The Forest (49 page)

‘That is possible, I suppose.’ Albion tried to keep calm.

‘People like your mother.’

He could not help it. He felt himself go white. ‘My mother?’

‘Has she received any letters, any messengers, any strange visitors? You surely must know.’

‘I …’ He thought furiously. Did Gorges know she had received a letter? If so, hadn’t he better tell him? Let the authorities search his mother, since he didn’t dare, and uncover her secret. But in that case what would they find? God knew what such a letter might contain to incriminate him. He dare not risk it. ‘I do not know of any such letter,’ he said hesitantly. ‘But I will question her.’ And then, in a flash of inspiration: ‘Do you suspect her, Thomas? God knows what her madness may lead her to.’

‘No, Clement. I ask in a general way only.’

Albion studied his face. He could be lying. Gorges was far too discreet to give himself away. And then a horrible thought occurred to him. What if Gorges, or those above him not only knew of the letter but had already read its contents? In that case Gorges knew more about it than he did. God knew what sort of trap this might be. ‘If my mother received a letter from the King of Spain himself, Thomas,’ he said, ‘mad as she is, she very likely would not tell me because she knows very well that I am loyal to my queen. That’s the truth of it.’

‘I know you can be trusted, Clement,’ Gorges said and moved off. But when a man says he knows he can trust you, Albion thought sadly, it usually means that he does not.

Nick Pride had certainly proved himself so far.

‘Who keeps the watch and ward at Malwood?’ Albion would cry as he came to make his inspection – almost daily by mid-July. He had discovered that the young man loved to be hailed in this manner.

‘Nicholas Pride, Sir,’ the youth would answer. ‘And all is in good order, may it please you.’

It certainly was, but for form’s sake Albion would inspect everything, starting with the beacon.

The beacons that would warn England of the coming of the Spanish Armada are often imagined as bonfires. But it was not so at all. Nick Pride’s up at Malwood was typical of its kind.

It had been placed at the highest point on the old earth wall from which, thanks to Albion’s tree thinning, it was visible for many miles. It consisted of a stout pole, about twenty feet high, which had been securely planted several feet into the ground and was also held firm by four supporting stakes, called spurs, angled up like guy ropes to its apex. On top of the pole was fixed a large metal barrel filled with a mixture of pitch, tar and flax, which would burn with a bright flame for hours.

You reached the tar barrel up a ladder – a single beam fitted with cross bars – and you lit it with a flaming torch. In order to have a flame to ignite the torch, Nick and his companions kept a small charcoal brazier alight, day and night, just below.

Nick always shared the watch with one other man, the one not on duty resting in a tiny wooden hut just inside the earth wall. In recent days Nick had been up on Malwood all the time, the other two men taking it turn and turn about. People would drift up from the village from time to time to keep them company; but for some reason the council had ordained that no dogs were permitted at any of the beacons. Perhaps it was feared they would be a distraction.

There was only one eventuality where the beacons would not be useful: if there was fog or extreme bad weather – and given the repeated storms this last was a distinct possibility. In that case, a chain of staging posts had been organized across the country. Light horsemen would race from one to another, carrying the news. The horse they rode was called a hobby, and so each man, with his single message that he must deliver, would ride his hobby horse from post to post.

The beacons on the Isle of Wight were more complex. At each end of the island there were a set of three. If one was fired it indicated either that a signal had been received from down the coast, or that the watchers on the island had seen the invading fleet on the horizon themselves. This served to alert the next county whose watch would light their beacon in turn. If the enemy was approaching the coast, a second was lit. This signalled the beacons of the coastal defences to be ignited and summoned the musters. If three beacons were lit, however, it meant that the coastal defences needed reinforcements from further inland, and then the inland beacons were lit and the trained bands were to go quickly to their meeting points and march down to the coast. Malwood was counted as an inland beacon. ‘However,’ Albion had instructed Nick Pride, ‘as we’re short of men, you are to light your beacon if you see a two-beacon alert on the island and then we’ll march down to Hurst.’

Most days Jane would come and spend an hour or two with him. She would bring him a pie that she had cooked, or cakes, or a jug of some cool drink made from fruit and flowers that she and her mother had prepared. And they would sit together up on Malwood’s grassy walls and gaze over the green forest towards the blue haze of the sea. In the evenings, sometimes, she would remain with him until long after dark, keeping watch together.

So Nick Pride waited for the Spanish Armada in company with the girl he was to marry; when he saw her coming, his heart would dance; when he looked down at her and put his arm round her waist as they viewed the Forest at twilight, he felt a great surge of warmth and thanked the faint evening stars that he had been blessed with her.

Obsession. She did not know the word, but everything belonging to it she had learned to understand. Disquiet, melancholy, distraction – all the long litany – Jane was sixteen and in three weeks she had experienced it all.

She had been back to see him several times already. The first time she had walked by, seen the children and played with the little boy until he came. The next time she had come, knowing Puckle would be there. They had talked; she had sat and watched as he played with Tom, or quietly carved a piece of wood. She realized that she already knew every sinew in his hands.

She had felt his hand upon her arm and upon her shoulder; she longed, now, to feel it around her waist. She could not help it. Nor was this all. Strong though he was, when she watched his daughter preparing the food, or saw him rather helplessly set out to wash the children’s dirty clothes, he suddenly seemed vulnerable. He needs me, she thought.

Twice she had gone to where she knew he would be working in the woods and watched him from a distance, although he did not know it. Once, unexpectedly, she had seen him go by in his cart, along the track up from Lyndhurst. She had felt her heart jump, but stood quite still, just staring after him as he passed, unaware of her presence.

Obsession. She had to conceal it. Her family knew nothing of her walks to Burley since she had always made some excuse for her absence. Nick Pride, of course, had no idea of it. But what did it mean? Why was she suffering? Why was it, night and day, that she longed to be only there, in the woodman’s presence?

Each time she went to Burley she passed the Rufus tree and each time she came back, she would pause there, trying to make sense of her thoughts and prepare herself, before returning to her family and to Nick.

How aware one became of the forest sounds, resting under the great oak’s shade in the late afternoon. The woods were full of birds – chiff-chaffs and tits, redstarts and nuthatches – but their mating and nesting was all done now, their young were mostly grown and flying. Their song was muted and occasional, therefore, and only the cooing of the pigeons came regularly through the woods. It was the ceaseless sound of the wood crickets, the drone of myriad insects, the humming of the bees as they visited the honeysuckle scenting the forest air – this was the sleepy summer music Jane listened to, all around.

But the shady space in which she rested was not still. Far from it. For summer was the time when the vast, hidden population that the tree’s huge system had housed came out to make an appearance. The space under the tree was teeming with life.

It would have been impossible to say how many species there were – perhaps ten thousand; probably more. There were the ticks and mites, so small you could hardly see them, which had made their way from the ground up the swaying bracken so that they could be brushed off on to the bodies of passing warm-blooded animals, like humans, sucking the blood and causing the skin to itch. More irritating still were the horseflies, who had spent the winter as maggots by the oak tree’s roots and now attacked, clumsily but constantly. There were spiders and bugs by the hundred, crawling over the warm bark, caterpillars – blue, yellow, green, orange – making their fantastic, furry progress to feed upon the leaves; there were weevils and ladybirds and moths. Butterflies were rarer in the Forest, but the handsome red admiral could be seen and, high in the canopy, the gorgeous purple emperor would feed on the sugar-rich trails left by the tiny aphids as those minute insects made their way across the leaves.

Jane would remain for an hour under the tree. She would look at the bright caterpillars, or gaze out at the green shadows of the other oaks in the glade. Sometimes her thoughts would turn to the coming Armada and to young Nick up by his beacon; sometimes she would think of Puckle. Before she left, she would appear to be calm. But she was not.

Above her, the huge system of the great tree was in a high state of activity. It knew nothing of the Armada, or of Jane. The myriad leaves of its spreading canopy, upturned to the sun, were daily converting the heavy carbon dioxide in the air to carbon, which was transmitted to its bark, while the oxygen was released back into the air. In this manner, through the great tree, the planet itself was breathing.

And also growing. As the carbon passed into the oak tree’s bark, which in turn would be added, as a yearly ring, to the thick wood beneath, so eventually when the oak and its fellows crashed to the ground and their successors did the same, century after century, a thin carbon layer would be added to Earth which, imperceptibly, would grow down the aeons.

His mother had vanished.

It was a late afternoon in the third week in July when Albion returned to his house to find that she had taken a horse, ridden out and not been seen for hours. For a few moments – he couldn’t help it – he devoutly prayed that she might have fallen, or struck an overhanging bough in the woods, and broken her neck. ‘She said nothing of where she was going?’ he asked his wife.

‘Nothing.’

‘You couldn’t stop her?’ His wife only replied with a look that told him the question was foolish. ‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Of course not.’

Alive or dead, he would have to go out and search for her. There were still long hours of daylight left. But he dreaded what he might find. A rendezvous with the Spanish army itself hardly seemed too unlikely. ‘God save us,’ he muttered.

As the Lady Albion came towards the Rufus tree she was feeling very pleased with herself. Indeed, she thought, she really should have done this before.

She had ridden in quite a large arc. Coming up from Albion’s quiet house by the ford, she had taken the road up to Brockenhurst, inspected the little church there and spoken to several of the villagers. Although few of them had seen her before, word of the strange lady at Albion’s house had gone round Brockenhurst long ago, so when they saw the odd figure in black and red come riding by they guessed who it was. The rumours about her were mixed, however. If the gentry knew all about the Pitts family and Albion’s troubles, the local forest folk were less clear. It was thirty years since she had lived in the Forest herself. Few remembered her and those memories were vague. They knew she was devout and a recusant, but that did not shock them. Word was that she was rich, which was always impressive. She might be liberal with her money, too, if you got on the right side of her. Some said she had gone mad. This could be interesting. They politely doffed their hats or put knuckle to forehead and gathered round in hopeful anticipation.

In fact, she was rather good with them. She was not a Pitts for nothing. She had an easy, proud style that impressed them and she spoke them fair.

She told them she had inspected their church and was sorry to see it had been somewhat damaged by carelessness, not malice, she hoped. At once, several long faces in the group told her she had sympathizers. She had not said more but bade them a courteous good day and proceeded on her way towards Lyndhurst, leaving behind the impression that she was surely not mad, but a fine lady.

At Lyndhurst she had encountered a cottager and had a similar conversation. Then she had swung up, round Minstead and come down through Brook, where she had done the same thing.

Now, as she approached the miraculous tree, she saw a girl, standing alone looking thoughtful, under its branches. The girl had an intelligent face. She drew up in front of her. ‘Good day, my child,’ she said kindly. ‘I see you are standing under a tree which, they tell me, is miraculous.’

Indeed, Jane politely replied, it was so. And she told the strange lady about the tree’s midwinter leafing and the Rufus legend.

‘Perhaps’, the Lady Albion pointed out, ‘this is a sign from God.’ She mentioned the two other trees. ‘Did not Our Lord hang on the cross with two thieves?’

‘And there are three persons also, My Lady,’ the girl suggested, ‘in the Trinity.’

‘Indeed you are right, my child,’ said Albion’s mother approvingly. ‘And is this not a sign to us that we should be faithful to the true Church?’

‘I suppose, My Lady, it may be so. I had not thought of it,’ Jane answered truthfully.

‘Think on it now, then,’ the Lady Albion commanded firmly. And then more gently: ‘Are you faithful, child, to Our Holy Church?’

Jane Furzey knew nothing of Albion’s mother. Brook was ten miles from Albion’s house; the lady had departed from the Forest almost fifteen years before Jane had been born. She had no idea who this impressive person with her air of splendid authority might be; but as she gazed at her now a thought occurred to her.

Jane had never seen the queen. Each summer, Queen Elizabeth would make a royal progress through some part of her kingdom. Several times she had come into other parts of the county, although not into the Forest. Was it possible that Her Majesty was coming down here now to see the shore defences? Would the queen ride about without a retinue? It seemed odd; but perhaps her gentlemen were nearby and would come up in a moment. The lady’s rich clothes, her haughty bearing and kindly words certainly matched every description she had ever heard of the queen. If it isn’t her, she thought, it’s somebody very important. ‘Oh, yes, My Lady,’ she said and attempted a rustic curtsy. She wasn’t sure what the queenly figure had meant, but she was certainly going to agree.