The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [57]
It took a while to revive her. When they had, she was determined to go on. ‘Not on that horse, you won’t,’ Pride had to tell her.
‘I’ll walk if I have to,’ she said.
He led her outside with a smile. ‘Do you think’, he asked, ‘you could ride one of these?’
Adela could feel the warmth of the late afternoon sun on her back as its golden rays fell, in great slanting shafts, over the forest wastes.
The sturdy little New Forest pony she rode was surprisingly fast. She had not realized how sure-footed these animals were, compared with her high-bred gelding. Born to the heather, he seemed to dance through it.
Pride was riding beside her. At first they had intended to try the woods near Brockenhurst again; but they had met a peasant who told them he had seen horsemen out on the heath to the east. And so it was, in the late afternoon, that Adela found herself passing on to the one huge tract of the Forest where she had never been before.
It was open country – a broad, low, gently undulating coastal plain. To the south, not seven miles away, the long, looming, blue-green hills of the Isle of Wight told her that she was near the Solent water, with its promise of the open sea. In front of her the heath, violet and purple in August, with fewer gorse brakes than on the western side of the Forest, stretched from Pride’s hamlet all the way down to the belt of wooded marsh and meadowland that masked the line of the coast. Ytene, as they had anciently called it: the land where the Jutes from the Isle of Wight had come to farm.
She was glad to have Pride with her. She could not tell him what they were doing, of course, but his calm presence gave her heart again. After all, she reminded herself, if the king’s party were still out hunting then nothing had happened yet. Walter was probably still safe. Perhaps the whole thing had been called off. As long as there was light, though, she must try to find him and deliver her message; and there were still hours to go before the sun would sink over the Forest.
Perhaps it was because she was tired, perhaps it was the heat, but as they went over the heath the great silence of the August afternoon seemed to take on an air of unreality. The occasional birds hovering overhead seemed to lose their substance as if at any moment they might recede upwards into the endless blue heavens, or dissolve down into the purple heather sea, becoming nothingness.
But where were the hunters? She and Pride travelled a mile, then another, crossed some marshy ground, rose up again on to dry heath, saw clumps of holly trees and oaks in the distance, but no riders. Only the same blue sky and purple heather.
‘There are two places they could be,’ Pride said at last. ‘They could be over there.’ He pointed eastwards to where she could see a line of woodland. ‘Or they might be down in the marshes.’ His arm made a sweeping gesture towards the south. ‘It’s your choice.’
Adela considered. She hardly cared, now, whether she encountered Cola, or even the king himself; but if she was going to deliver her message that day it would need to be done soon. ‘We’d better split up,’ she said.
Since the tracks in the coastal oak woods were treacherous, they quickly agreed that Pride would go down there while she went east.
‘And what am I to say if I find your cousin?’ he asked.
‘Tell him …’ She paused. What could the forester say? If she saw Walter herself, little though he respected her, she thought she could draw him to one side and tell him enough, at least, of what she knew to make him realize his danger. But what message could she possibly send by Pride that might make him take notice? She searched her mind. And then she had an inspiration. ‘Tell him’, she said, ‘that you come from the Lady Maud. Tell him she will explain all, but that,