The Forest (94 page)

It also turned out that Mr West liked to race horses, to hunt and to fish.

When the dessert course had been served, Mr West proposed that instead of the men sitting over port, they should all retire to the library; which clearly suited Aunt Adelaide, who said she hoped he would forgive her if, at her age, she did not linger long.

‘But I should like to see something of the house, Mr West,’ she said, ‘for strangely enough, the place always being empty, or tenanted by people who seldom stayed, I have never been round it before.’

‘Why then,’ their kindly host said, rising, ‘if you will forgive the fact that I have not yet had time to do much to
the place, let us explore it together.’ And taking a candlestick in one hand himself, and calling to the footmen to bring more, he led them all out into the hall.

There were two smaller formal rooms besides the library on the ground floor. The decorations were what one would expect in a manor house of the Georgian period, but somewhat faded. The better furniture had been brought by Mr West, but some of the pictures and a few old tapestries had come with the house and evidently dated from the century before; so there was a hint of the Jacobean era in the place, which reminded Fanny of the darker intimacy of Albion House.

When they had done looking at these rooms, it seemed to her that it was time to leave; but her aunt was not quite finished. ‘What lies upstairs?’ she enquired.

‘A landing and small gallery, and a parlour,’ Mr West replied, ‘and the bed chambers, of course. But they are hardly touched as yet, I fear, and are scarcely fit to be seen.’

‘May we not look, Mr West?’ the old lady asked. ‘As I am here, I confess I am most curious.’

‘As you like.’ He smiled. ‘If the stairs …’

‘I go upstairs every day,’ she replied, ‘do I not, Fanny?’ So up they all went, at a slow pace, Adelaide upon Mr West’s arm, two footmen carrying candlesticks, and the vicar discreetly following Adelaide like a shadow, a step below, in case she should fall. Up on the landing they paused for a moment, then Mr West went forward and opened one of the chamber doors, which swung with a soft creak.

It was pitch-dark inside, but as the footmen went in with the candles, faint shapes could be seen: a tall four-poster bed with heavy old curtains in tatters; the faint glow from a polished oak chair, the ghostly flicker of reflected candlelight in a blackened looking-glass.

‘I really think no one has touched these rooms in almost a century,’ Mr West declared. The next bedchamber was
the same and, having seen it, Aunt Adelaide signalled that she was ready to descend again.

They were just coming to the head of the stairs when, down a short passage, the old lady caught sight of a large portrait in a heavy gilt frame facing them, but whose lineaments were hidden in the shadows. Seeing her peer towards it, Mr West obligingly bade one of the footmen to hold the candles closer and by their light there now emerged a striking image.

He was a tall, saturnine and darkly handsome man. He had been painted three-quarter length and his clothes suggested that the picture must be about a century old. His long dark hair, falling to below his shoulders, was his own. His hand rested upon the hilt of a heavy sword and he stared out at them with the cold, proud and somewhat tragic air that is often found in those who were friends to the Stuarts.

‘Who is that?’ Adelaide asked.

‘I do not know,’ Mr West admitted. ‘It was here when I came.’ He went over to the picture with a candle and searched the base of the frame. ‘There is a label,’ he said, ‘but it is hard to read.’ He studied it a moment. ‘Ah,’ he called out, ‘I think I have it. This gentleman is …’ He struggled a moment more. ‘Colonel Thomas Penruddock.’

‘Penruddock?’

‘Of Compton … Compton Chamberlayne. Does that mean anything to you?’

Of course. The former Penruddocks of Hale, Fanny realized, must have been responsible. But who could have known that they had a portrait of their kinsman, or that they would have left it behind like this? What ill fate had arranged this ghastly shock for them?

The effect upon Aunt Adelaide was terrible to see. The old lady went white and grasped the oak banister of the staircase as though she might stagger. She let out a tiny moan and seemed to sag as Fanny moved swiftly to her side. But never had Fanny been so moved, or so proud of her
aunt as, not wishing to embarrass their host, she righted herself and bravely replied: ‘The name is familiar to me, Mr West. The Penruddocks owned this house a long time ago. And now,’ she continued, taking Fanny’s arm, I should like to go down. I must thank you, Mr West, for a most agreeable evening.’

So Fanny took her safely down into the hall and only she was aware that her aunt was still shaking.

But as the carriage was being brought round, it was the turn of sharp-eyed old Adelaide to look at Fanny and softly enquire: ‘Are you quite well, child? You look pale.’

‘Yes, Aunt Adelaide, I am well,’ she answered with a smile.

Yet in truth she was not, although she had no desire to tell her aunt the reason why. For the picture of Colonel Penruddock had been only too familiar to her: so much so that it had been all she could do not to gasp out loud when it emerged in the candlelight.

The figure and face were those of Mr Martell. To the life.

Caleb Furzey had set out at dawn on Wednesday morning from Oakley. The journey to Ringwood was one that he made every month or so to visit the market there. Sometimes he had piglets to sell, or some illicit venison. He would arrive by mid-morning, take his horse and cart to the inn, wander about in the market and, sooner or later, encounter one of the Ringwood Furzeys. By the end of the afternoon, he would be sitting in the inn, drinking and talking with anyone who cared to do so. Towards sunset, or even after dark, his cousins or the innkeeper would load him on to his cart and, while he slept in the back, the horse, who knew the way quite as well as he did, would walk slowly along the track past Burley and over Wilverley Plain and so take him home.

Given his superstitious nature and the vaguely mysterious reputation that Burley had always possessed,
Caleb Furzey might have hesitated to drive past Burley on a night when the moon was full, but today, as he had proudly told his neighbours some time before, was a special occasion. It was the fiftieth birthday of one of his Ringwood cousins. ‘And if I ain’t there,’ he had told a surprised neighbour, ‘they say it won’t be a proper party at all.’

So it was with great expectations of family warmth and cheerful drinking that he was crossing the Forest now. He was up on Wilverley Plain when he saw the Albions’ carriage returning and, as they passed, he saluted the occupants respectfully enough.

The red sun was already sinking over Beaulieu Heath that evening when Wyndham Martell began to ride across it. He had just spent an interesting two hours with Mr Drummond of Cadland, but now it was time to return. Indeed, he was going to be somewhat late for Mrs Grockleton’s ball.

Hardly anyone was going to be there, as far as he could gather. As Martell gazed across the open Forest before him he saw it, very naturally, through the eyes of the gentry. And to the gentry, although the ordinary Forest folk did not realize it, the whole Forest was just a kind of lake. There were the Mill and Drummond families in the east, various others along the coast; in the centre the Morants and the Albions; there were landed families around the north of the Forest and the estates down the Avon valley, like Bisterne, on its eastern border. But as far as their social world was concerned, the forest villages and hamlets, and even the busy town of Lymington, scarcely existed. ‘There’s no one there,’ they would say, without the least sense of incongruity. Thus Mrs Grockleton’s desire to tempt the members of this class into her social orbit was not mere snobbery, but a more primeval instinct: she wanted, quite simply, to exist.

Her hopes that the Burrards would come were going to
be disappointed. When she had heard he was calling upon Mr Drummond of Cadland, she had sent an urgent message through Louisa begging him to bring that gentleman and his entire family with him if he could – a suggestion Martell had quietly ignored. But the Tottons were going, and he had promised to accompany them. And besides, Fanny Albion was going to be there.

Why hadn’t Wyndham Martell been to see Fanny?

On the face of it his excuses might be reasonable enough. He had come there to get to know Sir Harry Burrard and he wished to place himself at that gentleman’s disposal. Indeed, Sir Harry had kept him quite busy, both in conversations with himself and in meetings with other people of local importance like Mr Drummond. It was surely right to attend to these matters first and it would certainly have been wrong to raise Fanny’s hopes with the prospect of a meeting that might have to be deferred. There was, besides, another problem. It was by no means clear that he would be welcome if he did call at Albion House and he wasn’t sure he really wanted to be thrown out a second time. Seeing Fanny, therefore, was not without complications.

But couldn’t he at least have sent her a message of some kind during all the days he had been there? He could have and he hadn’t.

The truth was – and he knew it perfectly well – he had deliberately kept her waiting.

He liked her, certainly. No, he conceded, he liked her very much. She was kindly and intelligent. She was wellbred. She came from an ancient family and she was a modest heiress. If he were to marry her, it might not be called a brilliant match, but then, as he had overheard a young blood remark jealously in London a week before: ‘With two fine estates, that damned Martell can marry anyone he pleases and still look a hero.’

If he secured one of the Lymington parliamentary seats and married the heiress of the Albion estate he had no doubt
that his father and his friends would say he had done well, and he wouldn’t deny that such things were important to him. And if, perhaps, secretly he yearned for something more than such conventional pleasures, he supposed his own political career might provide it.

There was something else he liked about her too. She was modest and she had not attempted to captivate him. Many women in London had tried to do so; it had been flattering at first but soon became a burden. He didn’t mind when some cheeky girl like Louisa Totton set her cap at him, because, whatever her drawbacks, he didn’t think she was sophisticated enough to deceive him much, and she was amusing. But Fanny was an entirely different case. Fanny had a simpler, purer nature, as well as being more intelligent.

And she was waiting for him. If he chose – and he wasn’t sure he did, yet – she was waiting to be his. He did not fear competition. He liked to play and win. But in the matter of marriage, if there were competitors, there was always the chance that the woman’s heart had been divided. And Mr Wyndham Martell wanted a heart that belonged to him and him alone – first to last.

He did not care for games, therefore, in matters of the heart. Unless, of course, it was he who was playing them. Every man knew that if a woman is waiting for you it is no bad thing to make her wait a little longer.

She would be there tonight at Mrs Grockleton’s ball, waiting.

Some people might have said there were too many plants. But the infallible maxim had been applied: if there is any doubt about the appointments of a room or the quality of the guests, then fill the place with flowers. And, so far as the September season allowed, this was what Mrs Grockleton had done. Every imperfection was masked by a late rose or a shrub. The entrance to the Lymington Assembly Rooms
this evening might have been mistaken for a plant house.

‘Mr Grockleton,’ she declared as, accompanied by her husband and her children, she surveyed the verdant scene, ‘I am quite in a flutter.’ And if a stout lady in a ball gown can be said to be fluttering, she was. ‘We have refreshments, dancing, cards. I’m sure I’ve done my best. And the guests are …’ She trailed off.

The guests were what in social terms might be described as mixed. Their core, naturally, was provided by the young ladies of her academy. The dance, officially, was for them. They gave Mrs Grockleton her cover. They, their parents and their brothers were the participants, she the presiding headmistress. Were the Burrards to come and not to care for the company of some of the parents there, it would be churlish of them indeed to be ungracious to the local school’s young ladies or to insult the headmistress. If she could not quite resist trying to make small social sorties beyond this defensible position, she could at least fall back upon it.

A huge asset were the French officers. Glamorous, undeniably aristocratic and God knows – although there was no need to say it – only too glad to go anywhere that offered dancing and free food, the Frenchmen would dance with the tradesmen’s daughters and speak to Mr Martell as equals. She would happily have entertained a hundred regiments upon such terms. ‘It will really seem’, she said to her husband, ‘as if Versailles has come to Lymington tonight.’

But even so, unless a romance should develop between a French aristocrat and one of the girls, the Frenchmen ultimately were pawns in the grand game of connections she meant to play.

Could the town’s fashionable doctor be introduced to Mr Martell? Surely, yes. Some of the other girls’ merchant parents? Probably not. The encounter she dreamed of was that of the blessed discovery. If, say, the Burrards were to
come and meet some other major family, and note that she was already their friend – why, then, they would accept her too. Thus, if Mr Martell brought Mr Drummond, Mr Drummond would find that she knew the Albions. And, of course, if she could then have got herself into Cadland and met the Burrards there … ‘These are connections, Mr Grockleton,’ she would explain. ‘It is all a question of making connections.’ Perhaps a quarter of Mrs Grockleton’s huge mental energy was expended in dreaming about discoveries and connections. ‘Whoever comes,’ she said – by which of course she meant only people like the Drummonds or the Burrards – ‘they will find the Tottons and ourselves and the Albions and Mr Martell all friends together. Just so long as it all goes well.’