The Forest (43 page)

After a little time, therefore, somewhat strengthened, Albion emerged from the oak to face the dangers of the coming days.

Jane Furzey was happy because she was with Nick Pride who was tall and handsome, and going to marry her when she said yes. She was going to say yes, but not until she had made him wait; that was what every girl did if she could.

‘Make him wait a year, Jane,’ her mother had told her. ‘If he loves you truly, he’ll want you all the more.’

She wasn’t going to give herself to him until they married either. She was going to get married in style. And in this exciting state they went about together often.

It had been kind of Clement Albion to allow her to come with the men this morning. There were just three men including Nick, and herself, bumping along in the little cart, while Albion rode his horse beside them. She was proud that Albion should have selected Nick for such special duties. She dangled her sturdy legs over the back of the cart. She had taken off her sandals. The sun was warm on her legs; the cool, salty air on her bare toes was delicious.

This expedition was rather an adventure and she looked about her with interest. They had already passed Lymington; she had never been down here before.

Jane was sixteen, Nick Pride eighteen. He lived in the village of Minstead, a couple of miles north of Lyndhurst, she in the hamlet of Brook, a mile and a half north of that. Their parents who, like most parents, were wise in these matters, thought they were perfect for each other; and so they were.

During the centuries the Prides had settled in many parts of the Forest, but the Furzeys had mostly stayed down in the south. Except for Jane’s family. For some reason – no one could remember when – the descendants of Adam Furzey had moved up to the Minstead area. ‘The Furzeys up at Minstead don’t get along with the other Furzeys,’ the Forest people would remark. And although in that region, where all the smallholding families intermarried, such differences usually got ironed out, it remained true that the Minstead Furzeys were a bit unusual. During the Wars of the Roses one of them had become a priest; and in the reign of old King Harry another had gone to Southampton. ‘He became a merchant,’ Nick’s father had told him. ‘Did very well, they say.’ The other Furzeys might mutter that the Minstead family thought too much of themselves, but this was no problem for the Prides, who thought well of themselves too. Nick Pride’s father and Jane’s father had always got along well and on the day, ten years ago, when Jane’s father had moved up to Brook, Nick’s father had remarked: ‘I reckon your Jane and my boy Nick would make a nice pair.’ And Jane’s father had agreed and told his wife, who knew it anyway. So there it was.

There was nothing very remarkable about Jane. She had a broad brow, brown hair parted in the middle, deep-blue eyes; she was short, with wide, well-shaped hips. Men were drawn to her. She cooked and baked and sewed; she looked after her little brothers and sisters; she had a dog called Jack who liked to chase squirrels; and there was nothing about the family’s smallholding she didn’t know.

She could also read, which was unusual. No one else in the family could, nor in any of the families like hers in Minstead or Brook. Had her father lived in a city like London as a small merchant or craftsman at this date, he would probably have been able to read. But in the country there was still little need. A rich yeoman with a big farm of his own might be a man of considerable substance but still mark his name with a cross, while the penniless clerk wrote it out in full.

No one had taught her to read. She had just, somehow, picked it up herself, from a Bible she had pored over in Minstead church, and from other written material she had found in visits to local markets. She did not prize this knowledge highly, since it was of little practical use; but it had amused her to learn something new. Nick Pride was rather pleased, though. ‘My wife can read,’ he could hear himself saying. It was an accomplishment, enough to show the world that he had married a superior woman. These things were important to a man.

When they married Jane would not be bringing any gold or jewellery or silken clothes with her: there was no need for such things in the Forest. But there was one small and humble ornament which she had begged and she had been promised for her wedding day.

It was a strange little wooden cross that hung on a string round her mother’s neck. Jane’s father had given it to her when they married.

‘I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s always been in the family,’ he had told her. ‘Hundreds of years, they say.’ He had shaken his head. ‘Funny old thing, really, but my grandfather told me: “You keep hold of that. That’s your birthright.”’

The cedarwood cross with its curious carving had been worn on the skin of so many generations now that it was almost black. But there was something about this family talisman that had always fascinated Jane since she was a little girl. She loved to touch it and hold it in her hand. She would try to decipher its carving as though it might hold some secret meaning. For she felt that it must, even if she could have no idea of the message that had been sent her, by a monkish ancestor, nearly three hundred years before.

She was going to wear it at her wedding.

The cart bumped down the lane and came on to a gravel strand.

‘Look,’ she cried in delight. ‘We’re at the sea.’

Albion looked irritably at the fortress ahead. Why the devil had his good friend Gorges insisted that he bring these men out here, anyway? It was a waste of his time, in his opinion. But behind this bravado lay a deeper apprehensiveness. After his talk with his mother yesterday – he couldn’t help it – he secretly viewed the fortress with a kind of panic.

‘Halloa,’ he cried to the sentry, ‘Albion’s muster.’

‘Pass, sir,’ came the reply.

They had crossed Pennington Marshes, passed the inlet of Keyhaven and now they had started along the track that led out to the end of the mile-long gravel spit opposite the Isle of Wight. On their right was the open sea. Above the sky was blue and seagulls were crying. And just visible at the end of the spit, glinting palely in the sun, lay their destination.

Hurst Castle. It would probably never have been built if it hadn’t been for Henry VIII’s marital troubles. England’s coasts had been threatened with raids, on and off, for over a thousand years. But when the Pope, at one point in his quarrel with Henry, had urged both Spain and her rival France to join forces and attack the heretic island, the king had decided he had better prepare himself and sent commissioners to inspect the coastal defences; and few places were more important than the port of Southampton and the Solent. When they got there, however, and saw the defences, their conclusion was simple: useless.

The most intelligent course was obviously to defend the two entrances to the Solent system so that enemy ships could not enter its huge shelter at all. At the western end this meant a pair of batteries, one on the Isle of Wight near the Needles, the other on the mainland. On the island there was already a ramshackle tower which could be put into service.

And on the mainland coast: ‘God has provided for us.’

The long, curving gravel spit that ran out from below Keyhaven was indeed a perfect God-given site. It ended with a broad platform; it commanded the narrowest part of the channel leading in and out of the Solent. Immediately they ordered an earthwork with gun emplacements – a bulwark. But King Henry wanted something more and soon an ambitious building was going up.

Hurst Castle was a small, squat, stone-built fort. It was an unusual structure, though. For it was neither round nor square but built in the shape of a triangle. At each of its three corners was a stout, semicircular bastion. In the western wall there was an entrance with a portcullis and a drawbridge over a small moat. Over the middle of the triangular fort stood a two-storey tower. Bastions, walls and tower all bristled with cannon. The Spanish, who knew all about it, considered Hurst a formidable obstacle.

And this was the place Albion’s mother expected him to betray. To her, of course, it was not only an obstacle to the true religion; its very stones were an offence.

When King Harry had sold off all the Church’s monastic lands to his friends, Beaulieu had passed into the hands of the noble family of Wriothesley. But many others in the area were keen to benefit from the opportunities of the age and none more so than a prominent Southampton merchant named Mill. An able man, he had already acted as steward of the old Beaulieu estate and was eager to please the king and acquire monastic lands of his own. As it was usual practice for the crown to subcontract important projects like building ships or forts to local entrepreneurs, it was not surprising that, when it came to the new Solent defences, the business should have been put in the capable hands of Mill. He had done an excellent job. The king was delighted. And when asked where he had got so much stone – there being little in the region – he affably replied: ‘From Beaulieu Abbey, of course.’

‘That impious Mill!’ the Lady Albion had exploded. To use the sacred abbey stones to defend the shoreline against the Pope! The fact that plenty of others had been busy dismantling the abbey and even its church, was not something that her son had cared to point out to her.

As they reached the end of the promontory, Albion saw that the drawbridge was lowered and the gate open; and he had no sooner ordered the three men down from the cart than a familiar figure, a man of about his own age with a broad intelligent face, fine grey eyes and thinning hair, which did not detract from his handsomeness, came striding towards him.

‘Clement.’

‘Thomas.’

‘Welcome.’

Thomas Gorges was of ancient lineage and, Albion thought, it showed. He had friends at court. But above all, Cecil and the council trusted him. For that reason he had been chosen to escort Mary Queen of Scots to her final imprisonment. He had also been knighted. And for some years he had been captain at Hurst Castle where, with the threat of invasion imminent, he had been spending a good deal of time. ‘These are your men?’ he enquired. Albion nodded. ‘Good. My master gunner will show them round.’ Apart from Gorges himself and his deputy, there was a considerable garrison at Hurst, headed by the master gunner. ‘I always think’, Gorges went on quietly, ‘that the more you show the men how things are done, the better you fire their loyalty. Come, Clement,’ he continued pleasantly, ‘let us talk.’

As he glanced around him, Albion considered, it would be hard not to be impressed. Two tiers of cannon protruded from embrasures in the bastions and the walls on the seaward sides. There were cannon in the central tower as well. No ship entering the Solent could escape this battery and, as for its defences, not only were the walls thick, but they had been built slightly convex to deflect cannonballs. Even under heavy bombardment, Hurst Castle would be a tough nut to crack.

Gorges grinned. ‘I hope you find everything in good order, Clement.’ There was no question that Gorges had been an excellent custodian. He had added more cannon, had the central tower rebuilt and greatly strengthened, trained the garrison admirably. He was so highly regarded by the council now that, although the lord-lieutenant of the country was nominally in charge of the county’s musters, if Gorges wanted anything – arms, materials or men, he got them at once. ‘So tell me, Woodward,’ he enquired genially, ‘when am I getting my elms?’

It was a curious thing, Albion reflected, that although you built ships of oak, if you used it in a place like Hurst, open to the salty sea breeze, oak timber soon rotted. When Gorges needed new mountings for the cannon, therefore, he had advised him to use elm, which lasted better. ‘I marked the trees last week. They’ll be cut and timber delivered in ten days.’

‘Thank you. Now tell me about these men you’ve brought.’

‘I’m putting Pride in charge. He’s young but trustworthy. Intelligent. Pleased with the responsibility and anxious to prove himself. He’ll be on his mettle. The other two are good fellows. They’ll be all right.’

‘How wise you are. I shall speak with them at once. By the way,’ he added casually, ‘did I tell you that Helena is here?’ Helena: his wife. Albion felt a glow of pleasure. He was fond of Helena. ‘She’s been waiting for you. Why don’t you talk to her while I see the men?’

Albion paused. The suggestion was so charmingly made that he might not have given it a second thought. Instead, he frowned. He had never been quite sure why it was necessary to bring these men down here at all when he could perfectly well have told them their duties up at Minstead. ‘Surely, Thomas, if you are seeing my men, you wish me to be present?’

A slight blush. A look of embarrassment, quickly covered, but not quite quickly enough. What did it mean? ‘Look, here she comes. Do walk with her a little, Clement. She has been so anxious to see you.’ And before Albion could argue, his friend had gone, leaving him alone.

Nick Pride felt pretty pleased with himself. They were standing in the master gunner’s chamber, which had a fine view over the Solent, when Thomas Gorges came in. The aristocrat had spoken to them very civilly for a few minutes, explaining the importance of their duties and Nick had observed him with interest.

He was impressed. If Albion was a gentleman, he sensed that this man was something more. He came from another world, even if Nick did not quite know what that world might be. Putting the two men side by side in his mind, he decided that Albion needed Gorges, but Gorges didn’t need Albion. I reckon that’s what it is, he thought.

‘So, Nicholas Pride,’ Gorges now said. ‘I hear you are the guardian of the beacon.’

‘Yes, Sir,’ he cried, swelling out his chest. ‘I am.’

The idea of planting beacons of fire on hilltops to alert the countryside of an enemy approaching went back to classical times; but it was the Tudors who had developed them into a regular system in England. A beacon lit at the south-western tip of England could start a chain reaction of coastal fires that would warn London within a couple of hours. At the same time as the message was passed along the coast, however, a network of secondary beacons, radiating inland, picked up the message and alerted the musters in the local settlements to assemble and go to their muster places to defend the coast.