The Forest (76 page)

‘You must be very wise, Mother.’

Alice laughed quietly. ‘How fortunate, when I’m to lose my head this afternoon.’

None of them said anything after that for a little while, each sitting silently with her thoughts.

Finally, it was neither Betty nor her mother, but Tryphena who spoke. ‘They say’, she said thoughtfully, ‘that after a head is severed, life does not instantly depart; but the head remains conscious for a moment or two. It may blink or even try to speak.’

This was greeted with silence.

‘Thank you, dear,’ Alice said softly, after a pause. ‘You are a great comfort to me.’

A further short silence ensued before Alice slowly got up. ‘I am ready to end my life now, my dear children, for I have nothing more to say. Let me embrace you, then you should go. I find I am a little tired.’

They had set up the scaffold in Winchester’s old market place. Half the population of the city had gathered there and many from the Forest too. The Prides were there. So were the two Furzey brothers, although the Prides entirely ignored them.

She looked pale and smaller than the crowd had imagined when they brought her out. Her hair, just a few sad strands of red remaining in the grey, had been scooped up on top of her head and tied, leaving her bare neck looking thin and rather scrawny. There was to be no address on this occasion for she had not wished to make one.

The fact was that Alice was now in something of a daze. A few minutes before, with a large trooper on each side towering above her, she had known great fear. But now, like an animal which, at the end of a long chase, knows that it can do no more, and that the desperate game is up, she had yielded finally to resignation. She felt limp and numb, and she wanted only to get it over.

She scarcely saw the faces as they led her out. She didn’t
see Betty, nor the Prides, nor the Furzeys. She didn’t see, some way off, Thomas Penruddock with a sad, grave face, sitting on his horse.

She saw the block as they helped her kneel down beside it, but scarcely took note of the axe. She saw the wooden boards, clumsily nailed, just below the block as they stretched out her neck upon it. And she realized that there would be a mighty bite, a blow that would crunch through her neck bones as the axe fell.

The axe fell and she was conscious of the huge thud.

It must have been a summer day, as they walked along the lane and turned down the track into the wood. 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; and her father was holding her hand.

There could be no doubt, no doubt of it at all: great things were afoot in Lymington nowadays – indeed, in the whole Forest.

‘And when you think,’ said Mrs Grockleton to her husband, ‘when you think of Mr Morant at Brockenhurst Park with I don’t know how many thousands a year and Mr Drummond now at Cadland, and Miss …’ For a moment her memory failed her.

‘Miss Albion?’

‘Why, yes, to be sure, Miss Albion, who must have a large inheritance …’

It was no doubt part of the divine plan that, having been endowed with an insatiable desire to rise in society, Mrs Grockleton had also been created absent-minded. Only the week before, showing her children to a visiting clergyman, she had told him there were five, pointing them out by name, until her husband had gently reminded her that there were six, causing her to exclaim: ‘Why so there are, indeed! Here’s dear little Johnnie. I had quite forgot him.’

Her ambition, like her absent-mindedness, was quite without malice. It was, for her, a little ladder to a humble heaven. It brought with it, however, certain small peculiarities. Whether it was because she thought it a kind of wit, or whether she supposed it indicated her own roots in some gentle antiquity, she liked to use expressions or exclamations that hearkened from a former time. She would pick these up from time to time and use them for several
years before moving on to others. At present, if she wished to convey something of particular significance, she would say: ‘Methinks …’ Or if she broke a cup, or told a funny story of a vicar getting drunk, she would conclude: ‘Alack-a-day.’ Expressions so dated that you might really suppose she had been present at the court of the merry monarch himself.

She was also the mistress, or at least the devotee, of the meaningful gaze. She would fix you with her dark-brown eyes and give you a look of such arch significance that, even if you had no notion what it meant, you felt privileged. When the look was accompanied by ‘Methinks …’ you really knew you were in for something, quite possibly a state secret.

And when you considered that she was the daughter of a Bristol haberdasher and her husband a Customs officer, these social marvels could only be described as a triumph of the human spirit.

Mrs Grockleton was of medium height, but with a fine display of powdered hair. Her husband was tall and lean with hands curiously like claws. Mrs Grockleton’s intention, which she planned to achieve as soon as she could, was to raise Lymington to the status of a social centre to rival Bath. And then to preside over it.

Samuel Grockleton inwardly groaned. It is not easy for a man to know that his wife is careering unstoppably towards her social doom, especially when he himself, through no fault of his own, must be the cause of the disaster. ‘You must not forget our own position in society, Mrs Grockleton,’ he observed. ‘And given my office, we can never raise our hopes
too
high.’

‘Your position is very respectable, Mr Grockleton. Quite gentlemanly.’

‘Respectable, yes.’

‘Why, Mr Grockleton, I declare you are held in great esteem and affection. Everyone has told me so.’

‘Neighbours are not always truthful.’

‘Oh, fie, Mr Grockleton,’ said his wife cheerfully. And a moment later she was off again, explaining her plans for the future.

You could say what you liked about Mrs Grockleton, but she was never idle. She had not been a month in Lymington when she saw that it had need of an academy for young ladies; and since it happened that a lease was available on the big brick house next to their own, which lay a little way past the church at the top of the High Street, she had persuaded her husband to take it and here she had set up her establishment.

She had been skilful. First she had secured the mayor’s daughter and her best friend whose father, an attorney, belonged to a landed family in the next county. Next she had gone to the Tottons. They lived nowadays in a handsome house just apart from the town. Although Mr Totton was certainly involved in the town’s trade, his sister had married old Mr Albion of Albion House, so the young Tottons and Miss Albion were cousins. Edward Totton was up at Oxford. When Louisa Totton was snared, therefore, Mrs Grockleton could reasonably feel that this advanced the academy into the sphere of the local gentry. At the apex of the merchant families was another, more recently arrived in the area: Mr St Barbe gave his business as grocer, salt and coal merchant, but he was a most gentlemanly and philanthropic man, a pillar of the community. One of the St Barbe girls was duly obtained. Within a few months, by allowing some girls to come for only certain lessons and others, from further off, to board there, Mrs Grockleton had drifted almost twenty young ladies into her academic corral.

The academy had two features of which she was particularly proud. It taught French, which was done by herself. She had acquired this fashionable accomplishment quite humbly as a girl from a French dressmaker in Bristol,
but her fluency certainly reinforced her claims to social authority in Lymington. And while a command of French would undoubtedly be an asset to any of the daughters of Lymington merchants who wanted to shine in the great London houses or the courts of Europe, it was surely an inducement that they could also practise upon the charming young French officers who had recently been stationed in the town.

The second was the art class. The Reverend William Gilpin had not only been the loved and respected vicar of Boldre for two decades; he was also a notable artist, selling his drawings and paintings from time to time for charitable causes. Mrs Grockleton had purchased two and, soon afterwards, when Mr Gilpin arrived to award prizes in the academy, he was astonished to discover it was his own work that the young ladies were instructed to emulate or even copy. The vicar was no fool, but it was hard, after that, to refuse the invitation to deliver a lecture and take a class at the academy once a month; and in fact he rather enjoyed it.

So Mrs Grockleton’s academy grew. Its growth, so far as Mrs Grockleton could manage, was spiral in form – starting with the better families in the town, then sweeping round those whose gentility had taken them to the environs and finally, circling ever wider, like a great, revolving seashell, she hoped to suck young ladies even from the distant manor houses of the gentry into the pleasant vortex of her establishment. Thus Miss Fanny Albion had already come to join her cousin Louisa Totton for the French classes – a triumph that had brought the academic huntress a deep joy – and no doubt there would be others. The one family she had hoped for, and which had so far eluded her, was that of Burrard.

The Burrards were very big in Lymington now. While the Tottons had remained, as it were, at the top of the town, the bolder and now much richer Burrards had long ago acquired a country estate called Walhampton, which lay on
the other side of the river from Lymington. Their generations of marriages into gentry families like the Buttons had entirely established them in that class. But Lymington town was their base of operations and they ran the politics of the place. She had not yet managed to get past the Burrards’ park gates. But one day, she felt sure, she would. Indeed, if all her hopes succeeded, it was inevitable that she must.

For the school was only the beginning. Her plans for Lymington were far larger. ‘I can see it, Mr Grockleton,’ she declared. And indeed she could. On the ridge overlooking Pennington Marshes and the sea, there would be rows of handsome Georgian houses and villas: with its ample supply of clay, the New Forest nowadays boasted a number of thriving brickfields; but in her mind’s eye she saw stone, like that at Bath. Perhaps, she considered, stucco painted white would do. The old medieval houses along the High Street, although still structurally intact, had mostly received squared-off Georgian façades by now. Any lingering medieval gables, she considered, could be quickly covered. The modest bathhouse down by the beach would be converted into something more like the Roman baths at the great spa in the west. The present Assembly Rooms, adjoining the Angel Inn, would of course be quite inadequate for the new resort. Something new, classical and splendid would be needed, up at the top of the hill, she supposed, very near her own house. Well, perhaps she’d be in something grander by then.

Then there was the theatre. It wasn’t bad. Similar playhouses had been set up at Sarum and other western towns. It had a modest pit with wooden benches for the poorer sort, a tier of boxes for the gentry and a gallery of cheaper seats above. During the season, from July to October, you could hear Shakespeare, or one of Mr Sheridan’s comedies, and a varied repertoire of melodramas and tragedies. Lymington theatre usually contrived one or two offerings with a
nautical flavour. No doubt, once the town was fashionable, the theatre could be redecorated. Mrs Grockleton’s only regret was that it should have been near the Baptist chapel which, as far as she was concerned, should be moved well away from the fashionable public’s sight.

No, the only complaint she had about the town lay down by the beach itself. Those salterns, with their grubby little furnaces and windpumps, and the dock where ships from northern Newcastle brought coal – coal of all things! – to fuel the furnaces: something would have to be done about them. The salt pans might still bring profit to the Tottons, but if the fashionable world was to take the waters there, the salterns would have to go.

Was her vision just a fantasy all of her own? Not entirely. The New Forest, after all, was a place with royal connections. For over twenty years the king’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, had been Warden of the Forest; and since his wife wasn’t welcome at court, he had often chosen to stay at Lyndhurst. The Prince of Wales came to stay in the Forest too. But Mrs Grockleton’s hopes grew out of larger considerations.

In the great political calm that had graced Georgian England for several generations now, society itself was changing. A burgeoning commercial empire was bringing the island kingdom huge new wealth. Although land inclosures and new production methods had taken the traditional livelihood from some peasant farmers, the landowners had prospered. In London and the handful of big cities that dotted the vast stretches of rural England, speculators were building handsome Georgian squares. People were moving about. Even the open wastes of the Forest were now crossed by a turnpike road – the first return to such a civilized transport system since Roman times. Like the latter-day Romans they were, the fashionable English classes were going in search of health and leisure. In the West Country the ancient Roman spa of
Bath had been revived and a gracious resort built around its mineral springs. More recently the royal court of King George III, in the belief that it might help cure the king’s bouts of madness, had become interested in the benefits not only of mineral waters but of those of the sea. Several times in recent years King George III had come to the New Forest on his way to the little seaside resort of Weymouth, some forty miles further west along the coast. He had stayed with the Drummonds and the Burrards, and visited the Isle of Wight.