London - Edward Rutherfurd [124]
A few days later Alfred reported back. “They say there’s a girl he seemed quite friendly with. I saw her actually. Quite a pretty little thing, in a timid sort of way! I even spoke to her.”
“And?”
“Oh. They were just friends, nothing more. She told me so herself.”
At which his wife shook her head and smiled. “I’ll talk to her,” she said.
She was surprised, therefore, by Osric’s behaviour when he came to eat with them the very next evening.
He still seemed pale, yet there was something, some secret, that appeared to be giving him an inner excitement. Unless he had made it up with the girl, she could not think what it might be.
Above all, no one had ever seen him eat so much. When she produced a dish of stew, he had four helpings. Offered ale, he drank three tankards. He consumed twice as much as one of the normally ravenous apprentices. “Look at Osric,” the children cried. “He’s going to burst!”
“Are you building up your strength for something?” Alfred asked him.
“Yes. I need all the food I can get tonight,” he replied, refusing to say why, and when he finally left no one was any the wiser. But he departed contentedly, and that night, as he lay on his bed of straw, he smiled as he contemplated his plan.
There was a mist hanging over the riverbank the next morning as Ralph made his usual rounds. People were stirring in the lodgings but they appeared only as vague figures, their coughs and voices sounding faint and disembodied in the clinging dampness. Even the great square of the Tower loomed indistinctly, as though in the mist some huge, phantom ship had strayed on to land.
Ralph grunted. He had been to visit the ladies of the south bank the night before, but though they provided physical release, nowadays they gave him less and less satisfaction, and he had wandered back across the bridge at dawn in a bad temper.
Besides, something else was annoying him.
Where the devil was his whip? It had mysteriously vanished two days before. He had only put it down for a few minutes, and though he had issued horrible threats, none of the workers at the Tower seemed to have any knowledge of it. Over the years he had grown so used to the feel of it in his hand that now he felt curiously awkward, almost off balance, as he strode about. “If I don’t find it soon,” he muttered irritably, “I’ll have to get another one.”
He did not bother to visit the sleeping quarters, but, as was his habit, stalked around the looming mass of the Tower, occasionally glancing towards the slopes as if to check that the ravens out there in the mist were still standing sentinel to protect those dark, damp walls.
He had just turned the corner when he saw his whip.
It was lying on the ground near the wall, undamaged by the look of it. Presumably the thief, having grown frightened, had found this way to return it to him.
With a faint smile, he moved across and bent down to pick it up.
Osric had been waiting for nearly an hour.
He knew his plan was dangerous, but all that week as he had thought about it, he had asked himself what he had to lose. Dorkes did not want him. The rest of his life contained nothing to look forward to. What could they do to him that they had not already done? Wasn’t there some satisfaction, however small, in striking a blow at the overseer who had so humiliated him?
So now, watching from his vantage point, he carefully calculated the moment for the blow to fall, took a deep breath, tensed himself and, through gritted teeth, muttered:
“Now.”
Osric’s efforts the evening before had not been in vain. Indeed his stomach had been so full he had wondered if he would burst. The soft, warm evacuation that sprang from him now and sailed