London - Edward Rutherfurd [131]
Here lay the problem. Although Alfred was secretly rather relieved at this excuse to end the dangerous business, there remained an obvious difficulty. “Ralph’s men guard the outside of the armoury. His spies are everywhere. Where can we hide the arms now? And even if I wanted to dump the arms in the river, how would we smuggle them out?”
Neither he nor Barnikel could think of what to do until the Dane, remembering Osric’s ingenuity when they had smuggled the arms before, at last suggested: “Let’s ask our little carpenter. Perhaps he’ll have a bright idea.”
And it was after listening to them carefully and thinking for some time, that Osric came up with a suggestion which caused the huge old Dane to gasp and then roar with laughter before crying:
“It’s so outrageous, I do believe it might work.”
Tap. Tap. As softly as he could. The little hammer and chisel echoing around the huge, cavernous cellar in the darkness. Tap, tap. Sometimes he held his breath, hardly able to believe that the short, sharp sounds could be muffled even by the thick walls of the Tower.
Tink, chink, he softly dislodged the mortar. Tap, scrape, he gently removed a stone. All by the light of a little oil lamp in the pitch-black cellar below the crypt. Tink, tink, like a busy gnome Osric burrowed in the bowels of the mighty Norman keep.
It was the strongroom he had made three years earlier that had given him the idea. “The wall beside the crypt was about twenty feet thick,” he pointed out to Barnikel. “So if there was enough space in there to make a strongroom, then there must be the same amount of space in the wall of the cellar directly below.” After careful calculation, Barnikel and Alfred had told him that they needed a space about five feet by eight feet to store all the illicit arms they had. Could he create such a thing?
“I’ll need a week,” he replied.
Tink, chink. All through the night, Osric eagerly went about his work.
It was not difficult for him to sneak into the empty Tower at night. Alfred had provided him with keys to the cellar doors. But there was very little time. As soon as he started to take arms into the cellar, Ralph would post guards on the door. Each night, therefore, until an hour before dawn, the little labourer worked, carefully loosening the stones to create a small space he could crawl into before cutting into the softer rubble behind.
This rubble he carefully placed into a sack, which he dragged from the crypt cellar, down the eastern chamber, round into the bigger western chamber and then over to the well, dropping it in there before returning. At the end of each night, he replaced the stones in the wall and fixed them with a shallow layer of new mortar that he hoped would not be noticeable in the cellar’s darkness. Tidying the floor carefully, he then departed.
And so he continued, night after night. Apart from the fact that he sometimes seemed sleepy at his daily work, no one was any the wiser.
Only one thing worried him. “I’m going to put so much rubble down the well,” he told the Dane, “I’m afraid I might block it.” But each night when he let down the bucket, it continued to enter the water easily and come up clean. And by the end of the week, as he had estimated, there was a small secret chamber just high enough for him to stand up in hidden within the cellar wall.
Which left him one, final task.
On the last night, instead of going to the wall, he went to the big western cellar. In the corner, over the great drain, was the stout iron grille Alfred had made. So that the drain below could be cleaned and repaired, this grille opened on a hinge and was locked in place. Using the key Alfred had provided him with, Osric unlocked the grille and let himself down with a rope. Entering the long passage, he bent almost double and worked his way down it for fifty yards until he came to the outlet in the riverbank. This, too, was guarded by a thick metal grille.
His timing was good. It was low tide and the passage was nearly dry. He encountered nothing except for a few