The Forest (82 page)

Puckle sighed. What had he done?

He had been right, the day he had met Grockleton, to spot the value of the spreading oak near the Rufus stone. Normally trees were felled in winter and transported in summer when the ground was hard. But for some reason Mr Adams had allowed this tree to be felled late. And so, while its pollarded brother had been left to live another century or two, this splendid son of the ancient, miraculous oak had felt the sharpened axes swing and thud into its side, biting their way into its two-hundred-year-old core until at last, in sight of the place where its magical old father had grown, it had toppled, and fallen and crashed down upon the moss and leaves of the forest floor. Then, with their saws and axes, the woodsmen had gone to work.

There were three parts to a fallen oak. First, the outer reaches, the lop and top, of no use to the shipyard and quickly cut away, along with the twigs that were carted for firewood. Then there was the main part of the tree, the mighty trunk, cut into huge sections to be used in the body of the ship; and then there were the all-important joints, known as knees, where the branches grew out from the trunk, which would form the supporting angles within the ship. There was also a fourth part, the bark, which some timber merchants would strip off and sell to the tanners. But Mr Adams would never allow this to be done, so the great oaks that came to Buckler’s Hard arrived with their bark still on.

Now, chained and spiked in place, the main section of the huge trunk, its widest or butt-end foremost, was being hauled across the Forest to the shipyard, where it would be seasoned for a year or two before use. To make the great stem and stern posts of a ship, a tree with a girth of at least ten feet was needed. A large tree like this one would provide about four loads, or tons of timber. A naval battleship would use over two thousand loads – about forty acres of oak trees. All the time, therefore, the woodsmen’s axes were at work, constantly felling, as the ancient oaks dropped from the canopy and the endless supply of timber made its way towards the sea like so many streamlets running off the Forest.

Now the tree had reached the end of its journey on land and Puckle, walking beside the lead horse, looked down into Buckler’s Hard.

What had he done? For some reason that particular morning, the terrible realization had come over him like a wave. As he gazed at the two little terraces of red-brick cottages he could have wept. He was going to have to leave all this: everything that he loved.

Buckler’s Hard had become his home. How many years had he worked here upon the wooden ships? How many years had he gone down the river to the quiet spot where the lugger brought casks of the finest brandy and brought the precious load up to the cobbler’s shop in Buckler’s Hard from whose secret cellar bottle upon bottle would be discreetly conveyed to the manors on the eastern side of the Forest? How many times had he walked by Mr Adams the master, or any of his other friends at the yard – or even young Mr Adams the curate of Beaulieu come to that – at some strange hour, and never been noticed?

For Mr Adams’s rule was simple. He was to see nothing. No contraband landed at the Hard. If the cobbler’s shop had a cellar, goods came and left after dark. If a bottle of finest brandy arrived at his door, he never asked how. And as long as these requirements were met, it was remarkable what he could fail to see. Whenever Puckle turned up late after one of the big runs on the other side of the Forest – and sometimes he missed an entire day – Mr Adams could always have sworn he was working in the yard all the time and paid him accordingly.

Puckle the trusted man; Puckle among friends; Puckle in the Forest. How could he leave?

He’d thought about it, of course, even told himself he could talk his way out of it. But it was no good. Some things you might get away with, but not this. There would be no forgiveness shown. Weeks, even months might pass, but you would pay the price.

If only, now, he could refuse. Could he? A vision of Grockleton’s claw-like hand and Isaac Seagull’s watchful face came up before him. No, it was too late. He could not refuse. Detaching himself from the haulage team, now, as other men came to take over, he made his way down towards the slipway. He always felt better when he was working on the ships.

Just before he reached it he noticed that Mr Adams was standing in front of his house, talking to a party of visitors.

Although two of his sons were there, it was old Mr Adams who fascinated Fanny. With his flint-like face, his old-fashioned white wig, his stiff, upright walk, at over eighty years of age he would still ride to London to get the contracts for the yard’s naval vessels. While clearly not best pleased to be interrupted by visitors, he was courteous enough as he showed them round.

But equally interesting, Fanny soon discovered, was the subtle change in Mr Martell. She had seen him as a proud aristocrat, a man of education and – she might as well admit it – a charming companion and no doubt lover. But as he went round with old Mr Adams she saw something else. His tall frame stooped forward just a little to catch everything the shipbuilder said; he asked sharp questions, to which the older man was soon answering with obvious respect. His handsome, saturnine face had grown concentrated and hard. This was the face of the powerful landowner, the Norman knight who knew his business and expected to be obeyed. To her surprise, she felt a little shudder pass through her body as she watched him. She had not realized he possessed such power.

The building of a great sea-going vessel, as the eighteenth century drew towards its close, was a remarkable business. Like so much industry at that time it was still a rural affair, small in scale and done by hand. Yet the little shipyard at the Forest’s edge was highly productive: as well as numerous merchant vessels, more than a tenth of all the new naval warships built had come from the Beaulieu River yard.

Taking them first to a large barn-like wooden building just above the slipways and beside the blacksmith’s, Mr Adams showed them a large, long space where a series of line patterns had been marked out on the floor. ‘This we call the mould loft,’ he explained. ‘We lay out the designs to scale on this floor; then we make wooden moulds so that we can check the shape of every inch of the ship as we build it.’

Then he walked them up to the huge sawpit. Two men were busily at work on a section of tree trunk, which they were sawing with a huge saw, the man holding the upper end standing up on the trunk, the man with the other end down in the pit.

‘The fellow on top is the master. He guides the saw,’ Mr Adams told them. ‘The man below is his junior. He has the harder work for he pulls the saw.’

‘Why is the man in the pit wearing such a big hat?’ asked Louisa.

‘Watch and you will see,’ answered Mr Adams with a wry look. And as the great saw swept downwards, the reason was all too clear as a cascade of sawdust fell down on the poor man’s head.

Inspired, it seemed, by the stern, practical mind of the aristocrat at his side, Mr Adams was becoming quite affable. He took them by several spots where individual men were at work on particular projects. One was shaping a huge rudder with a gouge and mallet; another was making holes in a timber post with an instrument like a huge two-handed corkscrew.

‘He makes a hole with the augur,’ the shipbuilder explained, ‘and then it will be fastened with one of these.’ He picked up a great wooden spike as long as his arm. ‘This is a wooden nail. We make them here. We always use the same wood for the nail as the timber it is to fasten, otherwise it will work loose and the ship will rot. Some of them are even bigger.’

‘Don’t you use any iron nails in the ship?’ asked Edward.

‘Yes, we do.’ A thought seemed to strike the old man.

‘You passed by the rope works up at Beaulieu, I believe? Well, the monks over at Sowley built a great fish pond in times past. And now it is used by an iron works. That’s where our nails come from.’ He smiled. ‘So even a monastery’ – he clearly meant, ‘even something so useless and popish as a monastery – may be changed, with time, to serve a useful purpose.’ And, clearly delighted with this reflection, he led them down towards the river.

There were three vessels of different sizes and stages of completion in the slipways.

Martell looked at them appraisingly. ‘I assume you try to build a smaller vessel alongside a larger, for reasons of economy,’ he remarked.

‘Precisely, Sir. You have it,’ Mr Adams responded. ‘The larger ship’, he explained to the others, ‘uses the larger timbers and the lesser ship the smaller, all from the same tree. Even so,’ he remarked to Martell, ‘there is huge wastage of wood, for only the inner part of the tree is hard enough to be used. We sell off all that we can, but …’ It was evident that any kind of waste was offensive to the shipbuilder.

‘Are they all New Forest oaks?’ asked Fanny.

‘No, Miss Albion. This’ – he indicated the surrounding Forest – ‘is our first timber yard. But we go further afield. Nor are ships made only of oak. The keel is made of elm, the ships’ wall planks are beech. For the masts and spars we use fir. Come, let me show you.’

On the largest slipway, a big man-of-war stood almost ready for launching.

‘That’s
Cerberus
,’ announced Mr Adams. ‘Thirty-two guns, almost eight hundred tons. The biggest battleships are only forty feet longer, although they have double the tonnage. She’ll launch in September and be towed along the coast to Portsmouth for fitting in the naval dockyards there. The smaller ship we have started work on beside her is a merchant ship, bound for the West Indies trade. She’ll complete next year. The little fellow in the third dock is a fifty-ton lighter for the Navy. As you see, we’ve just got the keel down, whereas for the merchant vessel we have the whole frame completed.’

‘Do you build the great battleships too?’ Fanny asked.

‘Yes, Miss Albion, but only once in a while. The biggest we built was
Illustrious
, five years ago. A seventy-four-gun monster. The finest ship I think we ever made was a sixty-four-gun called
Agamemnon
.’ He smiled. ‘The ’Am an’ Eggs, the sailors call her.’

‘And do you follow their progress after they leave the yard?’

‘We try to.
Agamemnon
, for instance, has just been placed under a new commander. A captain called Horatio Nelson.’ He shrugged. ‘Can’t say I’d ever heard of him.’ He glanced around. Nor had anyone else. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘would you like to enter
Cerberus
?’

Puckle was alone between decks. A moment ago there had been the sound of hammering from above as the last planks of the deck were being fastened; but now, for some reason, the noise had ceased and the ship had fallen silent.

How cavernous it seemed in the sudden quiet, with the light coming in through the empty squares of the gunports. There was nothing between the decks except the occasional supporting posts: no partitions, no guns, no galley equipment, no hammocks or ropes or casks. Everything beyond the empty shell of the ship would be fitted at Portsmouth. All he could see was wood: wooden deck, wooden walls, stretching away for a hundred feet, the grain of the timber visible in the soft light, the scent of the planking, and of the pitch used to seal it, sharp in his nostrils; and in the corners, where the deck heads met the hull, the angle brackets made of the knees of oak as though the decks above his head were not made of planks but a spreading canopy of branches forming natural layers within the silent echo of the ship.

Then he heard footsteps and down the ladder from the deck above came Mr Adams with the party of guests.

How curious the fellow looked, Martell thought, with his stooped shoulders, his shaggy brown hair and oaken face. One by one the party descended the ladder and looked at him.

Mr Adams came last and gave him a curt nod. ‘This man’s name is Puckle,’ he told them. ‘He’s been with us, it must be fifteen years.’

‘Seventeen, Sir,’ Puckle corrected.

‘Puckle.’ Edward laughed. ‘Funny name.’

‘It’s a good old Forest name,’ said Fanny at once, thinking her cousin sounded rude. ‘There have been Puckles in the Forest as long as Albions, I’m sure. Over at Burley mostly, isn’t it?’ she asked Puckle with a friendly smile.

‘That’s right.’ Puckle knew who the Albion girl was and she met with his approval. She belonged.

The Tottons were still gazing at Puckle with amusement, as though he were a curiosity. Martell was looking around, noting the way the deck and hull were joined. Mr Gilpin was apparently meditating.

‘Down here.’ Fanny hesitated because she wasn’t quite sure what she meant. ‘It has such a strange feeling.’ She looked at the others, who didn’t seem very interested, then turned to the Forest man. ‘Do you feel it?’ she asked, hearing as she did so, to her great irritation, Louisa giggle behind her.

Because he had just been feeling the same thing and because he liked her, for the first time in his life Puckle tried to put a complex idea into words. ‘It’s the trees,’ he said, with a nod towards the hull. He paused for a moment, wondering how to put it. ‘When we go, Miss, there isn’t much left, really. Not after a year or two in the ground, anyway.’

‘There is your immortal soul, man,’ Gilpin interrupted his reverie to remark firmly. ‘Pray do not forget that.’

‘I won’t, Vicar,’ Puckle concurred politely, if not, perhaps, with great conviction. ‘Only trees,’ he said to Fanny, ‘not having souls they say, when they’re cut down, they get another life’ and he waved all around him now. ‘Sometimes, down here,’ he added, with simple feeling for the mystery of the thing, ‘I feel as if I was inside a tree.’ He smiled at her, eager, yet a little embarrassed. ‘Funny, really. Stupid, I expect; but a man like me doesn’t know much.’

‘I don’t think it’s foolish at all,’ said Fanny warmly. But she got no further, for Mr Gilpin indicated with a cough that he and Mr Adams had had enough and a few moments later she found herself out in the bright sunlight again.

Louisa had started to laugh. ‘I do declare,’ she cried, ‘that strange fellow looked exactly like a tree himself. Did you not think so, Mr Martell?’