The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [175]
It was with no small fear that he went to his mother to explain the problem. Her reaction astonished him.
‘Of course, Clement. She is quite right. Your household is not large. My poor manservant has been sleeping in the barn. Leave everything to me.’
And the very next morning, to his astonishment, the whole cortège – the wagons piled high, the servants all on board – had been ready to depart. He and his family had stood and watched in wonder as the order was given to move off. There had been only one puzzling feature.
‘Shouldn’t you be in your carriage now, Mother?’ he asked. ‘It is about to move.’
‘I?’ His mother looked surprised. ‘I, Clement? I am not going.’ She raised her hand and waved as the two wagons began to rumble past them. ‘Do not worry, Clement.’ She gave him a brilliant smile. ‘I shall be quiet as a mouse.’
And from that day, with just a few chests of clothes and her prayer book, she had kept to herself in her chamber. ‘Like a good nun,’ as she put it. That is, when she was not sitting in the parlour, or instructing the children in their prayers, or giving the servants little commissions to do, or letting his wife know that the roast beef could have been cooked a little less. ‘You see,’ she would observe, every day at dinner, ‘how I live like a hermit in your house. You must scarcely know I am here.’
If her continued presence was a nuisance for his wife, to Albion himself it grew daily more alarming. Her private conversations with him left no room for doubt: the Spanish were going to triumph. ‘I wrote to your sister long ago about the strength of the musters,’ she declared. ‘The Spanish troops will smash them easily. As for our ships, they are all rotten.’ The first statement was true, the second false. But she had entirely made up her mind about it.
The problem was, how could he deal with the suspicions that must attach to him from her presence in his house? He decided that the best defence was attack.
‘My mother is now completely out of her wits,’ he told one or two gentlemen who he knew would repeat the information, ‘and there’s an end of it.’ When a number of recusants were interned by the council in case they proved dangerous, he remarked wryly to Gorges: ‘I have interned my mother myself. I am now her gaoler.’ When Gorges reminded him that he personally had had charge of Mary Queen of Scots, Albion riposted: ‘My mother is the more dangerous.’ And when Helena asked if he actually kept her under lock and key, he replied morosely: ‘I wish I had a dungeon.’
Were they convinced? He hoped so. But two incidents soon told him better. The first occurred just after news came that Drake had been refused permission to attack the Spanish in their ports again. The orders that the queen had wanted to give had caused some wry amusement among her commanders. Albion had been down at Hurst Castle just afterwards.
‘Do you know, Clement,’ Helena had remarked, ‘the queen wanted the fleet to go back and forth like men on sentry duty?’ She laughed. ‘It seems that Her Majesty, although she sends her buccaneers across the seas, did not know that their ships cannot change directions just as they please, ignoring the wind. Now the fleet is going to …’ But she suddenly checked herself and added sheepishly: ‘To do something else. I do not know what.’ And Albion had turned and seen Gorges standing behind him, quickly removing a warning finger from his lips.
The second incident came early in July.
The fact was that, despite its fearsome reputation at home, the royal spy system in England had been unable, with the Spanish Armada almost daily expected, to discover anything about its plan of action. There were, in fact, two threats to consider. One came from the great fleet itself; the other from the Spanish forces already just across the sea in the Netherlands, where they had been