The groom and the manservants silently assembled it, slotted in the poles and brought it to the carriage door. As his mother stepped out, Albion observed that she was already wearing wooden pattens on her feet to protect them from the mud. She had planned this halt, therefore. He should have guessed. She pointed, now, to the path along the ridge. Evidently she wished to go up there and expected him to accompany her. Dismounting, he walked up behind as the four men carried the litter and so, a curious little procession silhouetted against the sky, they made their way along the chalk rim as the small white clouds hurried over them.

At the high point she ordered the litter put down and stepped out of it. The men were told to wait at a distance. Then she turned towards her son, and beckoned. 'Now, Clement,' she said with a smile - the name had been her particular choice, not his father's - 'I want to talk to you.'

'Gladly, Mother,' he said.

At least she had chosen a fine place to do it. The view from the ridge below Sarum was one of the finest in southern England. Looking back the way they had come, the long slope now appeared as a beautiful sweep down into the lush green basin from which, four miles away, Salisbury Cathedral rose like a grey swan from the Avon valley floor, its graceful spire soaring so high that you might have supposed the surrounding ridges had been spun out from it, like clay on a lathe, driven by an ancient spirit. To the north lay the bump of Old Sarum's castle mound and the sea of chalk ridges beyond. Eastwards, the rich, undulating countryside of Wessex rolled away into the distance.

But it was turning south, in the direction of their journey, that one saw the longest sweep of all. For there, shelving gradually down, mile after mile, lay the whole vast expanse of the New Forest - wild oak wood, gravel ridges, sweeping gorse and heather heath, all the way to Southampton and the misty blue slopes of the Isle of Wight, plainly visible, twenty miles away in the sea.

Clement Albion stood before his mother on the bare ridge and wondered what she wanted.

Her opening words were not encouraging. 'We should not fear death, Clement.' She smiled at him in quite a friendly way. 'I have never been afraid to die.'

The Lady Albion - for although her husband had not been a knight, so she was always called - was a tall, slim woman. Her face was powdered white; her lips were, as God had graciously made them, red. Her eyes were dark and tragic unless she was annoyed, when they became adamantine. Her teeth were very fine - for she despised all things sweet - and long, and the colour of ancient ivory.