The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [162]
‘Of course I do.’ She smiled. ‘Come on.’ She linked her arm in his. ‘Let’s go back.’
But she was lying. He knew it. She wasn’t sure. And if she and Thomas Gorges didn’t trust him, then neither did the council nor the queen herself. The months ahead suddenly looked bleaker than ever.
And wasn’t it ironic when, whatever his mother might demand, he had just told Helena the truth.
Hadn’t he?
When winter came, it was icy cold. But the tree was used to that. For even as the tree had reached middle age, a century before, England had been entering the period, which lasted through the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, known to history as the little Ice Age. Temperatures throughout the year, on average, were several degrees cooler. In summer the difference was not so noticeable. But winters were often cruel. Rivers froze. In great trees cut during this time the yearly growth rings are close together.
By early December the oak tree was sealed off for the winter. Its branches were bare and grey; the tight little buds on their twigs were protected from the frosts by waxy brown scales. Deep underground the sugar in the sap would ensure that the moisture in the tree did not freeze.
On St Lucy’s Day, the thirteenth, the traditional day of the winter solstice, sleet fell at dawn, then froze by noon so that when a pale sun shone during the brief hours before the grey day’s ending, the oak tree’s crown was all hung with icicles as though some ancient silver-haired dweller of the forests had stopped there and become rooted to the spot. And even as the faint sun lent a shining to the greyness, the wind hissed through the icicles to freeze them further still.
Some way up, in a fork in the tree, where once a pigeon had made her nest, a large owl perched silently. A visitor from the deep-frozen forests of Scandinavia, it had come for the winter months to the more temperate island. Its eyes gazed blankly at the snow, but when dusk fell its astonishing asymetric ears would guide it, on soundless wings, infallibly down upon any little creature that ventured out into the darkness. Had anyone looked carefully at the ground by the oak tree’s base the remains of a thrush would have told them of the owl’s last meal. Slowly the silent bird turned its head. It could do so, if it chose, through more than three hundred and sixty degrees.
Above the owl’s perch, in a blackened fissure, a little colony of bats hung, like webbed pellets, in their winter hibernation. All over the tree, on branch and twig, tiny larvae, like that of the winter moth, were tight-wrapped in their cocoons. Down the tree’s great trunk spiders crouched in crevices behind windows of ice. Around its foot the brown bracken, bent and broken, lay flattened in the fallen leaves, ice-frosted.
Below the ground worms and slugs, and all manner of earth creatures, were insulated by the frozen leaves above from the bitter cold. But in the bushes, although the robin, like a puffball in its downy winter feathers, would probably survive, the song thrushes and blackbirds were ragged and gaunt. Two weeks of deep frost or snow, and many would reach a point of weight-loss and weakness from which there would be no return.
But if these little creatures dwelt always perilously at the brink of life and death during their few brief seasons of consciousness the tree, with its massively larger system, was also massively stronger. It was still less than three hundred years old. Yet nature imposed limitations upon the mighty oak as well. For of its vast fall of acorns that autumn thousands had been eaten by the pigs and other grazers; others trampled; others stored by squirrels or birds, others yet destined, as saplings, to be eaten by the deer. Of all that inundation of acorns, not a single new oak tree would result; nor would one for another five or ten or even twenty years.
She was feeling very weak now. She had sensed that something was wrong back at summer’s end, been sure of it before she had gone with Puckle, that autumn day, to deliver the charcoal to Hurst. She had