The Forest (59 page)

For the Lady Albion the weeks of gales were a time of trial indeed. For a start, she was kept, on Gorges’s strict instructions, in the tiny gaol in Lymington. And although the mayor of Lymington petitioned many times for her to be taken to another place – or beheaded, or set free, or anything so long as the indefatigable lady could be removed from
his
charge – it was not until October that the council agreed that, although a traitor, the lady represented no actual danger to the state. After her release, while Albion had never ceased to profess his personal loyalty to her, she never felt quite the same about him. And the following year she had taken ship and gone to visit her daughter Catherine whose husband Don Diego had been lost – no one knew
exactly how – in the great disaster of the Armada. That poor Don Diego had been safely buried by her son, the first night she had been in gaol, deep in the Forest where he would never be found, was something she never imagined.

It was hardly surprising that she remained with her daughter in Spain; and if, after failing to answer her summons that he join her there, Clement Albion forfeited any hope of inheriting her fortune, he was philosophical about it. ‘I really think’, he once confessed, ‘that I’d give up one of my coppices just to make sure she never returned.’

Albion’s own fortune remained modest, however, but that of his friends Thomas and Helena Gorges enjoyed a spectacular increase. For Queen Elizabeth looked kindly upon their request and granted them the hulk. By the time they had quietly emptied its contents, Sir Thomas Gorges and his wife the marchioness realized that they had one of the greatest fortunes in the south of England.

‘And now’, Helena joyfully declared, ‘you can build your house at Longford, Thomas.’

It was not until nearly two years later that Albion was invited to accompany them up to the big estate below Sarum. ‘The house isn’t quite finished yet, Clement,’ his host told him, ‘but I’d like you to see it.’

They had certainly chosen a beautiful site, Albion thought, as they came to the lush parkland down by the Avon. But what no one had prepared him for, and which caused him first to gasp and then to burst out laughing, was the design.

For there, in the tranquil peace of an inland Wiltshire valley, built on a huge scale, with handsome windows instead of embrasures, was a massive triangular fortress. ‘By all the saints, Thomas,’ he cried, ‘it’s Hurst!’

It was indeed. The great country house, which Gorges called Longford Castle, was an almost exact replica of the triangular coastal fortress by the Forest. In memory of the Spanish hulk and its cargo of silver he had even had carved,
high over the entrance, a depiction of Neptune reclining cheerfully in a ship with his trident sloped over his shoulder, on each side of which was a caryatid, one with his face and the other with his wife’s carved upon them. You had to admire his cheerful humour.

‘Helena insists that Swedish castles are all triangular and that the carving depicts her Viking ancestors,’ he said with a wink.

Swedish castle or gunnery fort, whatever you thought it was, the great triangular mansion would long remain one of the most eccentric country houses in England.

And if perhaps thereafter, Albion felt an occasional pang of jealousy at his aristocratic friends’ good fortune, he had to confess that, thanks to Gorges and Helena, his loyalty was never questioned again. He was even able, with a good conscience, to expropriate a considerable quantity of Her Majesty’s timber in the course of his subsequent career.

Jane married Puckle.

Nick Pride was completely astonished and so was everyone else. ‘If I hadn’t been stuck up at Malwood at the beacon, it would never have happened,’ he said.

‘If she was going to do a thing like that,’ said his mother, ‘you’re better off without her.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Nick. ‘It’s like she was under a spell, I reckon.’ Which didn’t make much sense.

Jane’s parents weren’t too pleased about it either. In fact, when they got married Jane’s mother didn’t want to give her the little wooden cross she’d always promised her. But in the end, not wanting to quarrel with her, she did. And Jane wore it like a talisman.

The great Armada storm did not only change the lives of men; here and there it made small alterations in the greater life of the Forest too.

It was deep on a night, when the Spanish galleons were
tossing helplessly in the northern seas, that the wind chose to race with a particular urgency through the glade by the miraculous Rufus tree. The branches of the great tree bent and shook. The myriad life forms in its crevices clung or crouched deeper into their shelters. Tiny organisms, minute particularities, flew off into the moving darkness of the wind, carried into chaos. All around, tall trees swayed, bent, oak leaves and acorns rattling in the furious tearing and buffeting of the wind, which howled and gusted and whooshed in the blackness.

But the roots of the miraculous tree were as wide as its branches and even though, on this wild Armada night, the upper world might have succumbed to madness, the lower world of the tree was silent, still, unmoved by the frantic waving of its branches.

Nearby, however, just inside the neighbouring wood, a different oak, only two centuries old, had grown up in close company with other oaks and beech trees, tall and straight. Its canopy was therefore very much smaller; its roots smaller in like measure.

And so it was, in the great turning and wrenching of the howling wind, that suddenly, dragged clean out of the ground by nature’s blind forces, this tall oak crashed down through its neighbours and smashed, a falling giant, to the Forest floor.

It is an awesome thing when an oak tree is torn down, but also beneficial. For the broken sections of the tree’s canopy, its great network of branches, lie like so many protective cages upon the ground. Within these cages for a year or two a new shoot may grow because the deer and other creatures that prey upon saplings cannot reach it.

Two cages of this kind fell upon that stormy night. And in the coming acorn fall, after so many years in which its children all had been wasted, two acorns from the miraculous tree would lie in the leaf mould within these oaken cages and take root, and grow.

What’s a life? Not a continuum, certainly. A collection of memories, perhaps; only a few.

She could just recollect old Clement Albion. She had been only four when he died, but she still remembered her grandfather. Not a face, exactly, but a quiet, benign presence in a Tudor house with big timber-framed gables. That must have been the old Albion House, she realized; not her Albion House.

Her Albion House began on a summer day.

It was very warm. It must have been late morning; perhaps it was a Saturday. She did not know. But they had walked down, just the two of them, from the old church at Boldre – just she and her father. She was eight at the time. They walked along the lane on the east side of the river and turned down the track into the wood. There were a number of young beech trees, saplings mostly, mixed with the oak and ash. The sun was slanting through the light-green lattice of the canopy; the saplings spread their leaves like trails of vapour through the underwood; birds were singing. She was so pleased that she had started to skip; her father was holding her hand.

They saw the house when they came round the bend in the track. The red-brick walls were nearly up. One of the two gables had already been refaced; the old oak roof timbers exposed their bare framework to the blue sky. The dusty site looked peaceful in the warm sun. A few men were quietly working on the upper storey; the clink of bricks
being tapped into place was the only sound that disturbed the quiet.

They had stopped and stood there together, looking at the scene for a little while; then her father had said: ‘I’m building this house for you, Alice. This will be your very own and no one shall take it away from you.’ Then he had looked down and smiled, and squeezed her hand.

She had looked up and thought that her father must love her very much if he was building a whole house for her. And she experienced a moment – perhaps there are just one or two in a lifetime – of perfect happiness.

It wasn’t a big house. It was only a little larger than the old Tudor house of her grandfather and his father before him. Built in red brick, in a simple Jacobean style, it certainly qualified as a small manor house; yet hidden away, in a modest clearing in the middle of the woods, it had almost the air of an isolated grange or hunting lodge. To Alice it was magical. It was her house; because her father loved her.

Of course, he had hoped to have a son. She understood that now; but ten years had passed since that summer’s day.

Of Clement Albion’s two sons, William and Francis, it was her father William, the elder, who had done better. In fact, he had done brilliantly. As a young man, in the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, he had gone up to London to study law. William had worked hard. It was a litigious age; a clever lawyer could do well. And when, fifteen years after the great Armada, the old queen had died and been succeeded by her cousin, King James of Scotland, the opportunities for amassing money had grown even greater.

For if James Stuart had one idea when, as a middle-aged man, he became King James of England, it was to have a good time. He’d never had any fun before. Son of the ill-fated Mary Queen of Scots – whom he’d scarcely even known – the dour Scots Presbyterians who had thrown out his mother brought him up to rule according to their way of
thinking and kept him on a tight rein. So when at last he got the throne of England as well, he was anxious to make up for lost time.

The liberated Scottish king’s ideas of fun turned out to be curious. A taste for pedantic scholarship – he was really quite learned and could be witty – led him to develop a full-blown theory that kings had a God-given right to do whatever they liked. Whether he truly came to believe this piece of startling nonsense or whether he was just amusing himself, no one has ever been sure. Another taste of this father of several children, which now became increasingly obvious, was his embarrassing, sentimental and even tearful passion for pretty young men. By his last years, court functions were apt to degenerate into a shambles of kissing and fondling these ‘sweet boys’. His third taste, which God knows he’d never been able to enjoy in the north, was a love of extravagance. Not the great displays and festivities in which (for someone else was always paying) Queen Bess had taken such delight: King James’s court favoured simple, gross excess. The feasts were often just a competition to see how much food could be conspicuously wasted. But even this was nothing compared with the licence given to the king’s friends to make free of the public purse. Old nobility like the Howards, or new like the family of the pretty boy Villiers, it was all the same: sales of offices and contracts, bribery, outright embezzlement. Everyone was at it.

Where rogues are stealing and fools spending, a wise man can surely make a fortune. William Albion had done so. By the time James’s small, shy son Charles had come to the throne in 1625, Albion had returned to the Forest a rich man. He had also married well – a modest heiress a dozen years his junior. His seat was a handsome estate in the Avon valley called Moyles Court – which contained, as it happened, the lands of his distant ancestor, Cola the Huntsman. Then he had Albion House, in the centre of the Forest, from his father; there were further holdings on
Pennington Marshes; he also owned most of the village of Oakley.

Albion House he had rebuilt for Alice. The rest, he had hoped, would go to his son. But although his young wife had given him several more children, all had died in infancy. Time had passed. Then it was too late. Last year his wife had died, but William Albion had no wish to start another family at the age of sixty.

Alice was eighteen now. She was to inherit it all.

William had paused before making this decision. After all, there was his younger brother to consider.

Technically, by title, all the land he had was William’s to dispose as he wished. Old Clement, he felt sure, would have wanted him to give something to Francis; and if he hadn’t always promised Albion House to Alice he might have let Francis have that. But there was a further consideration.

What had Francis ever done to deserve it? For years, despite his father’s help and encouragement, he had drifted, never really worked. He was in London still. He had become a merchant, but not a very successful one. William was fond of Francis, but he could not quite restrain the impatience of the successful man for an unsuccessful brother. He gave, without even knowing it, a tiny shrug when Francis’s name was mentioned. So it seldom was. With the logic typical of the man who had made money, he reasoned that it was a waste of time to give it to someone who had not. Or, to put it more kindly, should his desire to keep the family name in the Forest cause him to dispossess the daughter he loved? No. Francis must fend for himself. Alice was the sole heiress.

It had come as rather a surprise to her that a few months before, when discussing in a general way the men she might marry, her father had mentioned one name with particular favour: John Lisle.

They had met him at a gathering of a number of local gentry families in the Buttons’ fine house near Lymington.
He was a few years older than she and recently a widower. He had children. He had struck her as a sensible, intelligent man, although perhaps a little too earnest. Her father had talked to him more than she had.