While Elfgiva’s glance passed him uncomprehendingly, Randalin lifted startled eyes. When she saw that he was looking directly at her, she knew that it was no chance shaft, but an arrow aimed at her heart. The time had come that he had looked forward to, when Canute should get the kingship over the English, and Ivarsdale should come back to the race that had built it. And it was all fair, quite fair, quite within the rules of the game at which she herself had played. She had not a word to offer as she lowered her eyes and let her horse follow the others as it would. There was satisfaction on the lips of each of the King’s deputies as they rode cityward that day.
Long is and indirect the way To a bad friend’s, Though by the road he dwell. Hávamál.
The fact that King Edgar had slept under its uneven on some visit to Dunstan’s monkish colony, was scarcely sufficient to make a palace of the rambling rookery which a wall separated from the West Minster. It was an irregular one-storied building,—or, rather, group of buildings connected by covered passages,—and every kind of material had been used in its construction,—brick and stone and wood,—while some of the smaller offices were even straw-thatched and wattled.
“It is the waste-place of ruins,” Elfgiva said on the day of their arrival, when the monk who guided them proudly identified the brick portions as fragments of the old Roman Temple to Apollo, the wooden door-posts as beams from the Saxon Seberht’s refectory, and the stone walls as contributions from Dunstan’s chapel, which the Danes of the year one thousand and twelve had reduced to a crumbling pile.
To-day, a fortnight later, Randalin repeated the comment with a despondent addition: “It is the waste-place of ruins, and ruins have come to dwell in it. I can believe that it is no lie about the Fates to call them women, when they put like with like in so housewifely a manner.”
She was alone in one of the bare mouldering rooms, leaning against the deep-set small-paned window which had become her accustomed post. It offered no pleasanter outlook than the snow-powdered thicket beyond the wall and a glimpse of the Thames, spreading silently over the surrounding marshes; but from it her fancy’s eye could follow the mighty stream around its eastern bend to the point where the City walls began, and Saint Paul’s shingled steeple reared itself in lofty pride. The Palace stood in the shade of that steeple,—the real Palace, where the King sat deciding over the fate of his new subjects, taking their lands from them, when he did not take their lives, and banishing them across the sea to live and die in beggary. Her fingers tapped the glass in desperation as she realized her helplessness even to get news of his judgments.