London - Edward Rutherfurd [64]
As they rode home that day, she contented herself with urging Wistan once more: “Whatever happens, promise me you will obey your father.” More she would not say.
Offa was still full of plans, but he too had met an obstacle – in his wife.
When he had been at Lundenwic ten days, Wistan and one of his brothers had taken a boat upstream to collect supplies from a farmstead a few miles away, and Offa had gone with them. He had been delighted with what he saw. Soon after leaving the bend by the ford, the left and right banks broke up into a system of marshy islands.
“That’s Chalk Island on the right,” Wistan had told him. Except that in Anglo-Saxon, in which “island” was rendered “eye”, the words “Chelch Eye” made a sound roughly like “Chelsea”. “Opposite is Badric’s Island.” This time “Badric’s Eye” came out roughly as “Battersea”. Everywhere along the marshy banks of the Thames, Offa discovered, there were more of these eyes and the even smaller islands, mud flats really, known as eyots.
There were already numerous tiny settlements, a farm here, a hamlet there. These, too, bore characteristic Saxon names with endings like -ham for a hamlet, -ton for a farm, and -hythe, meaning a harbour. Soon after passing Chalk Island, Wistan had again pointed to the north bank, where smoke was rising above the trees. “That’s Fulla’s-ham,” he explained. “And up there,” he pointed to a higher spot a couple of miles north, “there’s Kensing’s-ton.”
But what had impressed Offa most, as they progressed upstream, was the lush richness of the land. Behind marsh and mud flat he saw meadowland, pasture and, further off, gentle slopes. “Does the land continue far like this?” he cautiously asked Wistan.
“Yes,” came the reply. “Pretty much all the way to the river’s source, I believe.”
When they had returned that night, therefore, he had said to Ricola: “When you feel ready, I think we could run away. Upriver. The living is good there. If we go far enough I’m sure someone will take us in.”
But here, to his surprise, Ricola had flatly opposed him.
Though she was still very young, Offa had already noticed in his wife a cheery independence of spirit that he found attractive. She had established a light-hearted banter with the men. Once, to his horror, she had even made a disrespectful remark to the foreman, but with such good humour that he had just shaken his head and smiled. “She doesn’t put up with any nonsense, that one,” the men laughed.
He had assumed, therefore, that she would be as anxious as he was for freedom. But he was wrong.
“You must be mad,” she told him. “What do you want to go wandering through the forest for? So we can be eaten by the wolves?”
“It isn’t forest,” he countered. “Not like Essex.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said.
“But we’re just slaves here,” he protested.
“So what? We eat well.”
“But don’t you want to be free?” he demanded.
And now she truly surprised him. “Not much,” she said. Then, seeing his astonishment: “What does it mean? We were free in the village and they would have drowned me with that snake.” She shuddered at the memory. “Run away from here and we aren’t free anyway. We’re outlaws. Frankly,” she smiled, “being a slave here isn’t so bad. Is it?”
Of course, he could not deny that her earthy practicality was right. In a way. But though the young fellow could not have expressed himself in abstract terms, the notion of independence acted powerfully upon him. It was something as primordial as the need for a fish to swim about in the sea.
“I don’t want to be a slave,” he said simply, but for the time being they discussed the matter no more.
In the meantime, he soon found something else to occupy his mind. A few days after the trip upriver, some of the men went across to the little promontory on the southern bank to do some fishing. As he had worked hard, Offa was allowed to go too.
It proved to be an excellent place for fishing. Jutting well