The Forest (68 page)

It was his son George who had brought up the matter. Furzey had two sons: William, who had married a girl over in Ringwood and gone to live there, and George, who had stayed at Oakley. When Furzey died, George would take over the smallholding, so naturally he had an interest in the business. Furzey had heard about the coming registration of claims that spring and wondered if he ought to be doing
something. Since he hated this sort of thing, though, and remembered the previous occasion with embarrassment, he had tried to put it out of his mind.

Then one evening George had come home with a worried look on his face. ‘You know this register of claims? Stephen Pride says we were never on it, Dad. Is that right?’

‘Stephen Pride says that, does he?’

‘Yes, Dad. This is serious.’

‘What does Stephen Pride know?’

‘You mean he’s got it wrong?’

‘’Course he has. I fixed all that. Years ago.’

‘You sure, Dad?’

‘’Course I’m sure. Don’t you worry about that.’

‘Oh. That’s all right then. Had me worried.’

So George had stopped worrying and Gabriel Furzey had started.

It had to be all right, though, didn’t it? A commoner’s rights were his, weren’t they? Always had been, long before all this writing of things down. All through the spring and summer Furzey had meant to do something about it; week after week he had put it off. He had half expected Alice or her steward to come and check the village; but Oakley was just the same now as it had been thirty-five years ago, so they probably assumed there was nothing to alter. Alice Lisle had many things to think about; she had probably forgotten about Furzey’s failure to turn up all those years ago. The court had met, but he had heard that Alice was not presenting her claims until later. The court had met again. But now time had run out. He had to do something. He rode up to the house.

As it happened, his timing could not have been better.

John Hancock the lawyer would be presenting Alice’s and numerous other landowners’ claims before the court. As Furzey stood before him with his hat in his hand, he understood the situation at once. ‘The claims for Mast and Pasture will not be a difficulty,’ he reassured the villager.
‘Nor, I think, will the right of Turbary. These clearly belong to your cottage. However,’ he continued, ‘the right of Estovers is not so straightforward.’ And when Furzey looked mystified and mumbled that he’d always had that right the lawyer explained: ‘You may think you have, but I shall have to examine the records.’

The ancient rights of the Forest folk, although they derived from common practices that went back into the mists of time, were by no means as simple as might be supposed. The common rights in the Forest belonged not to a family but to the individual cottage or holding. Some cottages had some rights, some had others. The right of Estovers – of collecting wood – was especially valuable and had been granted back in Norman times only to the most important village tenants, those who held their dwelling by the tenure known as copyhold. The Pride smallholding in Oakley, for instance, had always been a copyhold. Down the centuries, other villagers without copyholds had often claimed, or assumed they had, the right of Estovers and some had got away with it for so long that no one ever questioned it. From time to time, however, some new attempt was made to restrict this practice of helping oneself to the Forest’s underwood; and the rule which applied to Furzey now stated that he might claim the right of Estovers only if the cottage – the ‘messuage’ was the ancient legal term – he occupied had been built before a certain date in the reign of Queen Elizabeth – an arcane dispensation of which Furzey himself had never even heard.

The estate records were kept at Albion House. Hancock knew where they were and, as he had nothing special to do until Alice returned from her mission, he thought he might as well see what he could find. It was the sort of burrowing the lawyer rather enjoyed. ‘When did your family first occupy your holding?’ he enquired.

‘My grandfather’s day,’ Furzey told him. ‘We was in
another cottage before then. Always in Oakley, though,’ he added firmly, in case it mattered.

‘Quite. Sit and rest.’ The lawyer gave him a professional smile. ‘You don’t mind waiting, do you? I’ll see what I can find.’

The hunt had lasted less than a quarter of an hour. Stephen Pride still couldn’t quite believe it.

The thing had been beautifully managed, too. The king had been placed in a perfect spot in a glade. He was armed with the traditional bow. His ladies were grouped behind him. Pride and the Forest men, aided by the gentlemen keepers and two of the courtiers, drove some deer through and the king, in the most cheerful manner, loosed an arrow, which shot quite close over one of the deer before embedding itself in a tree.

‘Well shot, Sire,’ cried one of the courtiers, while Charles, without the slightest show of disappointment, turned to his ladies for approval.

Stephen Pride, riding past an instant later, could have sworn he heard Nellie cry: ‘I hope you’re not going to hurt any of those poor little deer, Charles.’ And after a moment or two, just as they were about to begin another drive, there was a shout: ‘To Bolderwood!’ And to the utter astonishment of the Forest men, the whole party prepared to ride back to the lodge, where refreshments were awaiting them. Did all kings, Stephen wondered, get bored so quickly?

But Charles II was not bored at all. He was doing what he liked best, which was to learn how things worked, with a shrewder eye than people supposed, and to flirt with pretty women. And an hour afterwards he was quite happily doing the latter when he observed, with no great pleasure, two figures, cut, it seemed, from the same brown cloth, riding towards him. Who the devil, he murmured to the Master Keeper, were they? Alice Lisle, he was informed. The child was her daughter.

‘Shall I send them away, Sire?’ Howard enquired, as he turned to meet them.

‘No,’ came the answer, with a sigh, ‘although I wish you could make them vanish.’

She had done her best, Charles saw at once, to make herself agreeable. Her reddish hair, streaked with grey was parted in the middle: she had curled and combed it to try to give it more body. Her plain dress was long out of fashion, but the cloth was good. She had made a little concession to him by wearing a lacy cravat. She looked what she was: a Puritan gentlewoman, a widow secretly sad that she had grown a little hard – not the king’s type at all. But he felt slightly sorry for her. The small girl looked much more promising, though: fairer than her mother; eyes more blue than grey; a twinkle there, perhaps.

So when Howard returned and murmured that the widow Lisle had come to beg a favour, Charles gave her a long, cool look and then remarked: ‘You and your daughter shall join our party, Madam.’

Bolderwood was a charming spot. Situated nearly four miles west of Lyndhurst, by the edge of open heath, it consisted of a paddock, a little inclosure of trees, including an ancient yew tree, and the usual outbuildings. The main house was quite modest, a simple lodge, really, where a gentleman keeper lived. Nearby, beside a pair of fine oak trees, was the small but pleasant cottage that went with Jim Pride’s job as underkeeper. As the day was fine, the refreshments had been set out in the open under the shade of the trees.

Dishes of sweetmeats, venison pie, light Bordeaux wine: all were offered Alice and her daughter as they sat on the folding stools provided. The king and some of the ladies lounged on rolled blankets draped with heavy damasks. It was a scene typical of the Restoration, as Charles II’s reign was often called: courtly, amusing, easygoing, louche. Alice understood at once that the king meant to punish her a little
by making her take part in it and she shrewdly guessed that he might deliberately steer the conversation into areas designed to shock her. For the time being, nobody took any notice of the visitors at all, however, and so she was free to listen and observe.

They represented, of course, everything that she and John Lisle had fought against. Their cavalier clothes, their immoral ways said it all. She might, she suspected, have been at the court of the Catholic King of France. The stern, moral rule that the Cromwellians at least aimed at was wholly foreign to these pleasure seekers. Yet, if she didn’t approve, she quite enjoyed their wit.

At one point the conversation turned to witchcraft. One of the ladies had heard there were witches in the Forest and asked Howard if it was true. He didn’t know.

The king shook his head. ‘Every disagreeable woman is accused of magic in our age,’ he remarked. ‘And I’m sure a great many harmless creatures are burned. Most magic is nonsense anyway.’ He turned to one of the gentlemen keepers. ‘Do you know this spring my cousin Louis of France sent me his court astrologer? Said he was infallible. Pompous little man, I thought. So I took him to the races.’ Alice had heard of the king’s latest passion for racing horses. At Newmarket Races he’d mingle with the crowds just like a common man. ‘I had him there all afternoon and, do you know, he couldn’t predict a single winner! So I sent him straight back to France the next morning.’

Despite herself, Alice burst out laughing. The king gave her a sidelong look and seemed about to say something, but then apparently changed his mind and ignored her again. The conversation turned to his oak plantation. Admiration was expressed.

Then Nellie Gwynn turned her large, cheeky eyes on the monarch. ‘When are you going to give me some oak trees, Charles?’ It was well known that the king had given an entire felling of timber to one young lady of the court a
few years back, presumably as a gift for favours received.

The king returned his mistress’s gaze sagely. ‘You have the royal oak, Miss, always at your service,’ he replied. ‘Be content with that.’

There was laughter, although not this time from Alice, who now felt a nudge from Betty at her side.

‘What does he mean, Mother?’ she whispered.

‘Never mind.’

‘The trouble with the royal oak, Charles,’ Nellie rejoined, with a tart look towards the elegant young Frenchwoman who was sitting composedly on a small chair, ‘is that it seems to be spreading.’ From this Alice concluded that the king had also been turning his eye in the French lady’s direction, but he seemed not in the least abashed about it.

Looking bleakly at the proud lady in question he replied with a slight crossness: ‘There has been no planting. Yet.’

‘I don’t think much of her, anyway,’ said Nellie.

In the middle of this unseemly exchange King Charles suddenly turned to Alice. ‘You have a pretty daughter, Madam,’ he said.

Alice felt herself tense. She realized instantly that Charles had deliberately chosen this moment and this remark to vex her: the idea, insolently floating in the air, that her God-fearing little daughter might be viewed as a future royal conquest was as offensive as anything he could have said. Not, of course, that he had even implied it. If such a horror arose in her mind, he would say, it only proved her own antagonism towards him. He’d simply said the child was pretty. His game was plain: if she thanked him, she made a fool of herself; if she was insulted she gave him an excuse to send her packing. But always consider, she reminded herself, that my husband killed this man’s father. ‘She is a good child, Your Majesty,’ she replied as easily as she could, ‘and I love her for her kindness.’

‘You rebuke me, Madam,’ the king said quietly and looked down for a moment, before turning back to her
again. She noticed as he did so that his nose, at a certain angle, looked strikingly large and that, with his soft brown eyes, this made him appear surprisingly solemn.

‘I will deal plainly with you, Madam,’ he said seriously. ‘I cannot like you. It is said’, he continued with a trace of real anger, ‘that you cried out with joy at my father’s death.’

‘I am sorry if you heard that, Sire,’ she said, ‘for I promise you it is not true.’

‘Why not? It was surely what you desired.’

‘For the simple reason, Sire, that I foresaw that, one day, it would lead to my husband’s destruction – which it did.’

At this blunt failure to express sorrow for the death of the king’s father, Howard began to rise as though he meant to throw her out; but King Charles gently raised his hand. ‘No, Howard,’ he said sadly, ‘she is only honest and we should be grateful for that. I know, Madam that you have suffered too. They say’, he continued to Alice, ‘that you harbour dissenting preachers.’

‘I do not break the law, Your Majesty.’ Since the law now required that meetings of religious dissenters must be five miles outside any chartered borough, and Albion House was only four from Lymington, this wasn’t quite true.

But to her surprise the king now addressed her earnestly. ‘I’d have you know’, he said, ‘that you will have no cause to fear trouble from me on that account. It is Parliament that makes these rules, not I. Indeed, within a year or two I hope, Madam, to give you and your good friends liberty to worship as you please, so long as all Christians may have equal dispensation.’ He smiled. ‘You may have meeting houses at Lymington, Ringwood, Fordingbridge and I shall be glad of it.’

‘The Catholics, too, might worship?’

‘Yes. But if all faiths are free, is that so bad?’

‘Truly, Sire’ – she hesitated – ‘I do not know.’

‘Think on it, Dame Alice,’ he said and gave her a look
which, at another time and place, might almost have charmed even her. ‘You may trust me.’