London - Edward Rutherfurd [145]
Looking back on her life, she usually supposed that she was contented. Certainly, it had to be admitted that over the last decade things had generally worked out for the best. Osric had gone, though she sometimes saw his little son, who lived with Alfred and his family now. Barnikel too. But she was glad of that. A month after the great fire of eighty-seven he had suffered a huge stroke down at Billingsgate Wharf and had crashed out of this life into the hereafter. A year later the expected rebellion in Kent and London had taken place and been utterly crushed. “Thank God he wasn’t there to make a fool of himself,” she often murmured.
And now old Silversleeves had gone too. Two months before, on a wet April night, a merchant had arrived at the stout stone hall of Silversleeves with a written message for the old man. An hour later a servant had approached the master to find him sitting stiffly in his chair, apparently still reading the message on the table before him. Except that he was dead.
The Canon of St Paul’s had been buried in St Lawrence Silversleeves with every obsequy and honour. Three days later she and Henri had moved into the house, and in the coming weeks even she had been astonished to discover the full extent of the fortune he had bequeathed them.
There had been peace too, for Rufus reigned securely now. Recently he had built a huge hall of his own at Westminster, a fitting companion for the Confessor’s Abbey. He was strengthening the fortress beside Ludgate. And when she glanced up from the courtyard of her house, she could see, on the site where the Saxon St Paul’s had burnt down that fateful night, the outline of a great Norman cathedral, massively built in stone, that would soon dominate the entire skyline, just as the Tower dominated the river.
Yet whenever she stared at St Paul’s and remembered that great fire, she always found herself pondering certain mysteries.
The talisman belonging to Ralph had been found in the cathedral’s charred ruins. But what had he been doing there? And whose were the mysterious hands that had held her for two whole hours that night before she had been just as suddenly released near the Walbrook only to see half London burning? She had never been able to solve either puzzle, and she had not supposed that she ever would.
Now that their children were grown, it often happened that Hilda and her husband were alone in the evenings, and they had long since evolved a habit of politely ignoring each other by which they could tolerate the other’s presence quite comfortably.
Hilda, therefore, was quietly doing her embroidery; Henri was sitting by his father’s chessboard, playing against himself.
This evening, however, Hilda was irritable. The reason, she thought, was the house. She had always felt uncomfortable in the stern, stone hall. She wanted to go outside, or else to find some more intimate, congenial place. Blaming her husband for all this, she occasionally glanced at him with an expression of dislike.
It was after he had made some twenty moves on the chessboard that Henri, aware of her angry looks, calmly turned his eyes towards her and remarked: “You should try to conceal your thoughts.”
“You have no idea what is in my mind,” she snapped, resuming her needlework, then, after a few cross passes of the needle, added: “You know nothing about me at all.”
Henri resumed his chess, his face lit by a faint half-smile. “You might be very surprised by how much I know about you,” he replied.
“Such as what?” she shot back.
For a few moments he said nothing. Then, very quietly, he said: “Such as that you were Barnikel’s lover. And that you helped him commit treason.”
For half a minute there was silence in the stone hall, broken only by the faint tap of a chess piece moving.
“What do you mean?”
Henri did not look up from the board. “Do you remember the night of the great fire? I’m sure you do. You spent the night before it with Barnikel.”
She gasped. “How do you know?”
“I had you followed,” he remarked mildly.