The Forest (61 page)

‘I should think we’ll be taking a lot of deer today,’ he remarked to one of the gentlemen keepers, who gave him an old-fashioned look.

‘Don’t count on it, Stephen,’ he murmured. ‘I know the king.’

And to Pride’s astonishment they had not gone a quarter-mile before he saw the Master Keeper’s hand shoot up and the king’s voice rang out. ‘Nellie wants to see the Rufus tree.’

‘The Rufus tree!’ his courtiers cried out.

So off they all went, instead, to the Rufus tree.

‘It will be like this’ – the gentleman smiled at Pride – ‘the whole day.’

And indeed, they had only gone another quarter-mile when suddenly there was a further change of plan. Before seeing the Rufus tree the king wished to inspect his new plantation. This meant a couple of miles’ extra riding and the party obediently swung round to go off there instead.

Pride looked at his companions. They were not very pleased.

‘Doesn’t look as if we’re going to get much out of this,’ Puckle remarked with reproach to Jim Pride. Money and the odd haunch of venison tended to come when numbers of deer were killed. The gentlemen keepers were usually pretty good at making sure the riders like Puckle were looked after. But if they were just going to wander about like this all day, the prospects weren’t so promising.

‘It isn’t Jim’s fault,’ Pride defended his son.

‘It’s early yet,’ said Jim hopefully.

Pride glanced across at Purkiss. He felt bad about him because he had asked the Brockenhurst man himself.

Purkiss was a tall man with a long face and a quiet, intelligent manner. The Purkisses were an ancient Forest family, respected for their good sense. ‘They go quietly,’ Pride would say, ‘but they’re always thinking. No one ever makes a fool of a Purkiss.’ If he felt guilty about wasting Purkiss’s time, however, Purkiss himself looked content enough. He seemed to be meditating to himself.

The king’s plantation, it had to be said, was a fine affair. So much timber had been lost during the lax administration and confusion of the last seven decades that everyone agreed something needed to be done. As so often with Charles II, behind his sensual indulgence, the king’s keen intelligence was at work. Just as, after the city of London had suffered its great fire, he had studied every detail and firmly supported the huge rebuilding programme of Sir Christopher Wren, so now the royal patron of the arts and sciences had devised a practical and far-seeing project in his royal forest. On his personal orders three large areas – three hundred acres in all – were to be fenced off like coppices and sown with acorns and beech mast. Thousands of fine timber trees would result for eventual harvesting. ‘Future generations, at least, will bless me,’ he had reasonably remarked.

The party arrived at the big inclosure. The seedlings stretched away in lines like an army. The party dutifully looked and expressed their admiration. But the king, Pride noticed, although genial, was also surveying the scene with a sharp eye and, taking two companions, he cantered away round the perimeter to inspect the fence.

Having returned satisfied, he gave the order: ‘Now for that Rufus tree.’

So back they went again. The four Forest men bringing up the rear of the cheerful cavalcade said little now. Jim was looking glum, Puckle bored. But Purkiss still seemed quite happy and, when Stephen Pride remarked that he was sorry to have brought him on a fool’s errand, the Brockenhurst man just shook his head and smiled. ‘It’s not every day I get the chance to ride with the king, Stephen,’ he said calmly. ‘Besides, a man may learn much and profit from such an occasion.’

‘I can’t see much profit myself,’ Pride answered, ‘but I’m glad if you can.’

If the Rufus tree had been old at the time of the Armada, eighty years later its long life was clearly nearing its end. The ancient oak was decrepit. Most of its branches had died back. A great rent in the side showed where a large limb had broken off. Ivy grew on the trunk. Only a little crown of leaves grew from its topmost branch. As a mark of respect it had been enclosed behind a stake fence.

The two acorns which had tumbled down and taken root after the Armada storms stood not far off, noble oak trees now. One was shorter and broader because it had been pollarded; the other, untouched, grew high.

They all surveyed the hoary old hulk with reverence. Several of the party dismounted.

‘This is where Tyrrell shot my ancestor William Rufus, Nellie,’ the king announced. He glanced at Sir Robert Howard. ‘That’s almost six hundred years ago. Can this tree really be so old?’

‘Undoubtedly, Sir,’ said the Master Keeper, who hadn’t the faintest idea.

‘What exactly is the story?’ young Monmouth asked.

‘Yes.’ King Charles looked sternly at Howard. ‘Let’s have it exactly, Master Keeper.’

And the aristocrat, a little red, had just started to bluster some vague and garbled version of the tale he’d obviously forgotten, when to everyone’s surprise there was a movement from the back, and a tall figure stepped forward and made a low bow. It was Purkiss.

Stephen Pride watched in astonishment as his friend calmly made his way to the front. Now Purkiss, in a respectful voice and with a serious countenance enquired: ‘May I, Your Majesty, recount the true story of this tree?’

‘You certainly may, fellow,’ King Charles said affably, while Nellie pulled a face at Howard.

And so Purkiss began. First he explained about the oak tree’s magical Christmas greening and, when Charles looked doubtful, the gentlemen keepers assured him this was perfectly correct. The king leaned forward in his saddle after that, paying close attention to Purkiss’s every word.

Purkiss was good. Pride listened with admiration. With the quiet reverence of a verger conducting the faithful round a cathedral, he gave the story of Rufus’s death with every detail recorded or invented in the chronicles. He described the evil visions of the Norman king seen the night before; what he had said to Walter Tyrrell in the morning; the monk’s warning. Everything. Then, solemnly, he pointed to the tree. ‘When Tyrrell loosed the fatal arrow, Sire, it grazed the tree and then struck the king. It left a mark, they say, which once could be seen up there.’ He pointed to a place some way up the trunk. ‘It was only a young tree then, Your Majesty, so the mark was carried higher with the years.’

He explained how Tyrrell fled across the Forest to the River Avon at Tyrrell’s Ford and how the king’s body was carried on a forester’s cart to Winchester. He concluded with a low bow.

‘Well done, good fellow!’ cried the monarch. ‘Wasn’t that well done?’ he asked the courtiers, who agreed that it was excellent. ‘That’s worth a golden guinea,’ he said, producing a gold coin and handing it down to the Brockenhurst man. ‘How do you come to know all this so well, good friend?’ he then enquired.

‘Because, Your Majesty’ – Purkiss’s face was as solemn as a judge’s – ‘the forester who carried away the king’s body on his cart was my own ancestor. His name was Purkiss.’

There was a peal of laughter from Nellie.

King Charles bit his lip. ‘The devil he was,’ he said.

Pride stared at his friend with stupefaction. The cunning rascal, he thought. The cleverness with which the thing was done; the way Purkiss had carefully stopped and let the king draw this last, astounding piece of information from him. And the man was still standing there, without even the hint of a smirk on his face.

As for King Charles II of England who, whatever his vices or his virtues, was certainly one of the most accomplished liars who ever sat upon a throne, he gazed down at Purkiss with professional admiration. ‘Here’s another guinea, Purkiss,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if your ancestor’s name appears one day in history books.’

Which it did.

It was not often that Alice Lisle couldn’t make up her mind. Some people would have been surprised to know that such a thing ever occurred. But this morning, as she looked coldly at her family and at Mr Hancock the lawyer, she hesitated; and her hesitation was not unreasonable. ‘I wish that somebody would tell me’, she remarked in her usual businesslike manner, ‘how I am to ask a favour of a man when my husband killed his father.’

For they wanted her to ride across the Forest and see the king.

There were many who thought that Alice Lisle was hard. She didn’t really care. If I’m not strong, she had long ago concluded, who will be? If she was attacked, who would defend her? She had looked about. She didn’t see anybody.

It wasn’t as if she had a husband any more. Sometimes she would have liked one: somebody to hold her, comfort her and love her; especially during that period, just after John Lisle’s death, when she was passing sadly from her childbearing years towards the age of fifty. But there had been no one, so she had faced it all alone.

God knows there had been plenty to do. And she had managed fairly well. Her triumph had been the marriage of her stepson. With the help of family friends she had found him a handsome girl who was heiress to a rich estate near Southampton. Her late husband would have been proud of her, and grateful, for that. As far as her own daughters were concerned they had so far married godly men, but none of wealth; and this, Alice frankly admitted, was probably her own fault.

The religious meetings she had begun at Albion House had soon grown into something more. Word spread quickly among the Puritan community. Since the new restrictions upon them, men who had been living as well-beneficed ministers had to toe the line of the Anglican Church; those who refused lost their livings. So there was no shortage of respectable men who were only too glad of the hospitality of a country house from which to preach. Soon she found she was letting them stay at Moyles Court as well and people were coming to hear preachings from Ringwood, Fordingbridge and other villages up the Avon river almost as far as Sarum. Some of the preachers, inevitably, were handsome unmarried men.

Margaret, as she had foreseen, had married Whitaker. Tryphena had wed a worthy Puritan gentleman named Lloyd. But Bridget, Alice considered, had found the most distinguished man of them all, a scholarly minister named Leonard Hoar, who had been in America and studied at the new university of Harvard before returning to England as a notable preacher. There had been talk of his returning with Bridget to Puritan Massachusetts when a good position came up, perhaps at Harvard. Sometimes Alice thought there was too much nervousness in his disposition, but his brilliance was undoubted. She was sorry that she seldom saw them.

For the moment, then, Alice could consider her daughters settled, except for little Betty. And as Betty was still only nine, there was time enough before she needed to worry about her.

Other matters, however, were not so settled. Money was always a problem. None of her Puritan sons-in-law was rich and with the new regime there wasn’t a chance of preferment. ‘And because I’m a woman,’ she told her family frankly, ‘men always think they can cheat me.’

There was the Christchurch merchant who had owed money to John Lisle, although he denied it; there were the Lisle relations on the Isle of Wight, withholding part of her stepson’s inheritance – they were still trying to wriggle out of that. When the Christchurch merchant told her she was a peevish, troublesome woman she had coldly demanded: ‘And if I weren’t, would you pay me what you owe? Would you feed and clothe my children? I think not. First you try to rob them,’ she told him scornfully, ‘then you call me names if I complain.’ She had learned to be tough.

‘No one is going to love me,’ she had remarked to Hancock the lawyer, ‘but perhaps they will respect me.’

She looked at the three people before her now. Whitaker: handsome, honest, a fine man, but not a man of business. Tryphena: her husband was no fool, but he was away in London. Narrow-faced Tryphena herself was a good woman and a loyal daughter, but even now, in her thirties, she was as literal as a child; the idea of being subtle, or even tactful, had simply never crossed her mind. John Hancock the lawyer, however, had good judgement. With his neatly curled grey hair and his stately manners, he should really have gone to practise in London, but he preferred to live down near Sarum. Like all good advocates he understood that the law is a negotiation and that indirect means are as good as direct. It was to John Hancock that she would listen.

‘You really think I should go and see the king?’

‘Yes, I do. For the simple reason that you have nothing to lose.’

Alice sighed. The problem involved no less a personage than the king’s brother James, Duke of York. In this case it was Alice who was defending herself against the charge of withholding money. For after being given part of John Lisle’s forfeited estate, the duke had somehow become convinced that Alice was secreting some of Lisle’s money, to which he was entitled. He had even started a lawsuit against her, which had already dragged on for some years.

‘I think that the Duke of York, who is an honest but obstinate man, really believes you are secreting this money and that if he were convinced you were suffering hardship, he would drop the case,’ Hancock explained. ‘He is of the opinion that you are cheating him because you are John Lisle’s widow. The king is a much easier man than his brother. If you can convince him, he would persuade James. At least you should try. You owe it to little Betty.’

‘Ah. You hit me there, John Hancock.’

‘I know. I am ruthless.’ He smiled. Betty, playing outside: the threat of the duke’s lawsuit was a cloud over her future fortune.

‘I know why you are unwilling to go,’ Whitaker remarked amiably. ‘It’s the king’s reputation with women. You fear he’ll make an attempt upon your virtue.’

‘Yes, Robert,’ Alice said drily. ‘Of course.’

‘I hardly think’ – Tryphena had been listening carefully and now she frowned – ‘that the king would make any attempt upon Mother. His interest is only in women who are young and beautiful.’

So it was agreed that Alice should go and that she should take little Betty with her. ‘Perhaps’, Alice said wryly, ‘the sight of the child may soften the king’s heart, even if the sight of me is unlikely to excite him.’

While Tryphena prepared the girl for her outing, Alice did, all the same, take some trouble over her own appearance so that, as she surveyed herself in the glass, she could murmur a little wistfully: ‘John Lisle didn’t marry such an ill-looking woman, at least.’