London - Edward Rutherfurd [133]
All the time, Osric was inwardly thanking the Lord that, as well as all his tools, he had thought to throw the key of the grille into the well behind him.
Finding nothing suspicious, Ralph considered the situation. The fellow must be telling the truth. How else could he have got there? Besides, what could he do down there anyway? And then, because the long-nosed Norman was in such a good humour anyway that morning, he did something most unusual. He made a joke.
“Well, Osric,” he said. “This makes you the very first prisoner of the Tower.” Then he let him out.
Later that day, Barnikel murmured with even greater satisfaction: “The arms are in the one place in London where no one would ever think of looking for them. And thanks to that drain, we can get them whenever we want.”
But the Dane’s satisfaction at this triumph was short-lived.
By the month of June, London was full of mercenaries. Every day the invasion was expected. The city was more nervous than it had been since 1066. July came. August. Soldiers came and went. Every sail upon the estuary seemed a threat. Rumours flew. “Yet still they don’t come. I can’t understand it,” Barnikel grumbled. And then, gradually, word began to filter through. “Something’s happening. There’s been a delay. He isn’t coming.”
England waited, but still no Viking ships hove into sight.
The collapse of the great Danish expedition of 1085, which might, indeed, have meant the end of Norman rule in England, remains a historical puzzle. The vast fleet was assembled. The new King Canute was ready and eager to sail. And then some kind of disagreement took place. Exactly how or why has never been entirely explained. Certainly the next year Canute was murdered. Whether the disputes were genuinely internal or cleverly fostered by the agents of William of England will never be known. But whatever the true reason, the fleet did not sail.
Autumn departed and the Tower grew. Cold Christmas came, and as the Dane trudged down to the riverside, he saw only the bleak outline of the great stone square, dark in the snow. A sense of uselessness and lassitude descended upon him.
But it was for spring that fate had reserved her grim surprise.
Even in the autumn, Barnikel had suspected he was being cheated. Just after Michaelmas, when he had asked for the rents from his new estate at Deeping, the steward there had sent a derisory amount. When he demanded an explanation, the man had returned a message that made no sense at all. “Either this fellow is a fool or he takes me for one,” swore the Dane, and if it had not been for a heavy fall of snow he would have gone to sort him out there and then. As soon as the snow cleared in early spring, therefore, he set off.
It took him several days. First he had to pass through the thick forests beyond London, then travel across the huge, flat wilds of East Anglia. The east wind was damp but bracing.
On the day he arrived, however, it had dropped to a light breeze and the sky had partly cleared. It was a pleasant March morning by the time he came to the coastal hamlet of Deeping.
Where he was unable to believe his eyes.
“What the devil happened?” he asked the sullen steward. The fellow only answered: “You can see.”
For the hamlet and its green were standing alone, not amid broad fields, but marooned, surrounded on three sides and gently lapped by the salty waters of the grey North Sea.
“It came in another fifty yards this year,” the steward told him. “Another two years and we reckon the whole village will be gone. It’s like this for five miles along the coast,” he explained. And then, with a kind of dour satisfaction on his long, pale face, he added: “There’s your estate, sir.” He pointed eastward. “All in the sea.”
Seeing that it was so, poor Barnikel bellowed: “I’ve been cheated by that damned Silversleeves!” And then: “I’ve been cursed.”
But why, he wondered in bafflement, why was the sea rising?
In fact, it was not. Or hardly. Although, even now, the final thawing of the last Ice Age was still fractionally raising the sea levels of the