alfred would work, his stubby fingers instinctively feeling their way forward so that soon, by careful trial and error, he had evolved a piece of carpentry so neat, so ingenious and so deceptive that the master armourer cried out: “You are a craftsman indeed!”
The task the Dane had set him was to convert a huge wagon he possessed so that he could conceal arms in it. But where he had expected the little carpenter to design a secret compartment under the cart, Osric had hit on a more ingenious solution. “If they search you, that’s the first thing they’ll look for,” he had pointed out. Rather than touch the floor of the wagon, he had instead concentrated on the solid beams that made its frame. Working with care and sheer inspiration, he had hollowed these out, preserving their outside appearance with stops and sliding panels, and doing so with such thoroughness that a quite remarkable quantity of dismantled swords, spearheads and arrowheads could be snugly lodged within. By the time he had finished, his work was invisible.
“The cart itself is built of arms!” Barnikel exclaimed with delight, hugging the little carpenter so warmly that for a moment Osric feared he might not breathe again.
He would be taking out a consignment, the Dane told Alfred, the following week.
It was quite by chance that, two days later, Hilda had an encounter with Ralph. It took place on the hill from Ludgate to St Paul’s, and Hilda was in a very bad temper. This, however, had nothing to do with Ralph.
Her anger was caused by an embroidery.
It was in those years, in King William’s England, that the largest and most famous piece of needlework that has probably ever been undertaken was made. The Bayeux Tapestry, as this extraordinary work was called, was not, in fact, a woven tapestry at all, but a huge embroidery of coloured wools stitched, in the time-honoured Anglo-Saxon manner, on linen. Though only about twenty inches high, it was an astounding seventy-seven yards long. It pictured some six hundred humans, thirty-seven ships, as many trees, and seven hundred animals. And it celebrated the Norman Conquest.
More than this, it was the first known example of English state propaganda. Arranged in the form of a huge, Anglo-Saxon strip cartoon, its stylized figures depicted, in dozens of scenes, the Norman king’s version of the events leading to the Conquest and a detailed account of the Battle of Hastings. It was commissioned