She was beautiful. Of course she was beautiful. She had the kind of face that had been beautiful for so many centuries that beauty had ceased to be a characteristic and had become a condition — something permanent, something structural, something that could not be removed without taking the bones with it. Her skin was the colour of aged parchment. Her hair was white — not grey, not silver, white, the pure, absolute white of snow before it has been touched — and it was braided in a crown around her head in a style that Clara recognised as ancient. Pre-Covenant. Older than Bellmere. Older, perhaps, than England.
Her eyes were the colour of amber. Warm amber. The kind of warm that a fire gives off just before it consumes the thing it is warming.
She looked at Clara the way a jeweller looks at an uncut stone — with interest, with assessment, and with the implicit understanding that the stone's value depends entirely on what the jeweller decides to make of it.
