The Forest (54 page)

‘Helena insists that Swedish castles are all triangular and that the carving depicts her Viking ancestors,’ he said with a wink.

Swedish castle or gunnery fort, whatever you thought it was, the great triangular mansion would long remain one of the most eccentric country houses in England.

And if perhaps thereafter, Albion felt an occasional pang of jealousy at his aristocratic friends’ good fortune, he had to confess that, thanks to Gorges and Helena, his loyalty was never questioned again. He was even able, with a good conscience, to expropriate a considerable quantity of Her Majesty’s timber in the course of his subsequent career.

Jane married Puckle.

Nick Pride was completely astonished and so was everyone else. ‘If I hadn’t been stuck up at Malwood at the beacon, it would never have happened,’ he said.

‘If she was going to do a thing like that,’ said his mother, ‘you’re better off without her.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Nick. ‘It’s like she was under a spell, I reckon.’ Which didn’t make much sense.

Jane’s parents weren’t too pleased about it either. In fact, when they got married Jane’s mother didn’t want to give her the little wooden cross she’d always promised her. But in the end, not wanting to quarrel with her, she did. And Jane wore it like a talisman.

The great Armada storm did not only change the lives of men; here and there it made small alterations in the greater life of the Forest too.

It was deep on a night, when the Spanish galleons were tossing helplessly in the northern seas, that the wind chose to race with a particular urgency through the glade by the miraculous Rufus tree. The branches of the great tree bent and shook. The myriad life forms in its crevices clung or crouched deeper into their shelters. Tiny organisms, minute particularities, flew off into the moving darkness of the wind, carried into chaos. All around, tall trees swayed, bent, oak leaves and acorns rattling in the furious tearing and buffeting of the wind, which howled and gusted and whooshed in the blackness.

But the roots of the miraculous tree were as wide as its branches and even though, on this wild Armada night, the upper world might have succumbed to madness, the lower world of the tree was silent, still, unmoved by the frantic waving of its branches.

Nearby, however, just inside the neighbouring wood, a different oak, only two centuries old, had grown up in close company with other oaks and beech trees, tall and straight. Its canopy was therefore very much smaller; its roots smaller in like measure.

And so it was, in the great turning and wrenching of the howling wind, that suddenly, dragged clean out of the ground by nature’s blind forces, this tall oak crashed down through its neighbours and smashed, a falling giant, to the Forest floor.

It is an awesome thing when an oak tree is torn down, but also beneficial. For the broken sections of the tree’s canopy, its great network of branches, lie like so many protective cages upon the ground. Within these cages for a year or two a new shoot may grow because the deer and other creatures that prey upon saplings cannot reach it.

Two cages of this kind fell upon that stormy night. And in the coming acorn fall, after so many years in which its children all had been wasted, two acorns from the miraculous tree would lie in the leaf mould within these oaken cages and take root, and grow.

ALICE

1635

What’s a life? Not a continuum, certainly. A collection of memories, perhaps; only a few.

She could just recollect old Clement Albion. She had been only four when he died, but she still remembered her grandfather. Not a face, exactly, but a quiet, benign presence in a Tudor house with big timber-framed gables. That must have been the old Albion House, she realized; not her Albion House.

Her Albion House began on a summer day.

It was very warm. It must have been late morning; perhaps it was a Saturday. She did not know. But they had walked down, just the two of them, from the old church at Boldre – just she and her father. She was eight at the time. They walked along the lane on the east side of the river and turned down the track into the wood. There were a number of young beech trees, saplings mostly, mixed with the oak and ash. The sun was slanting through the light-green lattice of the canopy; the saplings spread their leaves like trails of vapour through the underwood; birds were singing. She was so pleased that she had started to skip; her father was holding her hand.

They saw the house when they came round the bend in the track. The red-brick walls were nearly up. One of the two gables had already been refaced; the old oak roof timbers exposed their bare framework to the blue sky. The dusty site looked peaceful in the warm sun. A few men were quietly working on the upper storey; the clink of bricks being tapped into place was the only sound that disturbed the quiet.

They had stopped and stood there together, looking at the scene for a little while; then her father had said: ‘I’m building this house for you, Alice. This will be your very own and no one shall take it away from you.’ Then he had looked down and smiled, and squeezed her hand.

She had looked up and thought that her father must love her very much if he was building a whole house for her. And she experienced a moment – perhaps there are just one or two in a lifetime – of perfect happiness.

It wasn’t a big house. It was only a little larger than the old Tudor house of her grandfather and his father before him. Built in red brick, in a simple Jacobean style, it certainly qualified as a small manor house; yet hidden away, in a modest clearing in the middle of the woods, it had almost the air of an isolated grange or hunting lodge. To Alice it was magical. It was her house; because her father loved her.

Of course, he had hoped to have a son. She understood that now; but ten years had passed since that summer’s day.

Of Clement Albion’s two sons, William and Francis, it was her father William, the elder, who had done better. In fact, he had done brilliantly. As a young man, in the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, he had gone up to London to study law. William had worked hard. It was a litigious age; a clever lawyer could do well. And when, fifteen years after the great Armada, the old queen had died and been succeeded by her cousin, King James of Scotland, the opportunities for amassing money had grown even greater.

For if James Stuart had one idea when, as a middle-aged man, he became King James of England, it was to have a good time. He’d never had any fun before. Son of the ill-fated Mary Queen of Scots – whom he’d scarcely even known – the dour Scots Presbyterians who had thrown out his mother brought him up to rule according to their way of thinking and kept him on a tight rein. So when at last he got the throne of England as well, he was anxious to make up for lost time.

The liberated Scottish king’s ideas of fun turned out to be curious. A taste for pedantic scholarship – he was really quite learned and could be witty – led him to develop a full-blown theory that kings had a God-given right to do whatever they liked. Whether he truly came to believe this piece of startling nonsense or whether he was just amusing himself, no one has ever been sure. Another taste of this father of several children, which now became increasingly obvious, was his embarrassing, sentimental and even tearful passion for pretty young men. By his last years, court functions were apt to degenerate into a shambles of kissing and fondling these ‘sweet boys’. His third taste, which God knows he’d never been able to enjoy in the north, was a love of extravagance. Not the great displays and festivities in which (for someone else was always paying) Queen Bess had taken such delight: King James’s court favoured simple, gross excess. The feasts were often just a competition to see how much food could be conspicuously wasted. But even this was nothing compared with the licence given to the king’s friends to make free of the public purse. Old nobility like the Howards, or new like the family of the pretty boy Villiers, it was all the same: sales of offices and contracts, bribery, outright embezzlement. Everyone was at it.

Where rogues are stealing and fools spending, a wise man can surely make a fortune. William Albion had done so. By the time James’s small, shy son Charles had come to the throne in 1625, Albion had returned to the Forest a rich man. He had also married well – a modest heiress a dozen years his junior. His seat was a handsome estate in the Avon valley called Moyles Court – which contained, as it happened, the lands of his distant ancestor, Cola the Huntsman. Then he had Albion House, in the centre of the Forest, from his father; there were further holdings on Pennington Marshes; he also owned most of the village of Oakley.

Albion House he had rebuilt for Alice. The rest, he had hoped, would go to his son. But although his young wife had given him several more children, all had died in infancy. Time had passed. Then it was too late. Last year his wife had died, but William Albion had no wish to start another family at the age of sixty.

Alice was eighteen now. She was to inherit it all.

William had paused before making this decision. After all, there was his younger brother to consider.

Technically, by title, all the land he had was William’s to dispose as he wished. Old Clement, he felt sure, would have wanted him to give something to Francis; and if he hadn’t always promised Albion House to Alice he might have let Francis have that. But there was a further consideration.

What had Francis ever done to deserve it? For years, despite his father’s help and encouragement, he had drifted, never really worked. He was in London still. He had become a merchant, but not a very successful one. William was fond of Francis, but he could not quite restrain the impatience of the successful man for an unsuccessful brother. He gave, without even knowing it, a tiny shrug when Francis’s name was mentioned. So it seldom was. With the logic typical of the man who had made money, he reasoned that it was a waste of time to give it to someone who had not. Or, to put it more kindly, should his desire to keep the family name in the Forest cause him to dispossess the daughter he loved? No. Francis must fend for himself. Alice was the sole heiress.

It had come as rather a surprise to her that a few months before, when discussing in a general way the men she might marry, her father had mentioned one name with particular favour: John Lisle.

They had met him at a gathering of a number of local gentry families in the Buttons’ fine house near Lymington. He was a few years older than she and recently a widower. He had children. He had struck her as a sensible, intelligent man, although perhaps a little too earnest. Her father had talked to him more than she had.

‘But Father,’ she had reminded him, ‘his family …’

‘An ancient family.’ The Lisles were indeed a family of some antiquity who had for a long time possessed lands on the Isle of Wight.

‘Yes, but his father …’ The whole county knew about John Lisle’s father. Inheriting a good estate, he had squandered both it and his reputation. His wife had left him; he had taken to drink; in the end, he had even been arrested for debt. ‘Isn’t there bad blood …?’

Bad blood: that expression so beloved of the landed classes. A notorious brigand or two gave a certain patina to the ancestral furniture. But you had to be careful. Bad blood meant danger, uncertainty, unsoundness, blighted harvests, diseased trees. The gentry, who were still partly farmers, had their feet on the ground. Breeding people, after all, was no different from breeding livestock. Bad blood will out. It had to be avoided.

But to her surprise, her father only smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘now let me advise you on that.’ And giving her that look of his that announced, ‘I speak with a lifetime of experience as a lawyer,’ he proceeded: ‘When a man has a father who has lost his substance there are two things he can do. He can accept a lowly condition, or he can fight back and make his fortune.’

‘Isn’t that what younger sons are meant to do?’

‘Yes.’ A cloud crossed his face as he reflected that this was just what his own younger brother had failed to do. ‘But when a father has dishonoured his family as well then the case is even sharper. The son of such a man faces not only poverty but shame, ridicule. Every step he takes down the street is dogged by shadows. Some men hide. They seek a life of obscurity. But the bravest souls outface the world. They hold their heads high; their ambition is not like a fire of hope, but a sword of steel. They seek fame twice: once for themselves and once to erase the shame of their fathers. That memory is always with them, like a thorn, driving them on.’ He paused and smiled. ‘John Lisle, I think, is such a one. He is a good man, an honest man. I’m sure he is kind. But he has that in him.’ He looked at her with affection. ‘When a father has an heiress as a daughter he looks, if he is wise, for a husband who will know how to use that fortune: a man of ambition.’

‘Not another heir, Father? The ambitious man, surely, might care only for her money.’

‘You must trust my judgement.’ He sighed. ‘The trouble is that most of the heirs of fine estates are either soft, or lazy, or both.’ And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he laughed.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she asked.

‘I was just thinking, Alicia.’ He sometimes called her that. ‘With your strong character I wouldn’t inflict you on some unsuspecting heir to a great estate. You’d destroy the poor boy entirely.’

‘I?’ She looked at him in genuine astonishment. ‘I have no thought of being a strong character, Father,’ she replied, which only caused him to smile at her the more fondly.

‘I know, my child. I know.’ He tapped his finger lightly on her arm. ‘Consider John Lisle, though. I only ask that. You will find him worthy of respect.’

When, two days later, Stephen Pride stopped at the cottage of Gabriel Furzey on the way to the green, he reckoned he was doing him a favour. ‘Shouldn’t you be going?’ he enquired.

‘No,’ said Gabriel, which, thought Pride, was typical.

If, in the three hundred years since they had quarrelled about a pony, the Prides and the Furzeys had remained in Oakley, it was for the very good reason that there were few more pleasant places to live. If they had had other quarrels about Forest matters down the generations – as they surely must have done – these were buried and forgotten. The Prides, by and large, still thought the Furzeys a little slow and the Furzeys still considered the Prides a bit pleased with themselves; although whether, after centuries of intermarriage, these perceptions had any validity it would be hard to say. One thing, however, which Stephen Pride and anyone else could have agreed upon was that Gabriel Furzey was an obstinate man.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Pride and went on his way.

The reason for his visit to the green was that young Alice Albion was there.

If there was one thing that had changed scarcely at all in the New Forest since the days of the Conqueror it was the common rights of the forest folk. Given their smallholdings and the poverty of much of the soil, this continuity was natural: the exercise of common rights was still the only way in which the local economy could work.

There were chiefly four, by name. The right of Pasture – of turning out animals to graze in the king’s forest; of Turbary – an allowance of turves, cut for fuel; of Mast – the turning out of pigs in September to eat the green acorns; and of Estovers – the taking of underwood for fuel. These were the four; although there were also some customary rights to marl, for enriching your land, and of cutting bracken as bedding for livestock.

The system by which these ancient rights were allocated, like ancient common law, was often complex and they might attach to an individual cottage; but it had been the custom to consider them as belonging to each landowner, who would claim them on behalf of himself and his tenants. The estate under which both Stephen Pride and Gabriel Furzey came belonged to the Albions. And since it would all, one day, belong to her, it was Alice, that morning, whom her father had sent, together with his steward, to collect some important information.

As he came up, Pride saw that she was sitting in the shade at the edge of the green. They had provided a table and a bench for her. The steward was standing at her side. On the table a large sheet of parchment paper was spread. She sat very upright. She wore a green riding dress and a wide-brimmed hat with a feather in it. In colouring she took after her mother. Her fair hair had a reddish tint, her eyes were more grey than blue. He smiled, thinking she looked rather fetching. He had seen this Albion girl around the place ever since she was a child. He was only seven years her senior. When she was twelve, he remembered, she hadn’t been too proud to race him on her pony. She had spirit. The Forest people liked that.

‘Stephen Pride.’ She needed no prompting from the steward and gave him a bright look. ‘What shall I write down for you?’

It was the first time, as far as anybody knew, that a complete list of all the common rights had ever been written down. They had always existed. They were in people’s memories. Any dispute in the Swainmote, as the old Venderers’ Court was often called, could always be solved by reference to the local jury, advised by the representatives of the vills. So why would anyone want to write down all this mass of local information?

As Stephen Pride enumerated the commoning rights to which his smallholding was entitled, he knew the reason very well. ‘It is’, as he had remarked to his wife the day before, ‘for our sovereign lord, the cursed king.’ And as he looked young Alice Albion in the eye now, he knew equally well, although neither of them said it, that her opinion was just the same.