The Forest (76 page)

‘Have you taken up any career, Mr Martell?’ he enquired.

‘Not yet, Sir.’

‘You considered it?’

‘I did. At Oxford I considered entering the Church, but the responsibilities of my position decided me against it.’

‘A man may be the owner of a large estate and be a clergyman too,’ Gilpin pointed out. ‘My grandfather was.’

‘Certainly, Sir. But shortly after I completed my studies at Oxford a kinsman of my father’s died, leaving me a large estate in Kent: this in addition to the estates in Dorset, which will be mine on the death of my father. The two lie a hundred miles apart; unless I relinquish one – which would betray a trust laid upon me – I conceive that it would be impossible to carry out my duties as a clergyman as well. I could, of course, engage a perpetual curate, but if I do that there seems little point in taking holy orders.’

‘I see,’ said Mr Gilpin.

‘I think, perhaps,’ continued Mr Martell, ‘of entering politics.’

‘He’s looking for a seat,’ Edward now interrupted from behind. ‘I’ve told him he should talk to Harry Burrard. He decides who the members for Lymington will be.’ He laughed. ‘I think Martell should represent us, Mr Gilpin. What do you think?’

But whether the vicar of Boldre meant to reply would never be known, for Fanny suddenly cried: ‘Oh, look, Mr Gilpin! A ruin.’

The object at which she was pointing was a small bridge over the river, some way off to their right. If not exactly a ruin, it was certainly in a very dilapidated state, with its arches visibly crumbling. It looked most unsafe.

‘Folly Bridge,’ said Mr Gilpin, who seemed glad to change the subject. ‘Now then, Edward, can you tell me the date of it? No? Mr Martell? No also. Well, it is believed to date from the late eleventh century, about the time of King William Rufus. If so, it is much older than the university.’

This information having been received with respect, Fanny decided she could properly address the stranger. ‘Do you care for ruins, Mr Martell?’

He turned and looked at her. ‘I am aware’ – he inclined his head momentarily towards Gilpin – ‘having read Mr Gilpin’s
Observations
with great profit, of the picturesque nature of ruins; certainly there is much to admire in, and much to learn from, the ruins of antiquity. But I admit, Miss Albion, that I prefer the vigour of a living building to the decadence of its remains.’

‘Yet there are some people who build ruins,’ she offered.

‘I had a friend who did. But I consider it preposterous all the same.’

‘Oh.’ Thinking of her own plans she could not help blushing. ‘Why?’

‘I should not care to spend so great a sum upon an object so useless. I see no sense in it.’

‘Come, Sir.’ Gilpin came to her defence. ‘Your argument surely has this weakness: you might say the same of any work of art. A painting of a ruin, then, should not be made either.’

‘I grant the justice of what you say, Sir,’ replied Martell, ‘and yet find I am not satisfied. It is, I think, a question of degree. The painter, no matter how great his labour, expends only his time, paint, canvas. Yet for the cost of even a small ruin a man might build a score of cottages that could be both useful and pleasing to the eye.’ He paused. Did he, perhaps, resent being obliged to speak for so long? ‘There is this further, Sir. A mansion is what it is, namely a house; a painting is a painting. But a constructed ruin pretends to be something it is not. It is false. The sentiments, the reveries it is intended to provoke are also false.’

‘You do not care for the Gothic fashion in building, then?’ asked Fanny.

‘Taking a good house and adding Gothic ornaments to it to make it look like something else? Certainly not, Miss Albion. I abominate that fashion.’

‘Ha,’ said Mr Gilpin.

They went across, all the same, to inspect Folly Bridge, then walked along the river bank a little way. Edward had started to chatter again. It was very pleasant. By the time they had done this, Mr Gilpin and the two girls felt ready to return to the Blue Boar Inn to dine and rest. Edward and Mr Martell accompanied them to the inn and it was agreed that Edward should join them again the next morning to continue their investigation of Oxford. Mr Martell, it seemed, had other engagements. For their final day, however, Edward proposed that they should venture out to the village of Woodstock and visit the huge country mansion of Blenheim Palace, which lay in a magnificent park nearby.

‘The duke is away at present,’ said Edward, ‘but one can visit the house upon application, which I have already made.’

‘Capital!’ cried Gilpin. ‘The duke has some paintings by Rubens which must not be missed.’

‘Martell,’ asked Edward, ‘you will accompany us, perhaps?’ His friend seeming to hesitate, he asked: ‘Have you visited Blenheim?’

‘I have stayed there once or twice,’ Martell replied quietly.

‘Oh God, Martell,’ Edward cried, not at all abashed, ‘I should have guessed you would know the duke. So come now, will you keep these ladies company – or do you only go to Blenheim when the owner is there to receive you?’

To Fanny’s astonishment Martell merely shook his head, half smiling, at this sally. It seemed he did not mind Edward’s puppyish teasing. ‘I should be delighted to accompany you,’ he said with a slight bow; although whether he really wanted to Fanny could not guess.

Mr Martell left them after this and so the two girls dined with Edward and Mr Gilpin. Fanny decided that this was preferable, really, since it relieved them of the necessity of conversing with a man who had no great desire for their company. She did ask Mr Gilpin for his opinion of Edward’s friend, though.

‘His intellect’, Gilpin said cautiously, ‘is strong, although perhaps too rigid. But I should need to know him better.’ Which, while interesting, wasn’t quite what she’d meant.

‘He’s damnably rich,’ said Edward. ‘I can tell you that.’

Later, in their room, she had asked Louisa what she thought. She always enjoyed discussing things with Louisa. Her cousin and she were very close, perhaps because they were so different. They both had a good eye and enjoyed painting; but while Fanny would take time to seek some particular effect of the light or weather on the landscape, Louisa after a while would content herself with a few quick dashes of colour and say she was done. Or sometimes, when Mr Gilpin was instructing, she would make some flippant addition to the scene and, as the distinguished artist passed, point to it and ask: ‘Do you like my rabbit, Mr Gilpin? It has floppy ears.’

But as it was done in a cheerful way and was so in tune with her character, he would just smile and say, ‘Yes, Louisa’ and not take offence.

Louisa had a talent for mimicry – her imitation of Mr Grockleton was beyond praise – but she was not malicious. She read books, as much as she wanted to; she spoke enough French to amuse the French officers in Lymington. With her lovely eyes and dark-haired good looks, Louisa had long ago concluded that her role as a pretty daughter of Lymington’s richest merchant suited her ambitions very well. And if she could have been cleverer or more hard-working if she wished, then she must have concluded that it was not in her self-interest. ‘What do I think of Mr Martell, Fanny? Why that he is a great catch and he knows it.’

This was clearly true.

‘But what of his character and his opinions?’

‘Why, Fanny, I hardly know. It was you who spoke to him.’ Fanny had not thought of it, but she realized now that, unusually, Louisa had kept almost silent through their walk with Mr Martell. ‘I did observe one thing, Fanny,’ her pretty cousin continued with a smile.

‘Tell me what, Louisa?’

‘That you liked him.’ And now Louisa burst into a laugh.

‘I? Oh, no, Louisa. I do not think so. Why do you think such a thing?’

But Louisa refused to discuss the matter further and instead went and sat in a chair by the window and, taking up a book, started to make a little drawing for herself upon the flyleaf. She busied herself in this way, refusing all conversation for some time, while Fanny began to prepare herself for bed, until finally she called Fanny over and, quietly handing her the book, let her look at the drawing by the fading light.

It was of a rutting stag: a great red deer, on the twilit forest heath, his head with its magnificent antlers thrown back about to emit his roar. It really was a very good likeness of the creature and well observed. With this one alteration: the face was that of Mr Martell.

‘It is as well we are not to see him tomorrow,’ said Fanny, ‘as I should be afraid of laughing.’

They did not see Mr Martell, or even think of him, the next day, which passed delightfully. But the following morning he was at the door of the inn, wearing a brown coat and riding breeches, and a tall brown hat to match. While they rode in the carriage, he mounted a magnificent bay, explaining that, as the day was fine and his horse had now been stabled for two days, he thought it best to give it some exercise. While this made perfect sense, Fanny could not help but reflect that it also meant that he was spared the need of talking to them on the journey.

With Mr Martell riding easily beside the carriage, the journey nonetheless passed very pleasantly. Of the Oxfordshire countryside Mr Gilpin had a poor opinion. ‘It is too flat. I can describe it’, he told them, ‘only as a cultivated dreariness.’ But if the landscape was sadly wanting in the picturesque, its history was more encouraging. At Woodstock, the vicar reminded them, a medieval English king had kept his lady love, the fair Rosamund. So jealous of this lady was the queen that she wanted to poison her. And so, it was said, the king built a maze around her house, and only he knew the way in. ‘A pleasant story, even if untrue,’ as the vicar remarked. With these and other tales he regaled them until they reached the park gates of the great palace of Blenheim.

John Churchill had been a genial fellow, with only a poor squire’s fortune at the court of the merry monarch, with whom he had shared a mistress. But he was also a formidable soldier. Having won a string of brilliant victories for Queen Anne, he was made Duke of Marlborough and rewarded, as successful generals were, with a great estate. As their carriage rolled along the drive this sunny morning, Fanny looked out eagerly to see the mansion. And soon enough, looking across a great sweep, she did.

It came as a shock. She felt a little intake of breath, a sense of cold fear. She was familiar with the mansions of the New Forest; she had visited the great house of Wilton up at Sarum; but she had never seen anything like this before.

The vast classical palace of Blenheim, named after the duke’s most famous victory over King Louis XIV of France, did not sit in the landscape: it spread across it like a cavalry charge in stone. Its baroque magnificence utterly dwarfed even the largest of England’s manor-mansions. It was not an English country house. It was a European palace, of a kind with the Louvre, or Versailles, or one of the great Austrian palaces that stretch across the horizon at Vienna – behind whose classical façades one may sense a spirit of almost oriental power, like that of the Russian tsars, or the Turkic khans of the endless steppe.

For even in England, in that age – when portraits of aristocrats depicted them in the poses of classical gods – the founder of the Churchill family was not to be housed like a mortal. It was a quarter of a mile from the kitchens to the dining room.

They toured the house first. The Duke of Marlborough’s marbled halls and galleries had a haughty grandeur she had never encountered before. This, she realized, was an aristocratic world quite outside and beyond her own. She felt a little overawed. She noticed that Mr Martell looked quite at home, though.

‘There is a connection between Blenheim and the New Forest,’ Mr Gilpin reminded them. ‘The last Duke of Montagu, whose family owns Beaulieu, married Marlborough’s daughter. So the lords of Beaulieu now are partly Churchills too.’

They admired the Rubens paintings. ‘The first family picture in England,’ announced Gilpin of one. Although of the picture of the Holy Family he roundly declared: ‘It is flat. It possesses little of the master’s fire. Except, Fanny, you may agree, in the old woman’s head.’ But despite all the wonders of the palace, Fanny was not sorry when Mr Gilpin finally led them out to survey the park.

The park at Blenheim was very large, one of the greatest that Capability Brown had ever undertaken. There were no small comforts like those favoured by Repton: no modest walks or flower beds, but great sweeps across which all Marlborough’s armies might have marched. God, it seemed to say, in framing nature, had only presumed to make a rough preparation, to be ordered and given meaning by the authority of an English duke. So it was that the park at Blenheim, with its broad arrangement of stream and lake, belts of woodland and endless open vistas, rolled away towards a conquered horizon.

‘Every advantage has been taken, which could add variety to grandeur,’ declared Gilpin as they began their promenade.

They all chatted together quite easily by now. As she walked with Mr Gilpin behind the other three, she saw that even Louisa was saying a few words to Mr Martell, about the scenery or the weather no doubt; and if Mr Martell did not say much, he seemed to be replying, at least. One could not deny, whatever one’s opinion of him, that Mr Martell looked very handsome in this setting.

At one point, when a particularly fine vista, cunningly contrived by the genius of Brown, opened out before them, Gilpin cried out: ‘There. As grand a
burst
, I should term it, as art ever displayed. Picturesque. A scene, Fanny, for you to sketch. You would do it admirably.’

Mr Martell turned. ‘You draw, Miss Albion?’

‘A little.’ Fanny replied.

‘Do you draw, Mr Martell?’ Louisa asked; but he did not turn back to her.

‘Badly, I fear. But I have the highest admiration for those who do.’ And looking, now, straight at Fanny, he smiled.

‘My cousin Louisa draws quite as well as I do, Mr Martell,’ said Fanny with a slight blush.

‘I do not doubt it,’ he said politely and faced round again to resume his conversation.

Having walked some distance, they turned to look back at the palace of the Churchills and, by way of making conversation, she asked what was the origin of the family.