London - Edward Rutherfurd [177]
His widow had never understood why Simon had continued to hold these few acres, which yielded little return, but no subject had been closer to his heart. “My father had them, and his before,” he used to declare. “They say we were there in the days of good King Alfred.” To him the importance of this ancestral link was self-evident. Each year he had ridden the twenty miles to pay his rent and arrange with his now distant cousins, still serfs, alas, to work the land for him. Just before he died he had made her promise: “Never give up our land. Keep it for Adam.”
“But what am I to do about it?” she asked Mabel. “How would I even get there to make the arrangements?” Her answer came when Mabel appeared at Cornhill one morning with a small horse and cart belonging to her brother. “It smells of fish a bit,” Mabel remarked, “but it’ll do. You go to Windsor. We’ll look after the baby while you’re gone.” And so Adam’s mother set out to secure his inheritance.
She reached the hamlet on the second day. The place had changed little since the Domesday survey. She had no difficulty in recognizing her husband’s kin, for as soon as she arrived, she saw a fellow in the lane with a white patch in his hair just like her husband’s. And if, at first glance, she thought the fellow looked a little shifty, her fears were soon set to rest when he not only turned out to be the head of the family, but that very evening offered her a solution to her problem. “You don’t want to come out here every year,” he explained. “And there’s no need. We’ll work the land as usual. But from what it yields we’ll settle your rent with the lord’s steward and afterwards one of us will come to London with the balance for you.” He grinned. “I’ve two sons and a daughter who all want to visit London. You’d be doing me a favour if you would let them lodge with you a few days.”
By the next morning, the whole matter was settled with the steward and the widow was able to return, delighted with the easy way this tiresome business had been taken off her mind.
For Ida, the month of September passed pleasantly enough. The house of which she was now mistress had been enlarged in recent decades and was now a substantial building. Like most merchant houses, it was constructed of wood and plaster. Bull conducted his business on the ground floor; there was a fine upper floor where the hall and bedchamber were situated; and an attic floor where young David and the servants slept. However, two other features of the building, common to most of the houses in London then, gave the place its character.
The first concerned the construction of the different floors. Having completed the ground floor, the builders had not continued upwards in a straight line. Instead, the upper storey was actually larger in area than the one below, jutting out several feet into the lane, above the heads of the passersby. Few houses, as yet, had more than two storeys, but in those that did the third storey came out even further, making the narrow lanes almost like tunnels.
The other feature was that the overhanging front and sides of Bull’s house were supported by horizontal timbers that were no more or less than the great branches of pollarded oaks. These were used exactly as they were, uncut, sometimes even with the bark left on, and as a consequence, though hugely strong, they were by no means straight. The result was that all these timbered houses had a lopsided look, as if they were about to collapse, although in reality they could stand for centuries so long as they did not burn down.
The last risk was their weakness. Fire was endemic. That very year an ordinance had been made requiring the citizens to rebuild their ground floors in brick or stone and to replace their thatched roofs with tiles or other less flammable material. But as Sampson Bull had declared: “I’ll be damned if I’ll do it in a hurry. The expense is huge.”
Though used to running an estate,