The Forest (35 page)

For down near the shore a string of small buildings and a score or more of what looked like tiny windmills, their sails at present motionless, told a different story, reminding you that it was this marshland that provided the most important commodity the merchants of Lymington shipped: salt.

There had been salt pans there since Saxon times. The need for salt was huge. There was no other way of preserving flesh or fish. When the farmers killed their pigs and cattle in November, the meat had all to be salted so it could be used during the winter. If the king wanted venison from the Forest for his court or to feed his troops, it must be salted. England produced vast quantities and it all came from the sea.

Henry Totton owned a saltern on Pennington Marshes. They could see its boiling house and wind pumps as soon as they started along the gravelly path across the levels. It was one of a group down by the shoreline. It did not take them long to reach the place.

Jonathan liked the salterns; perhaps it was because of where they were, so close to the sea. The first thing needed for making salt was a large feeder pond, set just in from the shoreline, into which the sea water could flow at high tide. Jonathan loved to watch the sea come rippling in down the curving channels. He and Willie had once made a similar construction of their own when they were playing on a sandy beach along the coast.

The salt pans that came next were carefully built. They were, in fact, a huge single basin – shallow and dead level – divided into small ponds, about twenty feet square, by mud banks six inches high and just wide enough for a man to walk on. Water from the feeder pond was baled into these with wooden scoops; but they were only filled about three inches deep. From here, the salt-making began.

It was very simple. The water had to evaporate. This would only work in the summer and, the warmer the weather and hotter the sun, the more salt you could produce. The season usually began at the very end of April. In a good year it might last sixteen weeks. Once, in a very bad year, it had lasted only two.

The idea was not to leave the water to evaporate in a single pan.

‘Evaporation takes time, Jonathan,’ his father had told him long ago, ‘and we need a continuous supply.’

So the method was to move the water up a line of pans, so that it gradually evaporated and achieved a higher salt concentration as it went. To keep it moving along the pans, they used wind pumps.

They were very simple; they had probably been used on the marshes below the New Forest in Saxon times and were hardly different from those known in the Middle East two thousand years before. They were about ten feet high, with a simple cross carrying four little sails like a windmill. As the sails went round they drove a cam, which operated a rudimentary water pump below. From shallow pan to shallow pan the water was pumped along, until it reached the final part of the process at the boiling house.

Totton’s reason for going out today was to make a thorough inspection so that any repairs needed after the winter could be made in good time. He and Jonathan went over it together.

‘The channel to the feeder pond needs dredging,’ remarked the boy.

‘Yes.’ Henry nodded. Several of the mud walls in the salt pans needed mending, too.

Here Jonathan made himself particularly useful, walking lightly over every one of the narrow barriers, marking each crack he found with a splash of whitewash. ‘Don’t we have to clean out all the bottoms, too?’ he asked.

‘We do,’ his father said.

The final process was the actual salt-making. By the time the evaporated sea water reached the last salt pan it was a highly concentrated brine. Now the salt-maker would place a lead-weighted ball into the pan. When it floated, he would know the brine was thick enough. Opening a sluice, he would allow the brine to flow down into the boiling house.

This was just a shed, with strengthened walls. In here was the boiling pan, a huge vat over eight feet across, under which there was a furnace, usually heated by charcoal or wood. Here the vat gradually boiled away all the water, leaving a great piecrust of salt.

The boiling was almost continuous during the salt-making season. Each boiling, or turn, took eight hours. Starting on Sunday night and ending on Saturday morning, this allowed sixteen turns a week. At this rate Henry Totton’s boiling pan was able to produce almost three tons of salt each week. It was crusty and not very pure, but it was pure enough.

‘We burn nineteen bushels for each ton of salt produced,’ Totton remarked. ‘So,’ he started to calculate for the boy, ‘if the cost of fuel per bushel is …’

It was only moments before Jonathan’s concentration had started to wander. He didn’t enjoy the boiling house as much as the rest. When the boiling was going on, the clouds of steam, impregnated with salt, were blinding. His throat would feel on fire after a while. The area all round the boiling house would grow hot and cloudy. He would run away whenever he could to the fresh sea breeze, the curlews and seagulls along the shore by the feeder pond.

His father had just finished explaining how to calculate the total profit achievable if the weather held good for the full sixteen-week season when he noticed that Jonathan was looking at him thoughtfully.

‘Father, can I ask you something?’

‘Of course, Jonathan.’

‘Only’ – he hesitated – ‘it’s about secrets.’

Totton stared. Secrets? It was nothing to do with salt, then. Nothing to do with anything he had been trying to teach the boy in the last half-hour. Had Jonathan taken in anything he’d said? The all too familiar wave of disappointment and irritation started to sweep over him. He fought to control himself, not to let it appear in his face. He wished he could bring himself to smile, but he couldn’t. ‘What sort of secrets, Jonathan?’

‘Well … It’s like this. If someone tells you something important, but they make you promise not to tell anyone, because it’s a secret; and if you wanted to tell someone, because it might be important; should you keep it a secret?’

‘Did you promise to keep a secret?’

‘Yes.’

‘And is the secret something bad? Something criminal?’

‘Well.’ Jonathan had to consider. Was the secret that his friend Willie Seagull had told him so bad?

It concerned Alan Seagull and his boat. The secret was that it could run faster than Totton thought. And the reason for that was that Seagull was in the habit of making some very swift and illicit voyages indeed.

His cargo on these occasions was wool. Despite the increasing cloth trade, it was still wool that was the backbone of England’s export trade and her wealth. In order to ensure his treasury profited from it, the king insisted, as his predecessors had done, that the entire trade was funnelled through the great entrepôt, known as the Staple, of Calais. On all Staple wool duty was paid. When the monks of Beaulieu sent their vast clip abroad – mostly through Southampton, a little through Lymington – or when Totton bought wool from Sarum merchants, it all went through the Staple and was duly taxed.

When Alan Seagull made his illicit runs for other, less honourable exporters, he did so at night, slipping across from coast to coast, paying neither duty nor heed, for which he was well paid. Others did the same all along the coast. It was known as owling. It was illegal but every child in every harbour knew that such things took place.

‘It could get someone in trouble,’ Jonathan said carefully. ‘But I don’t think it’s very bad.’

‘Like poaching,’ his father guessed.

‘Like that.’

‘If you gave your word, you should keep it,’ said Totton. ‘No one will ever trust you if you don’t.’

‘Only …’ Still Jonathan was uncertain. ‘What if you wanted to tell someone to help them?’

‘How help them?’

‘If you had a friend and it would save them money.’

‘To break your word and betray a confidence? Certainly not, Jonathan.’

‘Oh.’

‘Does that answer your question?’

‘Yes. I think so.’ Although Jonathan still frowned a little. He wished there were some way of warning his father that he was going to lose his bet.

There were times during the next two weeks when Alan Seagull found it hard not to laugh.

The whole of Lymington was placing bets. Most were small, a few pence usually; but several merchants had a mark or even more on the race. Why were they betting? Often, the mariner guessed, it was just because they didn’t want to be left out. Some reckoned Seagull’s small craft would outsail the bigger ship because of the shortness of the crossing; others made elaborate calculations based on the likely weather. Others again put their trust in the soundness of Totton’s judgement and followed him.

‘The more they talk the less they know,’ Seagull pointed out to his son. ‘And none of ’em really knows anything.’

Then there were the bribes. Hardly a day passed without someone coming to the mariner with an offer. ‘I’ve got half a mark on your boat, Alan. There’ll be a shilling in it for you if you win.’ More interesting were the people who offered him money to lose. ‘I don’t know the Southampton men,’ one merchant told him frankly. ‘And besides, the only way to be sure of the result is if you promise to lose.’

‘It’s funny,’ Seagull remarked to Willie. ‘All these people come at you like waves and you can just sail across them. The way things are now, if I win I get paid and if I lose I get paid.’ He grinned. ‘Makes no difference, see? You remember that, son,’ he added seriously. ‘Let them do the betting. You just say nothing and take the money.’

More impressive was Burrard. At the end of the first week he told Alan: ‘A mark to you if you win.’ At the end of the second: ‘I’m in deeper now. Two marks.’

‘Is he stupid?’ Willie asked.

‘No, son. He ain’t stupid. Just rich.’

Totton, meanwhile, remained as calm and quiet as usual. This Seagull respected. ‘I don’t like him, son,’ he confessed. ‘But he knows when to keep his mouth shut.’

‘So are you going to win, Dad?’ Willie asked. But to this, infuriatingly, his father would only reply by humming a little sea ditty to himself.

Willie did better, however, when he asked his father if he could go with him for the race, for after a pause, and looking at him with amusement, his father, to Willie’s great surprise agreed.

This was a great prize. He shared it with his friends, who were duly envious. Jonathan’s eyes opened wide and every day asked Willie again: ‘Is it really true you’re sailing? I know’, he would add confidentially, ‘that you’re going to win.’ It was heaven.

But was his father going to win? Willie had boasted to Jonathan that he would, that night out at Bisterne, and he certainly wasn’t going to take it back. But he wished he knew what his father was really up to.

The truth of the matter was that Alan Seagull didn’t know himself. Certainly, he hadn’t the least intention of publicly disclosing his vessel’s speed. If that were needed to win, he would cheerfully lose. But you never knew with the sea. Something might happen to the other boat. The sea itself would decide, and chance, and his own free will. He hadn’t a care in the world. Until one evening, three days before the race.

He knew something was up the moment he saw young Willie, and the sheepish way he was approaching; but even so, he was completely taken aback by the boy’s question.

‘Dad, for the race, can Jonathan come in the boat too?’

Jonathan? Jonathan Totton? When his father was betting on the other boat? The mariner stared in amazement.

‘If his father says yes, that is,’ Willie added.

Which he certainly won’t, thought Alan.

‘I said I thought you might let him. He isn’t heavy,’ Willie explained.

‘Let him go in the other boat, then.’

‘He doesn’t want to. He wants to come with me. And anyway …’

‘Anyway what?’

Willie hesitated, then said quietly: ‘Dad, the Southampton boat’s going to lose isn’t it?’

‘So you say, my son.’ Alan started to smile, but then a thought hit him. ‘Willie?’ He looked at his son carefully. ‘You think I’m going to win?’

‘’Course I do, Dad.’

‘Is that why he wants to come with us, then? Because you told him we’d win?’

‘I don’t know, Dad.’ Willie looked awkward. ‘Maybe.’

‘Did you tell him about our business?’

‘No, Dad. I mean, not really.’ There was a pause. ‘I may have said something.’ He looked down, then raised his eyes hopefully to his father again. ‘He won’t tell, Dad. I swear.’

Alan Seagull said nothing. He was thinking.

There were quite a few people in Lymington who knew Alan Seagull’s business. His crew for a start. One or two merchants also – for the obvious reason that they gave him the illicit wool to carry. But Totton wasn’t one of them and never would be. And the rule in the business was very simple: you didn’t talk to people like Totton. For sooner or later, if people like him knew, things would get out; boats would be stopped, men fined, business disrupted and, strangely intangible but perhaps most important of all, freedom would be limited.

Did Totton know? Perhaps not yet. What he really needed, Seagull thought, was some time alone with Jonathan. He’d be able to tell, he guessed, if the boy had told his father. If he had, there was nothing to be done. If not … he mused. If the boy were out at sea, some men in his situation would quietly tip him overboard. He shrugged to himself. There was no chance of Totton allowing him to come anyway. ‘Don’t say any more about our business. Just keep your mouth shut,’ he ordered his son, and waved him away. He needed to think some more.

Jonathan found his father sitting in an upright chair in the hall, under the gallery. Totton was asleep.

The gallery passage that ran from the front to the back of the bigger Lymington houses was quite an impressive feature, but it was not handsome. Although two storeys high, the central hall was quite narrow, so that the gallery seemed to overlook a rather cramped covered area. Since the death of his wife, instead of going at the end of his workday to the pleasant parlour at the back of the house, which looked over the garden, and where his wife had liked to sit, Totton had taken to sitting in a chair in the rather awkward space of the hall. There he would remain until it was time to eat dinner, which he punctiliously did with his son. Sometimes he just sat staring quietly ahead; sometimes he dozed a little. He was dozing when Jonathan approached him.