The Forest (17 page)

‘You got my message, then?’ she cried back. ‘About the king?’

‘Message? I had no message. The king is dead.’

*

Hugh de Martell awoke. Foolishly, perhaps, after enjoying the view over the Forest, he had returned to Castle Hill and stayed up there. He must have fallen asleep in the sun. He blinked. It was late afternoon. And perhaps he might even have stayed there a little longer if he had not noticed, just then, coming over the ridge from the northerly Ringwood direction, a single horseman whom he recognized to be Edgar.

He muttered a curse. On the one hand the young fellow could probably tell him what had happened to Adela, but he was not sure he wanted to ask him. There was also the possibility, he supposed, that Cola and his family might have discovered about the assignation, might even have stopped Adela meeting him. Edgar could be coming to Castle Hill to look for him. Either way, he had no wish to encounter him.

There was a track from the bottom of the hill that led due west across open heath before entering a wood at a small promontory known as Crow Hill, from where it descended steeply into the Avon valley. It was less than a mile to the cover of Crow Hill. On his powerful horse he could be across it in no time. Moments later he was in the saddle.

He put his horse into a canter. The firm, peaty track was easy going. Ahead of him, in the west, the sun was starting to sink over the Avon valley, bathing the place in a pinkish, golden light. On each side the heather was like a shimmering purple lake. The moment was so magical that, despite himself, he almost laughed aloud at the sheer beauty of it.

He was a third of the way over when he realized to his irritation that Edgar had taken a path that led diagonally across the little heath. The tiresome young fellow meant to cut him off. He smiled to himself nonetheless. The Saxon might find that harder than he thought. His splendid stallion was bounding along. He measured the distance with his eye, bided his time.

Halfway across he went into a gallop. Glancing right, he saw that Edgar was doing the same. He chuckled to himself. The young Saxon hadn’t a chance. His stallion was thundering along, eating up the ground, making sparks when his shoes struck against the white gravel stones in the peaty turf.

But to his surprise he realized that Edgar was keeping pace. The fellow was going to meet him before he got to the wood. Ahead to his left, however, a little spur of wood came out, just in front of which, like a marker, was a solitary ash tree.

Suddenly, therefore, he veered left. His stallion plunged through the heather. Just ahead he noticed that some Forest fool had made piles of logs. He was almost level with the ash tree, which would screen him from the Saxon’s view, damn him. He urged his horse forward, forgetting that the surface of the Forest is not firm and true, like the sweeping chalk downs around his manor, but soft, shifting and treacherous to those who try to impose upon it. So he had no warning at all when his mighty beast’s leg plunged into a hidden pocket of boggy ground, throwing him head first towards the woodpile.

‘But what happened?’ She had never seen Walter at a loss before.

He gazed at her almost as if she were not there. ‘It was an accident.’

‘But who? How?’

‘An accident.’ He stared straight ahead.

She looked at him carefully. Was he just in a state of shock? Was he describing what he saw, or what someone had told him? They were trotting briskly, now, on to the heath.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘West. I have to go west. Away from Winchester. I have to find a boat. Further along the coast.’

‘A boat?’

‘Don’t you understand? I have to get away. Flee the realm. I wish to God I knew the way through this cursed forest.’

‘I do,’ she said. ‘I’ll guide you.’

It was astonishing how quickly the time seemed to pass. But then she was no longer searching and wandering; she was going straight for a point in the terrain whose position she knew: the little deserted ford north of Pride’s hamlet. The heath was empty. They saw no one. They did not speak. Avoiding the tiny hamlet, they found the long path that led down to the ford, crossed below Brockenhurst and came out on to the rolling heathland of the western Forest.

‘Do you want to try to get a boat at Christchurch?’ she asked.

‘No. It’s too near. I might have to wait a day or two and by then’ – he sighed – ‘they could arrest me. I have to go much further west.’

‘You’ll have to cross the River Avon. I know the Avon valley.’ Thank God for her rides with Edgar. ‘There’s a cattle ford about halfway between Christchurch and Ringwood. After that you cross the meadows and it’s open heathland for miles and miles.’

‘Good. I’ll go that way, then,’ Tyrrell said.

The sun was sinking in the west, a huge deep red; here and there a solitary tree stood out like a strange indigo flower against the red sky, casting a long shadow towards them like a cautionary finger. They had to walk their horses, but apart from the Forest ponies and the occasional cattle they had the place to themselves.

Tyrrell seemed to have recovered a bit now. ‘You said you were looking for me, that you sent a message,’ he said quietly. ‘What was that?’

She told him the whole story, the behaviour of Cola, what she had heard and how she had searched, with Pride’s help.

He listened carefully, then was silent for a few moments. ‘Did you realize that you might have been risking your life for me, my dear cousin?’ he said at last. He had never called her his dear cousin before.

‘I didn’t really think of it,’ she replied honestly.

‘This Pride – he knows nothing except the message you gave him, from the Lady Maud?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Let’s hope he is discreet, then.’ He stayed lost in thought for a while. Then, gazing ahead he said quietly: ‘You must forget everything you heard, everything you saw. If anyone asks, if Cola asks, you went for a ride in the Forest. Is there any reason why you should have done so?’

‘Actually,’ she confessed, ‘I had an assignation with Hugh de Martell. But I missed it.’

‘Aha!’ Despite everything, he laughed out loud. ‘He’s incorrigible, you know. Be warned. But it couldn’t be better. Stick to that if you must. Say you panicked and fled to find me if further pressed. But’, he became very serious, ‘if you value your life, Adela, forget everything else.’

‘What really happened?’ she asked.

He paused for some time before he spoke and, when he did, he chose his words carefully. ‘I don’t know. We’d split up. One of my Clare kinsmen came racing up to me and said there’d been an accident. “And as you were alone with the king,” he said, “you’ll take the blame.” I told him I hadn’t been with the king, but I got the message, if you see what I mean. He promised me they’d keep the hue and cry off my trail for a day or two if I made myself scarce and got across the sea. No point in arguing.’

‘Was it an accident?’

‘Who knows? Accidents happen.’

She wondered if he were telling the truth, and realized she could not know. She also realized that it was irrelevant. What mattered most – a hidden truth or a series of fleeting appearances? Or what men chose to say, or chose to believe?

‘I’m afraid, my poor little cousin, there’s nothing much I can do for you at present. I did have a possible suitor for you, but nobody will be wanting an alliance with a poor cousin of mine for a while. And you certainly can’t come with me to Normandy now. What’s to be done?’

‘I’ll go back to Cola’s first,’ she replied. ‘Then we’ll see. They tell me’ – she smiled – ‘that I’m going to be very happy.’

‘You are slightly mad,’ he replied, ‘but I begin to love you.’

Just then they came to the top of a low ridge. The sunset was in all its glory now, ahead of them, a vast red glow on the horizon over the Avon valley. And then Adela turned round to look back and saw all the purple heather of the heath suddenly transformed into a vast, magnificent, crimson fire, so that it seemed as if the whole Forest floor were molten, like the mouth of a secret volcano.

Then she and Tyrrell continued on their way, and when they could see the darkening river and the broad meadows by the cattle ford, she turned northwards and left him to take his flight towards the west.

A single arrow from a bow had killed Rufus. The red-headed monarch had died instantly. His companions had gathered and taken counsel quickly. It was his silent, thoughtful younger brother Henry who, after only moments of persuading, had announced: ‘We must go to Winchester at once.’ The treasury was there.

It was fortunate indeed that, no doubt thanks to the efficiency of Cola, Puckle and his cart should have been near at hand. They wrapped the body of the king, put it in Puckle’s cart and all set out for the ancient capital. All, that is, save Cola who, his work done, returned slowly home.

He reached his manor some time after dark, at just the same time as, in another, larger manor further west, they woke the Lady Maud, sleeping after her ride, to tell her that her husband, out riding in the Forest, had fallen from his horse, broken his neck on a pile of wood and was dead. She slept no more that night.

Another mother and child, deep in the Forest, did rest quietly that warm summer night: the pale doe and her fawn were at peace with the world, as they had been during most of the day. For, having briefly heard riders nearby and thought they were hunters, the pale deer had heard no more and settled down with her fawn once again. She lived in a part of the forest far distant from that in which King Rufus fatally hunted that day. So that whether Adela had seen another pale deer as she came across the heath, or whether the deer’s colour was only a trick of the light, or whether there was some other cause of her mistake, it was impossible to say.

Nor have men ever been able to say with certainty what really passed in the Forest that strange and magical day. The hunting companions of the king were known. Tyrrell, it was said, had taken aim at a stag, missed and struck the king. No one, or very few, asserted that he had done it deliberately, nor was there any clear reason why he should.

Who benefited from his death? Not his brother Robert, as it happened, nor the Clare family, as far as is known. But his younger brother – loyal, silent Henry with his fringe of black hair – took over the Winchester treasury by dawn and was crowned in London within two days. In time he took Normandy from Robert, just as Rufus had planned to do. But if he had any hand in the death of Rufus – and many have whispered that he must have done – not a trace of evidence remains.

Indeed, so completely did the Forest hold its secret, that even the place where it happened became forgotten until, centuries later, a stone was put up to mark the spot – in the wrong part of the Forest entirely.

There was, however, one other beneficiary of the mystery. A few days after it, Cola happened to come across Godwin Pride, who politely approached to have a private word with him. It seemed, he assured the surprised huntsman, that he had reason to believe that he had, in all honesty, a right to a large pen, far bigger than the one he had illegally made, next to his smallholding.

‘What possible proof have you, man?’ Cola enquired.

‘I think you could be satisfied,’ Pride replied carefully. ‘And if you’d be satisfied, I’d be satisfied.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I happened to be down Througham way the other day.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. Funny what you see sometimes.’

‘Funny?’ Cola was watchful now. Very. ‘Care to tell me what you saw?’

‘Shouldn’t care to tell anyone.’

‘Dangerous.’

‘Shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Well, I’ve no idea what you think you saw.’ Cola looked at him thoughtfully. ‘And I don’t think I want to know either.’

‘No. I shouldn’t say you did.’

‘Talk can be dangerous.’

‘See what I mean about that pen?’

‘See? I don’t suppose I see any better than you do, Godwin Pride.’

‘All right, then,’ said Pride cheerfully and walked off.

And when, the next summer, a splendid new pen, almost an extra acre, with a small bank and a ditch and a fence appeared by Pride’s homestead at the heath’s edge, neither Cola, nor his elder son, nor his younger son Edgar, nor Edgar’s wife Adela – who had received a nice little dowry upon her marriage from Tyrrell in Normandy – nor any of the royal foresters, ever seemed to see it or take any notice of it at all.

For in such ways life is arranged in the Forest.

BEAULIEU

1294

He ran along the edge of the field, bending low, hugging the hedgerow. He was red in the face, panting. He could still hear the shouts of rage from the grange behind him.

The mud-splattered habit he wore marked him as belonging to the monastery; but his thick hair was not shaved in the choir monk’s tonsure. A lay brother, then.

He reached the corner of the field and looked back. There was no one behind him. Not yet.
Laudate Dominum
. Praise the Lord.

The field he was in was full of sheep. But there was a bull in the next field. He didn’t care. Hoisting his habit, he swung his long legs over the stile.

The bull was not far off. It was brown and shaggy, and like a small haystack. Its two red eyes looked at him from under the thatch between its long, curling horns. He almost raised his hand to make the sign of the cross in benediction, but thought better of it.

Tauri Basan cingunt me …
The bulls of Bashan have beset me round: the Latin words of the twenty-second psalm. He had sung them only last week. A kindly monk had told him what they meant.
Domine, ad juvandum me festina
. O Lord, make haste to help me.

He started off as fast as he dared along the side of the field, keeping one eye on the bull.

There were just three questions in his mind. Was he being followed? Would the bull charge? And the man he had left bleeding on the ground at the grange: had he killed him?

*

The abbey of Beaulieu was at peace in the warm autumn afternoon. The shouts at the grange were far out of hearing. Only the occasional beating of swans’ wings on the neighbouring water broke the pleasant silence by the grey riverside inclosure.

In his private office, secure behind a bolted door, the abbot stared thoughtfully at the book he had been inspecting.

Every abbey had its secrets. Usually they were written down and kept in a safe place, handed down from abbot to abbot, for his eyes only. Sometimes they were of historical importance, concerning matters of royal statecraft or even the secret burial place of a saint. More often they were scandals, hidden or forgotten, in which the monastery was involved. Some, in retrospect, seemed trivial; others rose from the page like shrieks over which history had clapped a stifling hand. And lastly came the recent entries, concerning those still in the monastery – things which, in the view of the previous abbot, his successor needed to know.

Not that the entire Beaulieu record was so long. For the abbey was still a newcomer to the Forest.

Since the killing of Rufus the Forest had seen little drama. When, after a long reign, Henry had died, his daughter and his nephew had disputed the throne for years. But they did not fight in the Forest. When the daughter’s son, ruthless Henry Plantagenet, had come to the throne, he had quarrelled with his Archbishop, Thomas Becket, and some said he had had him murdered. All Christendom had been shocked. There had been another flurry of excitement when Henry’s heroic son, Richard the Lionheart, had gathered up his knights at Sarum to go on crusade.

But the truth was that the Forest folk cared little about any of these great events. The hunting of deer went on. Despite the numerous attempts of the barons and the Church to reduce the vast areas of the royal forests, the rapacious Plantagenet kings had actually enlarged them so that the boundaries of the New Forest were now even wider than they had been in the Conqueror’s time; though the forest laws, mercifully, had grown less harsh. The king no longer made Brockenhurst his main hunting base but usually stayed at the royal manor of Lyndhurst, where the old deer park pale had been greatly enlarged.

One national event had got their attention, though. When Lionheart’s brother, bad King John, had been forced by his barons to grant the humiliating Magna Carta, that great charter of English liberties had set out the limits to his oppressions in the Forest. And the matter had been even more clearly stated in a separate Charter of the Forest two years later. This was not a parochial business, either, given that almost a third of England had become royal forest by that date.

And then there had been Beaulieu.

If King John was called bad, it was not only because he lost all his wars and quarrelled with his barons. Worse still, he had insulted the Pope and caused England to be placed under a Papal Interdict. For years there were no church services in the land. No wonder the churchmen and monks hated him – and the monks wrote all the history. As far as they were concerned he had only done one good deed in his life: he had founded Beaulieu.

It was his sole religious foundation. Why did he do it? A good act by a bad man? In monkish chronicles such complexity was usually frowned upon. You were either good or bad. It was generally agreed that he must have done it to pay for some particularly awful deed. One legend even had it that he had ordered some monks to be trampled under his horses’ feet and had been haunted afterwards by a dream.

Whatever the reason, in the Year of Our Lord 1204, King John founded Beaulieu, a monastery of the order of Cistercians, or white monks as they were known, endowing it first with a rich manor in Oxfordshire and then with a great tract of land down in the eastern half of the New Forest – which included, by chance, the very place where his great-great-uncle Rufus had been slain a century before. In the ninety years since its foundation, the abbey had received further grants both from John’s pious son, Henry III, and the present king, mighty King Edward I, who had also been a loyal friend. Thanks to all this beneficence, the abbey was not only rich: small groups of its expanding body of monks had even gone out to start up little daughter houses in other places; one, Newenham, even lay seventy miles away, down the south-west coast in Devon. The abbey was both blessed and successful.

The abbot sighed, closed the book, carried it over to a large strong box in which he placed it and carefully locked the box.

He had made a mistake. The last abbot’s judgement, which he had so foolishly ignored, was right. The man’s character was clear: he was flawed and possibly dangerous.

‘So why did I appoint him?’ he murmured. Had he done it as a sort of penance? Perhaps. He had told himself that the man deserved a chance, that he had earned the position, that it was up to him as abbot – with prayer and the grace of God, of course – to make it work. As for his crime? It was in the book. It was long ago. God is merciful.

He glanced out through the open window. It was a beautiful day. Then his eyes fell on a pair of figures, walking quietly together in conversation. At the sight of these his face relaxed.

Brother Adam. There was a very different type. One of the best. He smiled. It was time to go outside. He unbolted the door.

Brother Adam was in a playful mood. As he sometimes did when he was pacing, he had pulled out the little wooden crucifix that hung on a cord round his neck, under his hair shirt, and was thoughtfully fingering it. His mother had given it to him when he first entered the order. She said she had got it from a man who had been to the Holy Land. It was carved from the wood of a cedar of Lebanon. He was enjoying the fact that the afternoon sun was gently warming his bald head. He had gone bald, and grey, by the time he was thirty. But this had not made him look old. Thirty-five, now, his finely cut, even features gave him a look of almost youthful intelligence, while one could sense that, under the monk’s habit, his thick, muscular body exuded a sense of physical power.

He was also quietly enjoying the business in hand, which was, as they paced up and down between two beds of vegetables, to inculcate, in the kindest way, some much-needed common sense into the young novice who walked respectfully beside him.

People often came to Brother Adam for advice, because he was calm and clever, yet always approachable. He never offered advice unless asked – he was far too shrewd to do that – but it might have been noticed that whatever the problem, after a troubled person had discussed it with Brother Adam for a while, that person nearly always started to laugh, and usually went away smiling.

‘Don’t you ever rebuke people?’ the abbot had once asked him.

‘Oh, no,’ he had replied with a twinkle. ‘That’s what abbots are for.’

The present talk, however, was not entirely comforting. Nor was it meant to be. Brother Adam had given it before. He called it his ‘Truth about Monks’ catechism.

‘Why’, he had asked the novice, ‘do men come to live in a monastery?’

‘To serve God, Brother Adam.’

‘But why in a monastery?’

‘To escape from the sinful world.’

‘Ah.’ Brother Adam gazed around the abbey precincts. ‘A safe haven. Like the Garden of Eden?’

In a way it was. The site the monks had chosen was delightful. Parallel to the great inlet from the Solent water that lay to the east of the Forest a small river ran down, forming a small coastal inlet, about three miles long, of its own. At the head of this inlet, where King John had kept a modest hunting lodge, the monks had laid out their great walled inclosure. It was modelled on the order’s parent house in Burgundy. Dominating everything was the abbey church – a large, early Gothic structure with a squat, square tower over the central crossing. Though simple, the building was handsome, and made of stone. There was no stone in the Forest; some of it had been brought across the Solent water from the Isle of Wight; some, like the best stone in the Tower of London, from Normandy; and the pillars were made of the same dark Purbeck marble, from along the south coast, as had been used in the huge new cathedral up at Sarum. The monks were particularly proud of their church’s floor, paved with decorative tiles they had painstakingly made themselves. Beside the church was the cloister; on its southern side the various quarters of the choir monks; along the whole of its western side the huge, barn-like
domus conversorum
– the house where the lay brothers ate and slept.

The walled inclosure also contained the abbot’s house, numerous workshops, a pair of fish ponds and an outer gatehouse where the poor were fed. A new and grander inner gatehouse had also just been begun.

Outside the wall lay the inlet and a small mill. Above the mill-race was a large pond surrounded by banks of silvery rushes. Beyond that, on the western side, some fields sloped up a small rise, from which there opened out a magnificent panorama: to the north mostly wood and heath; and to the south the rich, marshy land, which the monks had already partly drained to produce several fine farms, and which stretched down to the Solent water, with the long hump of the Isle of Wight lying like a friendly guardian just beyond. The entire estate, woodland, open heath and farmland, extended to some eight thousand acres; and since the boundary was marked by an earthwork ditch and fence, the monks referred not to the walled abbey inclosure, but to the eight-thousand-acre estate itself as the ‘Great Close’.

Bellus Locus
, the abbey was called in Latin – the Beautiful Place; in Norman French:
Beau Lieu
. But the forest people did not speak French, so they pronounced it Boolee, or Bewley. And before long the monks were doing so, too. Rich, tranquil haven that it was, the Great Close of Beaulieu might well have been mistaken for the Garden of Eden.

‘One is secure here, of course,’ Brother Adam remarked pleasantly. ‘We are clothed and fed. We have few cares. So tell me’ – he suddenly rounded on the novice – ‘now that you have had the chance to observe us for several months, what do you think is the most important quality for a monk to possess?’

‘A desire to serve God. I think,’ the boy said. ‘A great religious passion.’

‘Really? Oh, dear. I don’t agree at all.’

‘You don’t?’ The boy looked confused.

‘Let me tell you something,’ Brother Adam cheerfully explained. ‘The first day you pass from your novitiate and become a monk, you will take your place as the most junior among us, next to the monk who was the last to arrive before you. After a time there will be another new monk, who will be placed below you. For every meal and every service you will always sit in the same position between those two monks – every day, every night, year in, year out; and unless one of you leaves for another monastery, or becomes abbot or prior, you will stay together, like that, for the rest of your lives.

‘Think about it. One of your companions has an irritating habit of scratching himself or sings out of tune, always; the other dribbles when he eats; he also has bad breath. And there they are, one each side of you. For ever.’ He paused and beamed at the novice. ‘That’s monastic life,’ he said amiably.

‘But monks live for God,’ the novice protested.

‘And they are also ordinary human beings – no more, no less. That,’ Brother Adam added gently, ‘is why we need God’s grace.’

‘I thought’, the novice said honestly, ‘you were going to be more inspiring.’

‘I know.’

The novice was silent. He was twenty.

‘The most important qualities a monk needs,’ Brother Adam went on, ‘are tolerance and a sense of humour.’ He watched the young man. ‘But these are both gifts of God,’ he added, to comfort him.

The last part of this conversation had been quietly observed. The abbot had actually intended to join them, since he always enjoyed Brother Adam’s company; and he had been secretly irritated when, just as he got outside, the prior had appeared at his elbow. Courtesies must be observed, though. As the prior murmured at his side, the abbot eyed him from time to time, bleakly.

John of Grockleton had been prior for a year now. Like most of his ilk, he was going nowhere.

The position of prior in a monastery is not without honour. This is, after all, the monk whom the abbot has chosen to be his deputy. But that is all. If the abbot is away he is in charge – but only on a day-to-day basis. All major decisions, even the assignment of the monks’ tasks, must await the abbot’s return. The prior is the workhorse, the abbot is the leader. Abbots have charisma; their deputies do not. Abbots solve problems; priors report them. Priors seldom become abbots.