London - Edward Rutherfurd [92]
Again he considered the message he had received the day before. He was not sure what it meant, but he thought he guessed. And if he was right? Perhaps there was a way out. But he could not see it. He must do this terrible thing.
“Hilda.” He beckoned. How obediently she came.
Outside the snow had stopped. Only a pall of cloud remained, beneath which the city of London lay quiet.
Though Winchester, in the west, was still the senior Saxon royal seat, the London of Leofric the merchant was a busy place. Over ten thousand people – traders, craftsmen, and churchmen – dwelt there now. Like some huge, long-neglected walled garden, the ancient city had gradually been reclaimed. King Alfred had restored the Roman walls. A pair of Saxon villages, each with its own market, which the Saxons called cheaps, and a crude grid of streets had spread over the twin hills. Wharves appeared, and a new wooden bridge. Coins were minted there. But with its thatched and timbered houses, its barns, halls, wooden churches and muddy streets, Saxon London still had the air of a large market town.
Reminders of the Roman past remained, though. The line of the lower of the two great thoroughfares across the city was still discernible. Entering through the western gate, now called Ludgate, it crossed the western hill below St Paul’s and ended on the riverside slope of the eastern hill in the Saxon market of East Cheap. The outline of the upper Roman street was vaguer. Passing through the western wall at Newgate and crossing above St Paul’s, it lay under the long, open space of the West Cheap, but then, as it struck across to the eastern hill, it vanished ignominiously into some cowsheds where a Saxon track now led up to the eastern summit, known, because of the grain grown on its slopes, as Cornhill.
Of the great forum, not a trace remained. Of the amphitheatre, there was only a low outline in which some Saxon buildings had arisen and ash trees grew. Here and there, however, a broken arch or a marble stump might yet be found sheltering by a wattled fence, or brushing the thatched roof of some busy workshop.
The city’s only impressive building was the long, barn-like, Saxon structure of St Paul’s, with its high wooden roof. The most colourful place, the long stretch of the West Cheap, ran across from the cathedral, and was always full of stalls.
Halfway along the West Cheap on its southern side, beside a tiny Saxon church dedicated to St Mary, a lane led down to an old well beside which stood a handsome homestead which, for some reason already forgotten, was graced with a heavy hanging sign depicting a bull. And since it was his hall, people would often refer to the rich Saxon merchant who lived there as Leofric, who dwells at the Bull.
She stood meekly before him, dressed in a simple woollen smock. What a good girl Hilda was. He smiled. What was she? Thirteen? Her breasts had just formed. Her leggings, bound with leather thongs, showed well-shaped calves. She was a little thick in the ankle, he considered, but that was a minor fault. She had a broad, unworried forehead, and though her fair hair might be a little thin, her pale blue eyes had a calm innocence that was charming. Was there fire within? He was not sure. Perhaps it did not matter.
The problem for both of them lay on the table in front of Leofric. It was a short stick, nine inches long, scored with notches of various widths and depths. This was a tally. The notches marked his debts and showed that Leofric was facing ruin.
How had he got into this mess? Like other large London traders, he had two main lines of business. He imported French wine and other goods through a merchant in the Norman city of Caen, and he sold English wool for export to the great clothmakers of Flanders in the Low Countries. The trouble was that recently his operations had grown too large. Small fluctuations in the price of wine or wool could be critical to his fortunes. Then a cargo of wool had been lost at sea. The loan from Barnikel had helped him over that problem. “But even