London - Edward Rutherfurd [123]
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.
Alfred’s wife was a jolly, comfortable woman, the daughter of a butcher, and she presided over her noisy household with all the ease and confidence of a woman who has a loving husband and exactly one over the number of children she had always hoped for. However miserable his daily existence, Osric had usually cheered up by the time he reached the house, and often brought some little present he had carved to please the children.
“You’re a mother to the fellow,” Alfred would tell his wife.
“So much the better,” she would reply. “God knows he needs one.”
So, when, towards the end of summer, she noticed that Osric was not himself, she