London - Edward Rutherfurd [122]
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