The Forest (16 page)

His nerves strung taut, his pulse beating fast, he rode about, asking in Burley if they had been seen and looking out over various nearby high points. There was nothing. He returned slowly to the valley, thinking to check back at his home. Perhaps, he told himself, he had been mistaken. But if not he would come back to the Forest and try again.

Adela had been cautious as she approached Brockenhurst. On the one hand she had to find Walter, but on the other she must avoid Cola. She certainly could not tell the old man why she had disobeyed his orders and he would probably send her home before she could accomplish her mission.

As she came close to the royal hunting lodge, however, she had what seemed to be a piece of luck. She saw Puckle, standing alone by his cart. When she asked him where the king’s party were, he looked thoughtful, then said that they had gone northwards, somewhere above Lyndhurst.

This was good news indeed. The area was wooded. Perhaps she could intercept Walter without being spotted. Asking Puckle to say nothing of having seen her she set off, with a lighter heart, towards the north.

Not until some time after her husband had left did the Lady Maud stir from her usual position of resting in the solar. But when she did she astonished the entire household by demanding not only her outdoor clothes but that her horse should be saddled as well.

‘You do not mean to ride, My Lady?’ her maidservant enquired anxiously.

‘Yes. I do.’

‘But My Lady, you are so weak.’

It was true that, after so much inactivity, the Lady Maud was hardly steady on her feet. But despite all the woman’s remonstrances she insisted: ‘I shall ride.’ There was nothing they could do about it. One brave servant ventured to say that the master would not like it, but was cut with such a mean little look that he shrivelled back against the wall.

‘That is between me and him, not you,’ she said coldly and told them to bring the horse round to the door.

Moments later, while the groom held the bridle, they were helping her to mount.

‘Please, My Lady, you could fall,’ the groom now begged. ‘Let me at least accompany you.’

‘No.’ Abruptly she turned her horse’s head away and started off at a walk. So she proceeded, wobbling once or twice, pale-faced, looking straight ahead, all the way down the long village street, while the cottagers came out to watch her pass. She started up the track that her husband had taken. She swayed, seemed about to fall, but pressed on.

She was following him. Her journey was instinctive. Did she know that she had lost his love? She sensed it. Did she know he had gone to another woman? She guessed it. And something in her, an animal knowledge, told her she must get well, and ride and take him back. So that August day she rode out in front of them all, kept in the saddle by her will alone. At the top of the rise she urged her horse into a canter, and those who saw it below gasped and muttered: ‘Dear God, she will be killed.’

The king’s hunting party had set out gaily from Brockenhurst, accompanied by Cola.

‘My faithful huntsman. I can always trust you to do everything perfectly.’ Rufus was in a good humour. His sharp eyes bored into the old huntsman; then he laughed. ‘I don’t want to drive the deer into your great trap today, my friend. I want to hunt the woods.’

Hounds had been produced. There were two kinds: the tufters, agile scenting hounds, whose job was to sniff out the deer and spring them from the dense covert; and the running hounds which, today, would only be used to bring down any deer who having been wounded, escaped into the open.

They proceeded first into the woods below Brockenhurst; but after hunting there a while the king insisted on going eastwards, across a huge expanse of open heath, despite the fact that Cola warned him: ‘You’ll find some red deer, Sire, but few fallow.’

At noon the king decided to stop and rest, and demanded some refreshment. Then, some way into the afternoon, he agreed to let Cola lead them to a better hunting ground, although even now he seemed to be in no hurry. ‘Come on, Tyrrell,’ he cried. ‘We shall all be watching you.’

The pale deer started. She trembled for a moment, then listened.

The huge silence of the August afternoon seemed to lie like an endless covering over the warm blue sky. By her side, her little fawn could walk a few steps now. Gangling, delicate, feeding from her, precious to her, he had survived the first dangerous days of life. But was he old enough to run, if the hounds came?

She turned her head. She was sure she could hear them now. She looked at her fawn, her heart full of fear. Were the hunters coming this way?

Hugh de Martell had waited long enough. He was not used to being kept waiting. He knew from the messenger that Adela had received his letter. Could something have prevented her coming? Perhaps. But he doubted it. Had she arrived and waited for him and then left? Possibly. But his message had only said that they should meet in the morning and it had not been noon when he arrived. She would have stayed, he was sure of it. And now he had been kept waiting. Two hours, he guessed.

No. She had changed her mind and thought better of it. He was sorry. He had liked her.

He wondered what to do. Should he go down to Cola’s manor? He thought not. Too risky. Should he turn back and go home? It irked him to do so because it seemed an admission of failure. Anyway, it was a fine day. He might as well enjoy it. Leaving Castle Hill, he skirted Burley and idly walked his horse up on to the high heath. After a mile or two there would be a magnificent view eastwards and down to the sea. He had once had a girl, the daughter of a fisherman, down on the coast there. He had soon grown tired of her, but today the memory seemed a pleasant one.

His temper improved by the time he reached this high place. It could be that Adela had been prevented from coming after all. He would make enquiries. She might be his yet.

Godwin Pride had finished his new fence just after dawn that morning and he was proud of it. Not that the area enclosed was so much larger. He had actually extended it less than one yard. But – here was the cleverness of it – he had done so on two sides instead of one. As a result, the proportions of the pen were exactly as they had been before. Unless a person inspected the ground, he would never notice that there had been any alteration.

‘But what’s the point?’ his wife had asked. ‘There still isn’t enough space for that extra cow.’

‘Never you mind about that,’ he had replied. It was the principle of the thing. And he had been surveying his work for perhaps the fifth time that afternoon when he had looked up and seen a curious sight.

It was Adela. But he had never seen her like this before. She seemed exhausted, almost crushed. Her horse was on his last legs, his mouth foaming, his flanks drenched. She gave Pride a look of desperation. ‘Have you seen them? The king’s party?’ He hadn’t. ‘I’ve got to find them.’ She didn’t say why. It was lucky that he was close enough to catch her as she swayed and fell from her horse.

She had spent hours searching around Lyndhurst before finally concluding that the royal party had gone some other way. Retracing her steps down to Brockenhurst she had been told by a servant which way they had gone and so she had searched the woods to the south. Casting about this way and that, riding down tracks, through glades, listening for some faint echo in the endlessly receding trees, she had encountered nothing except a huge silence broken occasionally by the flapping of a bird in the leaves.

She had searched in a state of near panic, lost heart, almost despaired. Yet she could not give up. She had asked in the few hamlets but nobody knew where they were. By now she knew that her horse was giving out and that brought her to a kind of nervous hopelessness too. Then finally she had thought of Pride.

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, on any excuse he can think of, he must flee at once for his life.’ That, she thought, should do it. Moments later they went their separate ways. As they parted she called after him: ‘What’s the name of the place you’re going to?’

‘There’s a farm down there,’ he called back, ‘known as Througham.’ Then he trotted away.

For nearly another hour she wandered all along the line of the eastern woods but found no sign of them. Time and again she glanced back across the heath and saw nothing. She finally concluded that, if they were still in this part of the Forest at all, they must be somewhere in the woods where Pride was riding and had started back across the heath in that direction, when suddenly in the distance she caught sight of the strangest vision.

An animal was moving, with extraordinary speed, across the heath towards the woods at Througham. The sun in the west was shining, fiery gold, in her eyes and she raised her hand to shield them. But even in that reddening glare it seemed to her she could make out the creature well enough; and she realized with a start that she recognized it.

The pale doe. The pale doe was racing like a darting speck of light across the purple glow of the heather. There were two horsemen, hunters, behind her. Two hounds as well, she was almost sure. The deer was quite alone. Were there other deer nearby, a fawn perhaps, trembling by a thicket, watching its mother being chased by the hunters? The pale doe was going faster than they, running, almost flying for her life towards the shelter of the woods and marshes.

Hardly thinking what she was doing, almost forgetting Walter, she found herself urging her pony forward, following the deer. She waved at the hunters, but they did not seem to see her. The pale deer was already near the trees. The two hunters were at a gallop now. Try as she might, she could not cut them off and she was still half a mile behind them when they followed the pale doe into the woods.

Nor did she even see them again. When she reached the trees herself she encountered nothing but silence. The pale doe, the riders, the hounds might have been so many phantoms. All she found as she rode down one track after another, was a succession of oak woods, open glades and marshy meadows.

She had just tried a track through the woods that led south when, to her left, she heard hoof-beats rapidly approaching her. She stopped. Was it Pride? One of the hunting party? A moment later the horseman came into sight. She gave a little cry of relief. But it died in her.

For it was Walter as she had never seen him before. He was gasping, his eyes were wild and he was pale, almost green as though he were about to vomit. Seeing her, he scarcely even had the emotion left, it appeared, to register surprise. But as he came up, he cried out hoarsely: ‘Flee. Flee for your life.’