London - Edward Rutherfurd [154]
How gaily the little cog passed before the Tower. Bull had come to the top of Cornhill so that he could see the whole panorama of the Thames’s great, shining path towards the estuary. The cog entered the long stretch of the Pool of London and approached the river’s huge curve.
And then something strange happened. Suddenly the cog seemed to lurch. A second later, its prow veered towards the southern bank, it drifted sideways, began to turn about crazily, and then, as though some unseen hand had caught it, held fast.
Alderman Bull, understanding at once what had occurred, let out a bellow of rage that must have carried all the way down to All Hallows and even to the river below.
“Kiddles!” he shouted. “God damn the king!”
Then he rushed down the hill.
Treasonable though this sentiment was, there was hardly an alderman in London who would not have echoed it. The city’s ancient fishing rights had long been vested in certain great offices, and the fishing for many miles downstream now belonged to none other than the king’s servant, the Constable of the Tower. Since the Thames teemed with fish, the rights were valuable and were therefore cynically let for the constable’s maximum profit. As a result, the river’s broad waters were cluttered with nets, weirs, booms and traps of every kind. Scarcely a month went by without some ship being fouled. These obstacles were known as kiddles. And though the larger merchants never ceased complaining, even to the king himself, about the damage to shipping, only vague promises were ever made and the infuriating kiddles remained.
By late that afternoon, the cog was back at the wharf, its rudder broken, and at least a day’s sailing lost while it was repaired. The nets, Bull discovered, belonged to a red-haired fishmonger named Barnikel, whom he knew slightly, and who very reasonably remarked, “I’m sorry about your cog, but I paid the constable a fortune to fish there.” Furious though he was, Bull could hardly argue.
But one thing Bull did know. And he knew it with precisely the same sense of black and white, right and wrong, of his ancestors. He had been cheated. The king and his constable, contemptuous of the city’s leaders, were operating a system that was unfair, a racket. It was all he knew and all he cared about. Standing alone on the wharf and staring along the waterfront towards the Tower, he made a quiet but solemn vow.
“I’ll stop them one day.”
It might reasonably be supposed that fate had completed her work in ruining the best day in the life of Alderman Bull. Certainly he supposed so, as he trudged bitterly home that evening. But that would have been to underestimate the powers of providence.
On his arrival home, the alderman found his family waiting anxiously for him at the door. Imagining it was on account of the ship, he told them tersely that the rudder would be mended. It was then that his mother, gently shaking her head, revealed, “I’m afraid there is something else.” And at his impatient look: “You must be calm, Sampson, not angry.”
“What about?”
“Well.” She paused nervously. “It’s about your brother.”
He had been seventeen when he began. Ten years had passed. Now, as he faced the furious abbot, he trembled.
“You are breaking your vows,” the abbot thundered.
He trembled, but he did not give way.
Brother Michael was a pure and simple soul. Three years younger than Sampson, he could not have been less like him. Where his older brother was thickset, Michael was tall and spare; prayer and meditation had softened his broad Saxon face; his head was tonsured; and in all his actions he was quiet and mild. Yet now, with the whole monastery against him, he was firm.
Why had he become a monk? Had it just been a youth’s revolt against his father, his coarseness and endless talk of money? Not really. He knew he was no worse than others. Was it because of Sampson, the older brother he had revered as a boy but whose small, blunt cruelties had