The Forest (73 page)

It was very quiet. Sometimes she would read to the old people, but tonight they had preferred to sit still in their chairs, enjoying the silence of the house, which was broken only by the soft tick of the long-case clock in the hall and, more occasionally, by the tiny rustle of a falling cinder in the fire. At last, her father spoke: ‘I can’t see why she is going all the way to Oxford.’

This was greeted with a silence during which the clock quietly sounded another forty ticks.

‘Of course she should.’ Her aunt Adelaide.

Fanny knew better than to interrupt. Not yet, anyway. Only twenty ticks now intervened.

‘How long shall you be gone, Fanny?’ A hint of reproach, of sadness, bravely borne.

‘Only six days, Father, including the journey.’

‘Quite right,’ said Adelaide firmly. ‘We shall miss you, but you are right to go away to see your cousin.’

‘She’s going to see Oxford. It seems a long way.’ They had come full circle. A greying cinder fell.

Francis Albion was eighty-eight years old. People said he had stayed alive so long to see his daughter grown up and it was probably true. Then people said that he wanted to see her safely married. But since any mention of that subject seemed to fill him with dismay, this clearly could not be the case. And there were even those who wondered if, having grown so used to being alive for such a prodigiously long time, Mr Albion might not be doing it for himself.

The fact was that Francis Albion had never expected to have a child at all. The last of Peter and Betty Albion’s children, who had expected his elder brother to continue the family line, he had been a wanderer much of his life. A lawyer in London, an agent in France, a merchant for a while in America, he had always made enough to live as a gentleman, but not enough to marry. By the age of forty, when the death of his brother left him heir to the Albion estate, he was a confirmed bachelor with no desire to settle. His sister Adelaide had kept Albion House going alone for another twenty years before he had finally returned, as he put it, to take up his family obligations in the Forest.

These were not onerous and he made sure they were profitable to him. They soon included the position of gentleman keeper of one of the walks, as the minor divisions of the Forest were now called. His discharge of this responsibility was typical. Even by the genial standards of the eighteenth century the administration of the New Forest had become notoriously lax. When the crown, in one of its occasional attempts to sort the old place out, had held a royal commission some years before, the commissioners, having pointed out that the woodward of the Forest had kept no accounts for eighteen years, also noted rather sourly that when they inspected the coppice in Mr Albion’s walk, where the king’s timber was supposed to be grown, they had found it used as a huge rabbit warren, with not a single tree to be found in the whole inclosure.

Having assured the commissioners that something would be done, Francis Albion’s only comment to his sister was: ‘I had a thousand rabbits out of there last year and I’ll have another thousand next.’

What then, at the age of sixty-five, had induced Mr Albion to marry Miss Totton of Lymington, thirty years his junior?

Some said it was love. Others that, after his sister Adelaide had suffered a severe cold, it had occurred to Albion that she might not always be there to look after him. Whatever the reason, Mr Albion proposed and Miss Totton accepted, and came to live at Albion House.

It was strange, really, that Miss Totton had not married long before. She was pleasant-looking, respectable; she wasn’t poor. Perhaps she had been crossed in love when young. Whatever the reason, at the age of thirty-five, she had obviously decided that marriage into the Albions, even as a nurse, was preferable to her present situation. Her half-brother, as head of the Totton family, was pleased with the Albion connection, and Adelaide seemed genuinely glad to see her brother married. She kept to her own wing of the house and the two women had got on well.

The marriage had been rather successful. Miss Totton had not expected much, but marriage seemed to have given Francis Albion a new lease of life. Even so, it came as quite a shock to him when, in his sixty-eighth year, his wife informed him that she was pregnant.

‘Such things can happen, Francis,’ she told him with a smile. They called the baby Frances, after her father; and, as was the fashion of the time, she was always known as Fanny.

There were no more children. Fanny was therefore the heiress. Old Mr Albion was happy because he had a daughter, which caused some pleasant admiration at his age. Fanny’s mother was happy: not only had she a child to love, but to be the mother of the next owner of Albion House was a much finer thing than to be the married nurse to an elderly gentleman. Adelaide was happy because she, too, had a child to love. Mr Totton of Lymington was delighted, because now his children, who were the same age, had a close cousin who was heiress to one of the local estates. Why, even Fanny herself was happy, being rich and loved. And so she should have been. For all she had to do, in such happy circumstances, was to live up to everyone else’s desires.

Fanny had been ten when her mother died. The family had been shocked, not only on account of their grief, but with concern for the future of the child.

‘What shall we do now?’ Francis Albion had cried to his sister.

‘Live a long time,’ she had sternly replied.

They had both done so. Fanny had not been orphaned; if Francis and Adelaide had been more like grandparents, Fanny had nonetheless had a happy home. If her father, as he grew into old age, was somewhat timid and plaintive, her own youthful spirits and the frequent company of her Totton cousins easily overcame this influence. And if her Aunt Adelaide tended to repeat herself, Fanny could, all the same, enjoy the intelligence that was still there, as sharp as ever.

And then there was Mrs Pride.

Mrs Pride. Were all housekeepers known as Mrs, regardless of whether they had been married? Fanny had never met a housekeeper who wasn’t. It was a term of respect, a recognition that, within their own domain, they were mistress of the house. And there was absolutely no question about who ran Albion House. Mrs Pride did.

She was a very handsome woman: tall, her grey hair swept elegantly back, her walk stately; any man would guess at once that she must have a magnificent body. The only reason she had not married, in all likelihood, was that she preferred running a manor house to the much harder life she would have had as the wife of a farmer or forest smallholder, or even a Lymington shopkeeper.

She was always deferential. If the sheets needed renewing she would get permission from Adelaide to attend to it. When it was time for the spring clean she would enquire what date would be convenient. If a chimney looked about to fall down, even, she would politely ask Francis what he would like her to do about it. She knew every nook and cranny, every rafter, every store, every expenditure. Mrs Pride was, in truth, the mistress of Albion House; the Albions only lived there.

To Fanny she became a second, silent mother. For years Fanny did not know it. If she decided to go for a walk and Fanny went with her, Mrs Pride might want to sit a while so that Fanny could play in the water at the ford. When she happened to see sketching materials in Lymington she took the liberty of buying them, just in case Adelaide might wish to give them to Fanny. She remarked on Fanny’s drawing prowess to the vicar after church and meekly supposed that there would be tutors visiting the house to give her lessons in other accomplishments too – at which Mr Gilpin took the hint at once and saw that these things were attended to. And so quiet and effective was she that, at almost fifteen, Fanny still thought that she was just the loving, friendly figure who saw that she was clothed and fed, and who seemed always glad of a little company when she sat in her little parlour in the early evening for a pot of tea and some delicious brandy cakes.

Fanny glanced across at her father. He had closed his eyes, after these last remarks. It was strange, in a way, this timidity of his, when one considered his life. Sometimes, even now, he would tell her about his travels, describing the gorgeous French court of Louis XV, or the busy port of Boston, or the plantations of Carolina. He still recalled every great event.

‘I remember the excitement in London, back in forty-five,’ he would say, ‘when the Scots tried to march south under Bonnie Prince Charlie.’ Every victory of the British on the high seas or out in India seemed to have a story to go with it, and when she was a child he used to relate these to her vividly, so that, without knowing it, she had learned much of the history of her times from him.

She was sad to see his decline, but glad that she was there to be at his side in these final years.

‘Perhaps’ – her Aunt Adelaide’s voice broke into the silence, now – ‘you will meet a handsome beau at Oxford.’

‘Perhaps.’ Fanny laughed. ‘Mr Gilpin told me today I should fall in love with a poor professor.’

‘I don’t think that’s what a Miss Albion would do, is it, Fanny?’

‘No, Aunt Adelaide, I don’t think it is.’

She loved her aunt’s aristocratic old face. She hoped she would look like that one day too. It seemed to her that Adelaide could not have had a very happy life, but she never complained. If Mrs Pride ran the house in the practical sense, her aunt Adelaide was still its family guardian – the guardian angel, really.

It was evenings like this, when her father was dozing or had retired to bed, and she and Adelaide were sitting quietly together, that Fanny treasured most. The old house so silent; the shadows, like familiar ghosts, always in the same places on the panelling in the candlelight – at such times, her aunt would begin to talk. And she started to do so now.

Fanny smiled. Her aunt told the same stories over again, yet she was always happy to hear them. It was probably because, although her father’s stories were interesting, they concerned only his own life; whereas Adelaide spoke about a more distant past – her mother Betty, her grandmother Alice, the story of the Albion inheritance going back centuries. Fanny’s own inheritance. Yet the wonderful thing was that when her aunt Adelaide told it, all these things seemed to have happened only yesterday.

‘My mother was born just after the Restoration of King Charles II,’ Adelaide could say. That was more than a hundred and thirty years ago. Yet Betty Lisle was a living memory. Adelaide had shared this house with her for forty years. ‘That’s her favourite chair, where you sit now,’ her aunt would say. Or, one afternoon in the garden: ‘I remember the day my mother planted that rose tree. It was sunny, just like this …’ The very house itself seemed to become like a living person too. ‘The brick skin of the house was put on when grandmother was a girl by her father. But he left the timbers and this old panelling’, she would add, with a nod to the wall, ‘just as it was in Queen Elizabeth’s day. Of course’ – and here followed a vivid personal description of the terrifying figure in red and black – ‘it was from this room, on a night like this, that old Lady Albion went out to try to raise the county to join the Spanish Armada.’

How could anyone fail to love such family history? But – here was the real difference between her aunt’s and her father’s stories – Adelaide’s were told with such feeling for the people she spoke about. She would tell Fanny how this one had known hardship, or that one lost a child and grieved, so that the ghostly figures peopling the house became like friends whose joys and sadnesses one shared and whom, were such a thing possible, one wanted to sustain and comfort.

‘I try to keep things as they were for my dear mother and father,’ Adelaide liked to say. And even if I do decide to add some Gothic features, thought Fanny, I too will continue as loyal guardian of the family shrine.

There was only one story, though, which used to move Aunt Adelaide to tears and that was the tale of her grandmother, Alice Lisle.

It was ironic, really, that Monmouth’s rebellion and the execution of Alice Lisle should have come when they did. For within three years of Monmouth’s attempt to seize the throne for the Protestant cause, King James II had so infuriated the English Parliament with his promotion of Roman Catholicism that they were ready to throw him out; and when, at this crucial point, his Catholic wife unexpectedly gave birth to a healthy son and heir, they did. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 effectively ended the civil and religious dispute that had been going on since the Stuarts came to the English throne. It was practically bloodless. The English didn’t want Catholic rule and they got their way. James and his baby son were out. His Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William took over instead. Had Monmouth been alive then, Parliament might have chosen him but, like so many Stuarts, he had been vain and impetuous. So William and Mary it was. After them, the other Protestant daughter Anne. And after Anne, a grandson of one of Charles I’s sisters, the Protestant King George, head of the German House of Hanover whose grandson George III was still reigning now.

Kings ruled through Parliament these days. Neither they nor their heirs were allowed to marry Catholics. Catholics and dissenters might practise their religion, but they could not attend university or hold any public office. Eighteenth-century England would not be quite what Alice Lisle might have wanted, but to a large extent the cause for which both she and her husband had been murdered had now been won.

Ironic politically, but the personal tragedy remained, like a tree that continues growing, almost the same, despite a change in yearly weather. A century had passed, but the Forest had not forgotten Alice. And in Albion House she was still a living memory.

Aunt Adelaide might have been born twenty years after those terrible events, but she knew them from her parents, and relations like her old aunt Tryphena, and local figures like Jim Pride, who had all been there at the time. Through their eyes and their descriptions, she had witnessed the arrest, the shameful trial and the execution. She still shuddered whenever she passed Moyles Court or the Great Hall at Winchester. Moyles Court had passed out of the family, now, but Albion House had been Alice’s true home, the place she had loved, and her presence abided.