The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [145]
At the high point she ordered the litter put down and stepped out of it. The men were told to wait at a distance. Then she turned towards her son, and beckoned. ‘Now, Clement,’ she said with a smile – the name had been her particular choice, not his father’s – ‘I want to talk to you.’
‘Gladly, Mother,’ he said.
At least she had chosen a fine place to do it. The view from the ridge below Sarum was one of the finest in southern England. Looking back the way they had come, the long slope now appeared as a beautiful sweep down into the lush green basin from which, four miles away, Salisbury Cathedral rose like a grey swan from the Avon valley floor, its graceful spire soaring so high that you might have supposed the surrounding ridges had been spun out from it, like clay on a lathe, driven by an ancient spirit. To the north lay the bump of Old Sarum’s castle mound and the sea of chalk ridges beyond. Eastwards, the rich, undulating countryside of Wessex rolled away into the distance.
But it was turning south, in the direction of their journey, that one saw the longest sweep of all. For there, shelving gradually down, mile after mile, lay the whole vast expanse of the New Forest – wild oak wood, gravel ridges, sweeping gorse and heather heath, all the way to Southampton and the misty blue slopes of the Isle of Wight, plainly visible, twenty miles away in the sea.
Clement Albion stood before his mother on the bare ridge and wondered what she wanted.
Her opening words were not encouraging. ‘We should not fear death, Clement.’ She smiled at him in quite a friendly way. ‘I have never been afraid to die.’
The Lady Albion – for although her husband had not been a knight, so she was always called – was a tall, slim woman. Her face was powdered white; her lips were, as God had graciously made them, red. Her eyes were dark and tragic unless she was annoyed, when they became adamantine. Her teeth were very fine – for she despised all things sweet – and long, and the colour of ancient ivory.
To the casual observer it might have seemed that she had continued to dress in the fashion of her heyday because, being neither at court nor in London, and proud no doubt of the finery of her best years, she had quietly slid, as older women often did, a decade or two behind the times. Instead of the large ruff now in fashion, she maintained a simple high, open collar; her long heavy gown had large slit puffs on the shoulders and her arms were encased in the close-fitting sleeves of an earlier time. She wore a richly embroidered underskirt. On her head she usually carried a heavy veil held with a linen hood; but today, for her journey, she had put on a jaunty man’s cap with a plume. From a chain around her waist hung a fur-lined muff. To the casual observer it might have seemed a picture of dated charm. But her son was not deceived. He knew better.
Her clothes were all black: black cap, black gown, black underskirt. She had dressed in this way ever since the death of Queen Mary Tudor, thirty years before; there being, she would say, no reason to leave off mourning. Yet what made this attire so truly startling was the fact that the embroidery of the underskirt and the whole inside of her stiff, high collar were bright crimson: red as the blood of the martyrs. She had trimmed her widow’s black with crimson, now, for half a year. She was a walking emblem.
He looked at her cautiously. ‘Why do you speak of death, Mother? I hope you are in good health.’
‘I am, by God’s grace. But I was speaking of yours.’
‘Mine? I am well, I think.’
‘Before you, Clement, may lie great earthly glory. I pray it may be so. But if not, we should equally rejoice to wear the martyr’s crown.’
‘I have done nothing, Mother, to cause me to be martyred,’ he said uneasily.
‘I know.’ She smiled at him almost gaily. ‘So I have done it for you.’
When the Wars of the Roses had ended, a century before, with a final royal bloodletting, the new Tudor dynasty had picked up England’s crown. Descended only from an obscure branch of the royal Plantagenets,