The Forest (34 page)

This was what had happened to Brother Adam. He was unaware of the yellowish light around him because he was blind.

It was often remarked with wonder by the monks of Beaulieu, from that time on, how Brother Adam could find his way about unaided. Not only in the cloister. Even in the middle of the night, when the monks came down the passageway and the stairs to perform the night office in the church, he would walk down with them quite unaided and turn into his choir stall at exactly the right place. Outside, too, he would pace about in the abbey precincts without, it seemed, ever getting lost.

He seemed to find all manner of tasks he could perform without the use of his eyes, from planting vegetables to making candles.

He was still a handsome, well-made man. He conversed little and liked to be alone, but there was always about him an air of quiet serenity.

Only once, for a matter of a few days some eighteen months after his return, did something occur within him that seemed to distract his mind. Several times he became lost, or bumped into things. After a week, during which the abbot was rather worried about him, he seemed to recover his equanimity and balance, and never bumped into anything again. No one knew why this brief interlude had occurred. Except Brother Luke.

It had been a warm summer afternoon when the lay brother had offered to escort him along his favourite path down along the river.

‘I shall not see the river, but I shall smell it,’ Adam had replied. ‘By all means, then.’

It had been necessary, in this instance, for Luke to take his arm, but with an occasional warning about any small obstacles along the path, they had been able to stride along quite easily through the woods, emerging finally on to the open marsh by the river bend where, to his delight, the monk had heard the sound of a party of swans, rising off the water on the wing.

And they had been standing in the afternoon silence for a little while, feeling the sun on their faces very pleasantly, when Brother Adam heard light footsteps on the path. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked Luke.

‘Someone to see you,’ the lay brother replied. ‘I’m walking off a little way now,’ he added. And it was with a slight shock of surprise, a moment or two later, that Adam realized who it must be.

She was standing in front of him. He could smell her. He was, as only the blind can be, aware of her whole presence. He wanted to reach out to touch her, but hesitated. It seemed to him that she was not alone.

‘Brother Adam.’ Her voice. She spoke calmly, softly. ‘I have brought someone to see you.’

‘Oh. Who is that?’

‘My youngest child. A little boy.’

‘I see.’

‘Will you give him your blessing?’

‘My blessing?’ He was almost surprised. It was a natural thing to ask of a monk, but, knowing what she did about him … ‘For what my blessing is worth,’ he said. ‘How old is the boy?’

‘He is five.’

‘Ah. A nice age.’ He smiled. ‘His name?’

‘I called him Adam.’

‘Oh. My name.’

He felt her move very close, her body almost touching, but so that she could whisper, close in his ear. ‘He is your son.’

‘My son?’ The revelation hit him so that he almost staggered back. It was as if, in his world of darkness, there had been a great flash of golden light.

‘He doesn’t know.’

‘You …’ His voice was hoarse. ‘You are sure?’

‘Yes.’ She was standing back now.

For a moment he stood there in the sunlight, quite still,
though he felt as if he might be swaying. ‘Come, little Adam,’ he said quietly. And when the small boy approached, he reached down with his hands and felt his head, then his face. He would have liked to lift him, feel him, press him to him. But he could not do this. ‘So, Adam,’ he said gently, ‘be a good boy, do as your mother tells you and accept another Adam’s blessing.’ Resting his hand on the boy’s head, he recited a brief prayer.

He wanted so much to give the boy something. He wondered what. Then, suddenly remembering, he drew out the cedarwood crucifix that, so long ago, his mother had given him and, with a single pull, broke the leather string that secured it round his neck and handed it to the boy. ‘My mother gave me this, Adam,’ he said. ‘They say a crusader brought it from the Holy Land. Keep it always.’ He turned to Mary with a shrug. ‘It is all that I have.’

They went, then, and soon afterwards he and Luke made their way back towards the abbey.

They did not speak, except once, halfway along the path through the woods.

‘Does the boy look like me?’

‘Yes.’

Of all the times, during the long years of his blind existence, it was on those sunny afternoons as he sat quietly meditating in the carrels in the sheltered north wall of the abbey cloister, that Brother Adam appeared most serene. It seemed to the younger monks that, being obviously very close to God, Brother Adam was in a silent communion that it would be impious to interrupt. And sometimes he was. But sometimes, also, as he smelled the grass and the daisies in the cloister, and felt the warm sun coming from over the
frater
, it was another thought that filled his mind with a joy and delight which, if it led him down even to perdition, he could not help.

I have a son. Dear God, I have a son.

One afternoon, when he was all alone with no one to see, he even took out a small knife he had been using earlier in the day, and discreetly carved a little letter ‘A’ in the stone beside him.

‘A’ for Adam. And sometimes, he thought, if his punishment was to be cast out of God’s garden into some darker place, then still, perhaps, for the sake of his son, he would do it all again.

So, for many years, Brother Adam lived with his secret, in the abbey of Beaulieu.

Friday. Fish market day in Lymington. On Wednesdays and Fridays, at eight o’clock in the morning, for one hour, the fishermen set out their stalls.

A warm early April morning. The smell of fresh fish was delicious. Many of them had been landed down at the little wharf that dawn. There were eels and oysters from the estuary; hake, cod and other white fish from the sea; there were goldfish also, as they called the yellow gurnard then. Most of the women in the small borough went to the fish market: the merchants’ wives in their big-sleeved gowns with wimples covering their heads, the poorer sorts and the servants, some in back-laced bodices, all with aprons and little hoods on their heads to make them look respectable.

The bailiff had just rung a bell to close the market as, from the direction of the wharf, two figures appeared.

Even a glance, as the lean figure made his way up the street that warm April morning, and you felt you knew him. It was just the way he walked. It was so obvious he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought. The loose linen leggings he favoured flapped cheerfully on his calves, leaving his bare ankles exposed. On his feet he wore only sandals secured with leather thongs. His jerkin was made of ray – striped cloth – blue and yellow, none too clean. On his head was a leather cap he had stitched together himself.

Young Jonathan Totton could not remember ever seeing Alan Seagull without this item of headgear.

If Alan Seagull’s cheerful face took a short cut from his
mouth to his chest, if his sparse black beard went from his mouth down to his Adam’s apple pretty much without pausing for such an ornament as a chin, you could be sure it was because he and his forebears had reckoned they could do perfectly well without one. And there was something about his cheerful, canny grin that told you they were right. ‘We’ve cut a corner, there,’ the Seagull smile seemed to say about their chin, ‘and we could probably cut a few more too, that you don’t need to know about.’

He smelled of tar and of fish, and of the salty sea. As he often did, he was humming a tune. Young Jonathan Totton was enchanted by him and, walking proudly beside the mariner, he had just reached the point on the sloping street where the squat little town hall stood when a voice, calm but authoritative, summoned him: ‘Jonathan. Come here.’

Regretfully, he left Seagull’s side and went over to the tall-gabled timbered house outside which his father was standing.

A moment later, with the older man’s hand resting on his shoulder, he found himself inside and listening to his father’s quiet voice. ‘I should prefer, Jonathan, that you should not spend so much time with that man.’

‘Why, Father?’

‘Because there is better company to keep in Lymington.’

Now that, Jonathan thought, was going to be a problem.

Lymington, lying as it did by the mouth of the river that ran down from Brockenhurst and Boldre to the sea, was geographically at the centre of the Forest’s coastline – although, strictly speaking, on its small wedge of coastal farmland and marsh, it had not been included in the legal jurisdiction of the Conqueror’s hunting forest.

It was a thriving little harbour town nowadays. From the cluster of boathouses, stores and fishermen’s cottages down by the small quay, the broad High Street ran up quite a steep slope fronted by two-storey timber-and-plaster
houses with overhanging upper floors and gabled roofs. The town hall at the crest of the hill on the left-hand side, typical of its kind at that date, was built of stone and consisted of a small dark chamber surrounded by open arches in which various sellers offered their wares; above which, reached by an outside staircase, a spacious overhanging penthouse served as a courtroom for discussing the town’s affairs. In front of the town hall stood the town cross; across the street, the Angel Inn. About two hundred yards further along the crest of the slope, a church marked the end of the borough. There were two other streets, at right angles, a church, a market cross – for Lymington had the right to hold an annual three-day fair each September. There was a stocks and a tiny prison house for malefactors, a ducking-stool and whipping post. There was a town well: all this to serve a community of, perhaps, four hundred souls.

From the High Street you could look down over the wharf and the little estuary water to the high slope of the river bank beyond. From behind the town hall, you could see the long line of the Isle of Wight on the other side of the Solent.

This was the Lymington that contained better company than Alan Seagull.

It was hard to say when Lymington had first begun. Four centuries before, when the Conqueror’s clerks had compiled his Domesday Book, they had recorded the little settlement near the coast known now as Old Lymington, with land for just one plough, four acres of meadow and inhabitants to the number of six families and a couple of slaves.

Technically, small though it was, Lymington was a manor held along with many others, by a succession of feudal lords who first began to develop the place. Its original use, as far as they were concerned, was as a harbour from which boats could cross the narrow straits to the lands they also held on the Isle of Wight. Even this choice was not
inevitable. The feudal lords also held the manor of Christchurch where, soon after the death of Rufus, they had built a pleasant castle beside the new priory and the shallow harbour. At first sight that seemed the natural port. The trouble was, however, that between Christchurch and the Isle of Wight there were some awkward shoals and currents to navigate, whereas the approach to the Lymington hamlet was discovered to have a deep and easy channel.

‘The crossing’s shorter, too,’ they observed. So Lymington it was.

It was still only a hamlet; but around 1200 the manor lord had taken a further step. Between the hamlet and the river, on an area of sloping ground, he had laid out a single dirt street with thirty-four modest plots beside it. Fishermen, mariners and even traders, like the Tottons, from other local ports were encouraged to come and settle there. And to induce them still further, the development, known as New Lymington, was given a new status.

It became a borough.

What did that mean in feudal England? That it had a charter from the monarch to operate as a town? Not quite. The charter was granted by the feudal lord. Sometimes this might be the king himself; in the new cathedral cities springing up at this time – places like Salisbury – the charter would come from the bishop. In the case of Lymington, however, it was granted by the great feudal lord who held Christchurch and many other lands besides.

The deal was simple. The humble freemen of Lymington – they would be called burgesses now – were to form themselves into a corporation, which was to pay the lord a fee of thirty shillings a year. In return, they were recognized as free from any labour service to the lord, and he also threw in the concession that they could operate anywhere on his wide domains free of all tolls and customs dues. Confirmed half a century later by a second charter, the Lymington burgesses could run the borough’s daily affairs and elect
their own reeve – a sort of cross between a small-time mayor and a landlord’s steward to answer for them.

Know ye all men present and to come that I, Baldwin de Redvers, Earl of Devon, have granted and by this my present charter have confirmed to my burgesses of Lymington all liberties and free customs … by land and by sea, at bridges, ferries and gates, at fairs and markets, in selling and buying … in all places and in all things …

So began the stirring words of the charter, typical of its kind, by which the lord’s small harbour graduated into a little town.