The Forest (108 page)

‘So you fear for your future?’

‘I do.’

The Committee was silent. The smallholder had impressed them. This was no furtive forest scavenger, but a free farmer of a kind, they dimly realized, which went back in their island history to ancient days, before even the feudal lords ruled the land. Only the young peer seemed ready to test Pride any further. Cumberbatch had just passed him a note.

‘Mr Pride,’ he gazed at the forest man thoughtfully, ‘I understand that there has been bad feeling towards the inclosures. Indeed, the fences of some have been torn down. Others have been set on fire. Is it not so?’

‘I’ve heard about that, yes.’

‘I suppose, until now, that is the only way the commoners could make their feelings felt. Wouldn’t you agree?’

It was a trap. Colonel Albion looked at Pride sharply, trying to catch his eye. Pride stared fixedly at the wall behind the Committee.

‘I couldn’t say, your Lordship.’

‘You feel some sympathy for them, I dare say?’

‘I’d be sorry for any man that had his livelihood taken away, I suppose,’ said Pride calmly. ‘But of course they shouldn’t break the law. I don’t hold with that.’

‘You wouldn’t do such a thing yourself, then?’

Pride looked at the young peer dispassionately. If he felt anger, or contempt, there was not a sign of it on his face.

‘I have never broken the law in my life,’ he said, gravely.

Well done, man, thought Albion. He watched the young peer, to see if he had finished. Not yet, it seemed.

‘Mr Pride, you seem much opposed to the Office of Woods. Yet you have an eldest son do you not? One George Pride. Would you please tell us by whom he is employed?’

‘Yes, Sir. He is employed by Mr Cumberbatch.’

‘By the Office of Woods, then?’ The young peer looked triumphant. He’d caught this peasant out. ‘If the Office of Woods is such a monster, why does your son work there? Or is he consorting with the enemy?’

Albion held his breath. He had foreseen most things but not this. He hadn’t imagined that, in such a setting, anyone would stoop to baiting the smallholder about his son. Quite possibly the young peer didn’t understand the question he had been told to ask. Albion glanced across at Cumberbatch. The swine.

He saw the hair bristle on the back of Pride’s neck. Dear God, this was the lighted match that was going to set off the powder keg. He tensed, bit his lip.

Pride gave a quiet laugh, and shook his head. ‘Well, well. I reckon a young man gets a job where he can, Your Lordship. Don’t you? As for Mr Cumberbatch, he isn’t any enemy of mine.’ He turned his head round to look at the Deputy Surveyor and gave him a forester’s smile. ‘Not at present he isn’t, anyway. Of course,’ he turned back to the young peer, ‘if Mr Cumberbatch makes so many inclosures that he ruins me, and my children go to the poor house, you
might say he makes himself my enemy whether I like it or not. I only came here, Your Lordship, hoping you could help, so that Mr Cumberbatch and me could stay friends.’

Even the Chairman smiled broadly now, and the young peer gracefully indicated defeat.

‘I think,’ said the Chairman, ‘we have met the Pride of the Forest. Perhaps this would be a good moment to adjourn.’

The white-haired woman waited nervously in the big empty church on the hilltop. She had not told her husband about her rendezvous.

When Mr Arthur West had married Louisa Totton they had produced two sons and four daughters; the sons had been brought up to make their way in the world, the daughters to obey – first their parents and then their husbands. When Mary West had married Godwin Albion it had been on the clear understanding that she would obey him, and so she always had. It was no small thing for her, therefore, to be having a secret assignation in Lyndhurst church; and especially when the man she was meeting had such a dangerous reputation as Mr Minimus Furzey.

Women were always forgiving Minimus. They had been all his life. Minimus, the smallest, the last child of a large family, the pet, the one who could get away with the things his brothers and sisters never could. He was so charming that women could forgive him anything. Men, especially husbands, did not always forgive Minimus. Nor did fathers.

His family had not been shocked when Minumus became an artist. They were all talented. His grandfather Nathaniel had taken up the law and become a solicitor in Southampton. His father had also followed the legal profession but graduated to London and prospered. His eldest brother was a surgeon, the next a professor. Two of his sisters had married rich men in the city, and it was these two who had provided Minimus with the modest income
that allowed him to follow his inclinations without any financial worries.

Three years ago Minimus had come to the Forest and decided he liked it. He was not the first artist of his time to do so. If Gilpin in the last century had written of the picturesque beauty of the Forest, numerous artists and writers had come to visit in recent years. The author, Captain Marryat, whose brother had bought a house on the old smuggling route known as Chewton Glen, had even immortalized the area in his
The Children of the New Forest
twenty years before. ‘Is it the play of the light on the heath or the beauty of the oaks that brings you artists here?’ one enthusiastic lady had once asked Minimus.

‘Both, but principally it’s the railway,’ he had replied.

The fact that the Forest was full of humble Furzeys who were undoubtedly his relations neither embarrassed nor even interested Minimus. About all social matters he had a reckless innocence. It was not that he ignored social conventions: he only had the vaguest idea of their existence. If something felt agreeable, Minimus usually did it and he was genuinely surprised when people became angry. This included his relationships with women.

Minimus did not set out to seduce women. He found them delightful. If they were charmed by his boyish innocence; if they thought him poetic and wanted to mother him; or if perhaps he found himself suddenly drawn to some pretty young woman: to Minimus these were all wonders of nature. He scarcely stopped to think whether they were ladies or farm girls, married or unmarried, experienced or innocent. All things, to Minimus, were wonderful. He could not really see why the whole world did not operate in this carefree way.

He favoured the western side of the Forest, finding himself a pleasant little cottage near Fordingbridge which he had set about furnishing with gusto. The walls were hung with his own paintings and watercolours; an annexe he
built on contained a studio and a study already filled with specimens of plants and insects, in which he took a scholarly interest. But the possession that gave him most delight was in the bedroom upstairs.

He had found it when he was walking near Burley one day. He had noticed an old cottage, badly damaged by a fire, which a group of men were preparing to demolish. Always curious, he had gone inside. Upstairs, exposed to the open sky, covered with ash and charred rafters, he had discovered the shape of a broken bed. Broken but not destroyed. The dark old oak had survived the fire. Cleaning off the ash, he had seen that the rustic piece was magnificently carved. And by the time the men had brought the thing downstairs for him, Minimus realized that he had stumbled on a treasure. Squirrels and snakes, deer and pony, the thing was alive with every creature of the Forest.

‘This must be preserved,’ he declared, and for a few shillings he both purchased it and had it carted to his own cottage where he restored it for his own use. So Puckle’s bed found a new home.

Mrs Albion had been waiting for him in the church, now, for some time. But she knew better than to be cross. Minimus was always late. In the cavernous space, with the warm light filtering in through the richly coloured windows, she had time to reflect on why her daughter Beatrice had chosen to marry Minimus Furzey. He was almost ten years younger than Beatrice was. And she had had to face her father’s bitter rage.

‘She only wants him because she thinks she’ll never get a husband,’ Colonel Albion had fumed.

‘She is nearly thirty-five,’ Mrs Albion had gently pointed out.

‘The man’s a common adventurer.’

The fact that Minimus was of the same family as some of his humblest tenants could not be expected to please Albion, kindly landlord though he was. It upset the order of
things. With neither a proper occupation, nor any income except his sisters’ charity, you couldn’t possibly deny that he was an adventurer.

Yet Mrs Albion knew perfectly well that Minimus hadn’t married for that reason at all. The amount of money her husband had been going to settle upon Beatrice was quite modest, and the fact that he had refused to do so had meant very little to Minimus. Her own suspicion was that Furzey had been a good deal less interested in marrying Beatrice than she had been in marrying him.

‘The damn fellow just sees her as a free housekeeper,’ the Colonel had once muttered, and Mrs Albion suspected this might not be far from the truth. Certainly they lived in the most extraordinary manner, with only a woman coming from outside to cook and clean. Even the meanest shopkeeper in Fordingbridge had a servant or two living in.

But what, she wondered, had Beatrice seen in him? As if in answer to her question, the door of the church opened and there, with the golden sunlight behind him, stood Minimus Furzey.

‘You are alone, aren’t you?’ he enquired as he shut the door.

‘Yes. Quite.’ She smiled and, just for a moment, had to fight down an idiotic little fluttering of her own heart as he came towards her.

He looked about the church. ‘Strange place to meet.’ His musical voice made a brief echo that quickly died away in the surrounding silence. ‘Do you like it?’

The new church which had replaced the eighteenth-century structure on Lyndhurst’s hill was a tall, ornate, redbrick Victorian affair with a tower. The tower had only just been completed and it now rose, a monument to the age’s commercial pride and respectability, over the oak trees of the old royal manor at the heart of the Forest.

‘I’m not sure.’ She didn’t like to say either way, in case he didn’t approve.

‘Hmm. The windows are fine, don’t you think?’ The two that he indicated, one at the east end, the other in the transept, were certainly impressive. They had been designed by Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter who had been a visitor to the Forest in recent years. With their huge, bold forms, they were very striking. ‘Those two figures,’ he pointed to the transept window, ‘were actually done by Rossetti, you know, not Burne-Jones.’

‘Oh.’ She looked at them. ‘I suppose you know all these artists personally.’

‘I do as it happens. Why?’

‘It must be …’ she was going to say ‘so interesting’, but that sounded so banal she stopped herself.

The light from the transept window just caught his fair hair. ‘I love the fresco,’ he said with a smile.

The huge painting of
The Wise and Foolish Virgins
by Rossetti’s friend Leighton dominated part of the interior. The bishop had been concerned that the Pre-Raphaelite images were too ‘popish and ornamental’, but they had been allowed all the same. So they stood below the wise and foolish virgins, admiring both.

‘I asked you here,’ Mrs Albion said, ‘to talk about Beatrice.’ She took a deep breath. ‘There’s something I want you to do.’

Bognor Grockleton was in a cheerful mood. As he passed his claw-like hand over his pale, clean-shaven face to wipe off the beads of perspiration, he was smiling contentedly.

To appreciate Bognor Grockleton – he was named after the seaside resort where his parents liked to go on holiday – it was necessary to understand that he meant well. Perhaps there was something of the missionary in him, or perhaps it was the genetic legacy of his grandmother who, after leaving Lymington, had lived to a formidable old age in Bath; but whatever it was that drove Bognor Grockleton relentlessly forward, he always acted in the belief that the world was
there to be improved. Few people, in the Victorian age, would have disagreed with him.

He had been trying to improve the Forest ever since he came there. It was natural that he should soon have found an ally in the Deputy Surveyor. The two men in fact were very different. To Cumberbatch the Forest was a material resource like a coal mine or a gravel pit. The Forest folk were a nuisance. If he could have chained them like galley slaves or culled them like the deer, he probably would have. To Grockleton, the Forest folk needed to be helped. Many of them lived in miserable little cottages with only an acre or two. It was primitive. Even the best sort, like the Prides of Oakley, only made their modest living because they had the run of the Forest, and that was a terrible waste of resources. Once the Forest was economically run though, there would be work for many of them in timber production. A few of the larger farms round the Forest edge would doubtless survive. The factories and enterprises growing up in Southampton and the local market towns like Fordingbridge and Ringwood should absorb the rest. The new productive world was going to be so much better. Once the Forest people saw this, they would understand.

The visit to the House of Lords in London had been interesting, but though the Select Committee had not reported yet, he had little doubt of the outcome. The plantations would continue. They had to. This was progress.

He’d been glad when Cumberbatch had offered him young George Pride as a guide this afternoon. If old Pride represented the past, his son George was the future. The job he’d taken was a good one. The keepers and under-keepers were no longer needed now the deer had gone, but there were several positions, known as woodsmen, looking after the plantations, which brought a cottage with them. Young George might be working for Cumberbatch, but he lived on the Forest and he was well paid.