London - Edward Rutherfurd [120]
His life was bearable, though. Most of the time, of course, there was the sheer daily drudgery – pulling carts of rubble, hauling buckets of stone up to the masons, or carrying wood from the carpenters. Gradually, however, he had added another activity.
Ever since he had discovered his skill with Barnikel’s wagon, the little fellow, almost unable to help himself, had taken to picking up bits of wood or begging timber ends from the carpenters. Sitting by the light of the brazier in the evenings, he would then carve them. Every week or so he turned out something – a little figure, a child’s toy – and soon even the carpenters and masons were referring to him as “the little craftsman”. It was said affectionately, though with some amusement, as if he were a sort of mascot. After all, he was not a member of their craft; he was only a beast of burden. Still, he did not mind, and as he went about his daily business, they would often show him what they were doing and explain it to him.
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