The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [156]
No one had taught her to read. She had just, somehow, picked it up herself, from a Bible she had pored over in Minstead church, and from other written material she had found in visits to local markets. She did not prize this knowledge highly, since it was of little practical use; but it had amused her to learn something new. Nick Pride was rather pleased, though. ‘My wife can read,’ he could hear himself saying. It was an accomplishment, enough to show the world that he had married a superior woman. These things were important to a man.
When they married Jane would not be bringing any gold or jewellery or silken clothes with her: there was no need for such things in the Forest. But there was one small and humble ornament which she had begged and she had been promised for her wedding day.
It was a strange little wooden cross that hung on a string round her mother’s neck. Jane’s father had given it to her when they married.
‘I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s always been in the family,’ he had told her. ‘Hundreds of years, they say.’ He had shaken his head. ‘Funny old thing, really, but my grandfather told me: “You keep hold of that. That’s your birthright.”’
The cedarwood cross with its curious carving had been worn on the skin of so many generations now that it was almost black. But there was something about this family talisman that had always fascinated Jane since she was a little girl. She loved to touch it and hold it in her hand. She would try to decipher its carving as though it might hold some secret meaning. For she felt that it must, even if she could have no idea of the message that had been sent her, by a monkish ancestor, nearly three hundred years before.
She was going to wear it at her wedding.
The cart bumped down the lane and came on to a gravel strand.
‘Look,’ she cried in delight. ‘We’re at the sea.’
Albion looked irritably at the fortress ahead. Why the devil had his good friend Gorges insisted that he bring these men out here, anyway? It was a waste of his time, in his opinion. But behind this bravado lay a deeper apprehensiveness. After his talk with his mother yesterday – he couldn’t help it – he secretly viewed the fortress with a kind of panic.
‘Halloa,’ he cried to the sentry, ‘Albion’s muster.’
‘Pass, sir,’ came the reply.
They had crossed Pennington Marshes, passed the inlet of Keyhaven and now they had started along the track that led out to the end of the mile-long gravel spit opposite the Isle of Wight. On their right was the open sea. Above the sky was blue and seagulls were crying. And just visible at the end of the spit, glinting palely in the sun, lay their destination.
Hurst Castle. It would probably never have been built if it hadn’t been for Henry VIII’s marital troubles. England’s coasts had been threatened with raids, on and off, for over a thousand years. But when the Pope, at one point in his quarrel with Henry, had urged both Spain and her rival France to join forces and attack the heretic island, the king had decided he had better prepare himself and sent commissioners to inspect the coastal defences; and few places were more important than the port of Southampton and the Solent. When they got there, however, and saw the defences, their conclusion was simple: useless.
The most intelligent course was obviously to defend the two entrances to the Solent system so that enemy ships could not enter its huge shelter at all. At the western end this meant a pair of batteries, one on the Isle of Wight near the Needles, the other on the mainland. On the island there was already a ramshackle tower which could be put into service.
And on the mainland coast: ‘God has provided for us.’
The long, curving gravel spit that ran out from below Keyhaven was indeed a perfect God-given site. It ended with a broad platform; it commanded the narrowest part of the channel leading in and out of the Solent. Immediately they ordered an earthwork with gun