The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [163]
She had used all the remedies she knew. She had tried to shield herself. Each month, as the moon waxed from maiden to mother and waned back to crone, she secretly prayed. Three times she drew down the moon. But as winter came she knew: nothing can change the wheel of life; there would be no healing and she must pass from this life to another.
Nature is cruel, yet also merciful. The canker that was eating away the life of Puckle’s wife caused other changes in her body. She became pale, her blood changed its composition; she began to be drowsy, thus ensuring that, before the canker grew into its final monstrous life and racked her body with pain, she would instead slip sleepily towards an earlier closing.
She and Puckle had three children. She loved the woodsman. She knew very well that, after her passing, life must go on. And so it was, in secret, that she made her prayers and did what she thought best.
And now it was the year’s midnight, when scarcely seven hours of sunlight is seen and all the world seems to withdraw into the deep blackness under the ground.
Two weeks later, just after Christmas, Clement Albion rode by.
The hard frost had broken just before the sacred festival. Although the ground was still crisp underfoot, he saw a clique of birds fighting over a worm in the ground leaves. A squirrel, a blur of red, dashed across into a cover of hawthorn bushes.
But it was the oak he had come to see.
In the wood beside it the soaring grey and silver branches were bare, save for encrustations, here and there, of dark ivy or lichen, white as death. The oaks that dotted the glade were all bare too.
But the oak that stood apart was a stranger sight entirely. It had shed its icicles. Its tiny, tight-wrapped buds had broken out into sprigs of leaves. The midwinter tree was green. Albion stared in silence. Nothing stirred.
Why did this New Forest tree, which is well recorded, behave in this way? Possibly some accident had occurred during its growth – a lightning strike, for instance – which had somehow reset the internal clock, whose operation is not fully understood, by which a tree regulates its flowering. Perhaps more likely was some genetic peculiarity. One such trait, in which there is a failure in the autumnal sealing-off process, causes certain oaks to retain their leaves right through winter into spring. The Christmas leafing might have been another such genetic condition and the recorded existence of three such oaks in the same area further suggests that it could be so. But nobody knows.
Albion sighed. Was it a miracle, as his mother insisted? Was the tree speaking to him, reminding him of his duty and his religion? Was this marvellous tree a living emblem, like one of those haunting signs on the road to the Holy Grail in the tales of knightly romance?
He hoped not. Since the autumn there had been no whisper from the council to suggest he was further suspected. He had encountered Gorges twice, and each time his friend had been warm and natural towards him. The truth was that he just wanted a quiet life. Was that so wrong? Didn’t most people? A tree that flowers at midwinter: the promise of life in death. Three flowering trees, three crosses: the crucifixion upon Calvary. Whichever way you looked at it, if the green trees were a sign from God they suggested death and sacrifice.
If only the Spanish invasion did not come. His mother could leave him her fortune believing that he would have joined the invaders; Gorges, the council, the queen herself would have nothing with which to reproach him. He heartily prayed that he would not be put to the test.
He had not heard from his mother for some time. He should have gone to see her at the Christmas season but had found an excuse not to. He wondered for how long he could avoid her.
A second later he saw her.
She was in the green tree, high in the branches. She was all in black, as usual, but the entire lining of her cloak was bright red. She was flapping it and flying from branch to branch like a huge, angry bird. She turned