The Forest (105 page)

Yet something was missing from the town even so. Perhaps it was the French. In 1795 most of them had departed on a campaign against the revolutionaries in France. They had landed there in force, fought bravely, but in vain. The expedition had not been very well supported by the British government. Few of the brave Frenchmen returned. All that was left to remind Lymington of their sojourn there were one or two aristocratic widows, a larger number of local girls who had either fallen in love with, or married, French troops and, inevitably, a number of illegitimate children, all of whom were likely to be a charge to the parish.

No, it was not enough. With its salt pans and its smugglers, Lymington, while well enough, was never going to become a place of fashion.

But what of her own position? Wasn’t she a friend of Fanny and Wyndham Martell? And of Louisa, dear Louisa, who had married Mr Arthur West? Wasn’t she, if not a regular guest at dinner, at least on terms of friendly acquaintance with the Burrards, the Morants, even Mr Drummond of Cadland? She was and that was just the trouble. She had achieved her objective. The enemy had been vanquished. She had met them and they were mortal. It might have surprised these good people to know it, but in
her own capacious mind, at least, Mrs Grockleton had moved past them. The Forest was no longer large enough to contain her.

So the Grockletons went to Bath.

And with Mr Grockleton’s retirement and departure, the coast had been clear for Puckle to return.

It was all done very quietly. Isaac Seagull saw to that. His old cottage was ready for him. So was his job. And, by some Forest magic, when he walked back into the shipyard you really might have thought that no one even knew he had been gone.

And indeed, he discovered one other, pleasant continuity upon his arrival. For the great tree he had escorted across the Forest from the Rufus stone was also there, as it were, waiting to greet him. So large and fine were its timbers that Mr Adams had been holding it at the yard until he had a ship that was worthy of it. That ship had been the mighty
Swiftsure
. In this way, the acorn from the magical, midwinter-leafing tree had entered and become a part of one of Nelson’s finest ships.

That had been four years ago, as work had just started on
Swiftsure
, and he had been working on her ever since. Her launching tomorrow, therefore, in some strange way seemed a kind of affirmation to him. He had returned home, and brought a great ship into the world. At least, he would have, after tomorrow when she was launched.

The launching of a great ship was a complex and tricky business. Essentially it was necessary to transfer the vast weight of the vessel from the keel blocks on which it had been built to a slipway down which it must safely enter the water.

For days, now, Puckle had been helping the men building the wooden slideways. These were railtracks made of elm and, since they had to run down well into the water, most of the work on them had to be done at low tide. It was a muddy affair.

The business of transferring the huge weight of the ship had to be done with the utmost care. While it was being built, the ship had rested upon keel blocks made of elm wood, about five feet high and placed five feet apart. Around the outside of the hull, tall wooden poles, thirty or forty feet high, like ship’s masts, acted as scaffolding. Starting from the end nearest the water, the riggers had swiftly moved, driving in huge wooden wedges to lift the ship off the blocks and then putting in the timber props that would guide her on her path down the rails. It was a long operation requiring great skill. For everything had to go right. If the ship lurched, it could crash on its side. If the angle of the slideways were too shallow she might not launch. Too steep and she might rush down into the water and go careering off, to get stuck on the mud banks across the river. Such things had happened. If all went well, however, the rising tide coming up under the stern would just ease the ship off the blocks, the wedges holding her would be knocked away and, slowed by drag ropes, she would slide gently down into the Beaulieu River, stern first, to be towed away downstream and out into the Solent.

Puckle walked round the ship. He loved the line of the huge keel and the workmanship that had gone into it. The inner keel was made of sections of elm. Outside this was another outer keel of oak. When the ships ran down the sliderails, or if ever, later, they ran aground, it was this outer keel that would endure the scraping, protecting the inner keel from harm.

He would be staying at the yard that night, for before the ship could be launched there was still one vital job to do.

The normal time to launch a ship at Buckler’s Hard was an hour before high tide. At lowest tide, therefore, which, that night, would come shortly before dawn, gangs of men would go down to grease the slideways with melted tallow and soap. Puckle had asked to be one of them. He wouldn’t have missed this last pre-dawn preparation for anything.

*

There was a quarter-moon that night and the sky was full of stars. At Albion Park the pale, classical façade of the house stared across the faintly glimmering sweep of its lawns to the gently shelving belt of small fields and woods that sank down, as though in a contented dream, to the Solent water. Beyond that, clearly visible in the moonlight, the long line of the Isle of Wight lay like a gentle guardian.

In that handsome, ordered house, everyone was asleep. The five children of Fanny and Wyndham Martell slept happily in their nursery wing. Mrs Pride, a little elderly, now, but still very much in control – not a fly stirred in that house without her permission – slept peacefully. The entire household would be driving across to join the more than a hundred carriages, which would arrive to watch the launching of
Swiftsure
in the morning.

Everyone slept. Or almost everyone.

Mr Wyndham Martell was not asleep. He had been awakened an hour before by a sound from his wife and now he sat watching her thoughtfully.

It was just in the last few weeks that she had taken to talking in her sleep. He did not know why. She had done so before, usually in little bursts that lasted for a week or two and then subsided, as though there were complex hidden tides in her mind about which he scarcely knew. Sometimes he could make something out. She had murmured about her aunt, about Mrs Pride, about Alice Lisle. There had also been conversations with what appeared to be Isaac Seagull. Mr Gilpin was the recipient of some of her confidences, too. But there was one dream she had which seemed to cause her particular distress; she would toss and turn, and even cry out. She had just had it again tonight.

Wyndham Martell loved his wife very much. He wanted to help her, yet was not sure what to do. Most of the conversations she had made no particular sense. Even when she was in distress, it was not always possible to understand
the moans and cries she emitted. And by morning, when she awoke, she would smile at him lovingly and be well enough.

Tonight, however, he thought he had understood something more.

Wyndham Martell got up and walked to the window. The night was warm. Across the park he could see to the coast, out past the distant spit of Hurst Castle and the open sea beyond. He smiled to himself: that was the province of Isaac Seagull the smuggler. His wife’s cousin. He remembered well the night Louisa had told him that and how her malice had made him feel so sorry for Fanny. Perhaps, he thought wryly, it was the very unfolding of that dark secret that had led him to the wife he loved.

Maybe everyone, he reflected, had dark secrets within them of which they might or might not even be aware.

And then, because he loved his wife and all her secrets, he quietly left the room, went down to his private library and, sitting down at his desk, took out a piece of paper. He was going to write his wife a letter.

He paused a little while, thinking carefully, then began.

My dearest wife

Each of us has secrets and now there is something which I, too, have to confess.

It was a long letter. Dawn was almost breaking before he finished and sealed it.

At Buckler’s Hard, Puckle was busily at work. The tide was out. Slipping about contentedly in the riverside mud, he moved the heavy soaked leather rag over the wooden rail. Above him the dark bulk of
Swiftsure
loomed beneath the fading stars like a friend. Across the Beaulieu River a bird suddenly started singing and, glancing eastwards, Puckle saw the first faint hint of the light of dawn.

Swiftsure
would be launched that day. As he glanced up
again at the vessel, although he had not the words quite to express it, Puckle reflected once again how, in this huge wooden ship, the trees had become transmogrified into a second and perhaps equally glorious life. And his heart was filled with joy to know that the Forest itself, with all its secrets and many wonders, would, in this manner, pass down the slideway to be joined with the endless sea.

Brockenhurst railway station: a sunny day in July. The tall-funnelled steam engine had a burnished coppery gleam, like a snake that has just shed its skin, as it hissed and smoked by the platform. Behind it a line of thickset brown carriages, their windows wiped and their brasses buffed by the smartly uniformed guards, stood waiting to receive their passengers, who would be taken with a proud rattle and at speeds of over thirty miles an hour the seventy miles to London.

The London and South-Western Railway line was a fine affair, a symbol of all that was best in the new industrial era. A decade or so before, it had been extended westward across the Forest to Ringwood and down into Dorset. But as well as paying compensation to the Forest for this intrusion, the director of the line, Mr Castleman, had agreed to follow a winding route that would inflict minimum damage on the woodlands so that his line was known as Castleman’s Corkscrew. At Brockenhurst, where the cattleyard and pony-yards abutted the station, the engines would also pause to take on more water.

The two figures who walked along the platform made a curious contrast. The older man, almost sixty, was every inch a Victorian gentleman. As the day was warm he wore no outer garment over his grey frock coat. His wing collar was encircled by a cravat tied in a floppy bow. He carried a silver-handled cane. His tall black top hat had been brushed until it shone; there was not a speck of dust upon his trousers. As for his shoes, the boot-boy had spat and
polished to such good effect before dawn that they gave off little flashes as they caught the sun. Florid faced, blue-eyed, white-haired with a long drooping moustache, Colonel Godwin Albion would have been pleased to know that he resembled his Saxon ancestor Cola the Huntsman and, in all probability, would have agreed with him on most matters of importance.

If Colonel Albion was even a fraction nervous at the prospect ahead of him he no more showed it now than he had, a dozen years before, when he led his men into battle in the Crimean War. If he could face the Russians, he reminded himself, then he could certainly face a Select Committee of his fellow countrymen, even if they were all peers of the realm. He squared his shoulders, therefore, and went forward bravely.

The figure beside him, about ten years younger, was also looking his smartest, in a different manner. He was dressed in his Sunday best – a rather more shapeless frock coat made of sturdy material. On his head, a wide-brimmed countryman’s hat. His boots, under the Colonel’s strict instructions, were shining. Like most working men, he couldn’t see the point of the high polish that the gentry and the military favoured on their boots, which were bound to get dusty again. His beard was neatly combed and his wife had continued brushing his coat until the Colonel had come for him. But as Mr Pride, tenant smallholder of Oakley, strode cheerfully along with a slightly loping gait, beside his landlord, he was probably less concerned than the Colonel about the prospect before him.

Besides, if the Colonel wanted him to do this, then as far as Pride was concerned, that was reason enough. He’d known the Colonel all his life and his parents too. As well as being his landlord, the Colonel was a man you could trust. When, a few years back, the Colonel had started a local cricket team on Oakley green, and Pride had shown a distinct aptitude as a spin bowler, there had sprung up an
extra bond between them which, as far as social position allowed, could almost be called a friendship.

Only one cloud darkened his horizon. His son George. They’d scarcely spoken this last few years. Until three days ago when the boy had turned up begging him not to go, afraid he’d lose his job. His brow darkened when he thought of that; he didn’t want to ruin his son.

‘You shouldn’t have gone to work for Cumberbatch then,’ he’d said coldly. And he’d gone with the Colonel.

He had never been to London before. He had read about it. Like his father Andrew before him, he had attended the little school founded by Gilpin and he took quite an interest in the newspapers. But this would be his first time in the capital; so the day was rather an adventure. The fact he was about to face a panel of peers meant nothing in particular to him. He supposed they would be like the gentlemen verderers. And anyway, whether they were devils incarnate or a choir of archangels, he knew who he was. He was a Pride of the Forest. That was good enough for him.

The Colonel, however, with subtler distinctions on his mind, was not sorry as they came along the platform to see another top-hatted figure, with a rich brown beard, waiting by the entrance of the first-class carriage. For though his fellow landowner, the lord of the great Beaulieu estate, was only a little over half his age, he was the son of a duke, which was no small thing to be in Victorian England.