The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [160]
‘Is he one of the Puckles, from Burley?’ Jane ventured.
‘That’s right.’ It seemed to her that the woman’s eyes were measuring her in some way. ‘You married?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Considering it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Your man: he’s here?’
‘In there.’ Jane indicated the fort.
Puckle’s dark-haired wife did not say anything for a little while. She seemed to be staring across the water. Only when she spoke again did she transfer her gaze to her husband. ‘He’s a good man, John Puckle,’ she said.
‘I’m sure.’
‘Good worker.’
‘He looks it.’
‘Lusty. Keep any woman happy.’
‘Oh.’ Jane was not sure what to say.
‘Your man. He good? He knows how to halleck?’ A coarse word.
Jane blushed. ‘I expect so. But we are not yet married.’
The woman’s silence conveyed that she was not impressed with this information. ‘He made himself a bed.’ She nodded towards her husband. ‘All oak. Carved it, too. At the four corners. I never saw such carving.’ She smiled. ‘Carved his bed so he might lie in it. Once you lie in his oak bed with John Puckle, you’ll not want any other bed, nor other man.’
Jane stared. She had heard the village women talk at Minstead, but although they would joke quite crudely about the men sometimes, there was a directness about this strange person that both repelled yet fascinated her.
‘You like my husband?’
‘I …? I do not know him.’
‘You like to halleck with him?’
What did this mean? Was it some kind of trap? She had no idea but the woman was making her nervous. She rose. ‘He is your husband, not mine,’ she said and began to move away. But when, from a safe distance, she stole a glance back, her companion was still sitting quietly, apparently quite unperturbed, and gazing thoughtfully out towards the island.
Helena had suggested they walk along the beach together. Beside them lay the broad open waters of the English Channel. The thrift and sea-campion were no longer in flower but their green shoots extended like a haze all along the strand. Their words as they conversed were accompanied by the quiet hiss and the deep-drawing rattle of sea on shingle, and the cries of the white gulls rising from the foam.
Clement Albion was very fond of Helena Gorges, even if she sometimes made him smile. She was Swedish by birth, very fair, beautiful. ‘You are as kind as you are beautiful,’ he would tell her with perfect truth. Although he could have added: ‘And not a little vain.’
It is a universal law that no woman, once she has acquired a title, is ever willing to give it up. Or so it seemed to Albion. When Helena the Swedish beauty had been brought to Queen Elizabeth’s English court it had not been long before she had been snapped up as a bride by no less a person than the Marquis of Northampton. She had also become a great favourite of the queen. Sadly, her noble husband had died after only a year, leaving her glamorous, lonely, but a marchioness.
There were very few peerages in Queen Elizabeth’s England. The Wars of the Roses had killed off many of the great titles and the Tudors had no wish to make more feudal lords. But one title they had brought into use in England was that of marquis. There were scarcely a handful of them. They ranked only below the haughty dukes. In the order of precedence, therefore, the young Marchioness of Northampton walked through the door before even countesses, let alone ladies and gentlewomen.
So when she had met and fallen in love with aristocratic Thomas Gorges, who was then not even a humble knight, she had married him, but still insisted on calling herself the Marchioness of Northampton.
‘And she’s still doing it,’ Albion would say to his wife with a laugh. ‘Thank God Thomas just thinks it’s funny.’
Certainly she and Thomas were very happy together. She was a good wife. With her striking looks, her golden hair, her dazzling eyes, she would come on foot along the spit to the fort – she had a wonderful, elegant stride – and charm the garrison. If she was at court she never lost