The Forest (64 page)

Figures in a landscape, in the misty morning. Monmouth was fleeing. He had only two companions with him now. He needed to find a port from which to sail, somewhere he would not be betrayed. ‘We had better go’, he decided, ‘to Lymington.’

There were other fugitives, too, that July morning, heading in the same direction.

‘But isn’t he everything you have taught me to love?’ Betty was looking at her mother in genuine confusion. ‘You can hardly object to his family,’ she added, ‘since he is an Albion.’

Alice sighed. There had been no news, yet, from the West Country. Was Monmouth about to succeed? The whole business made her fearful. And now her daughter insisted on troubling her with a suitor. She wished the young man, just for a month or two, could be made to disappear.

Peter Albion was a credit to his family. If his grandfather Francis had deserved her own grandfather’s scorn, Francis’s son had done better. He’d become a physician and married a rich draper’s daughter. Young Peter had practised law and, with his parents’ numerous friends to help him, had already, by the age of twenty-eight, established himself as a rising man. He was handsome, with the traditional Albion fair hair and blue eyes; he was industrious; he was clever, thoughtful, ambitious. It was Tryphena who had encountered him and invited him to call; and it was she who summed him up: ‘He looks an Albion, but he’s just like father.’

Perhaps, Alice thought, that was why Betty liked him so much. He fitted the description of the father she’d never known.

But that, unfortunately, was precisely why Alice wanted to discourage him. ‘I’m getting old,’ she told Tryphena. ‘I’ve seen too many troubles.’ Troubles in England; troubles in the family. She did not doubt that the causes her husband had fought for had been just; she was quite sure, when she helped the dissenters, that she did right. But was it all worth it – the fighting, the suffering? Probably not. Peace was worth more, it seemed to her, than any of the small freedoms won in her lifetime. And peace was what she wanted now, for her old age and, above all, for her daughter.

It wasn’t so easy to come by. A couple of years ago, at the time of that stupid plot to assassinate the king and his brother, Tryphena’s husband had been arrested and questioned for days. Why? Not because he had even the faintest connection to the plot, but because of his family associations and friends. Once you were an object of suspicion you would always remain so. It was inevitable.

But for young Betty things could be different. Her youngest child, having lost her father, had missed the joys of early childhood she had known; but the rest would be better: a life of peace and security – the sort of life that she, Alice, had always expected to live in her house in the friendly Forest.

The very day after news of Monmouth’s arrival in the West Country Peter Albion had come to Tryphena’s house to pay his respects to his cousin Alice and her daughter. He had been pleasant company, very polite, but quietly forthright. ‘The English will not tolerate a Catholic king,’ he stated. ‘Nor do I think they should.’ He bowed to Alice as though he clearly expected she would endorse these views. ‘Let us hope Monmouth succeeds.’ He had smiled. ‘I have some friends in that camp, Cousin Alice. I expect word of success at any time. Then, I can assure you, we shall see King James sent packing.’

As he spoke, she had felt herself go cold. It was her own husband again, John Lisle. ‘Do not say such things,’ she cried. ‘This is dangerous.’

‘I should not, I assure you, Cousin Alice,’ he said quietly. ‘Except in such company as this.’

Such company as this; the phrase had terrified her. Was Betty already assumed to be a conspirator? Was Peter Albion going to drag her into that role? ‘Leave us, Sir,’ she begged, ‘and speak no more of this.’

But he had, nonetheless, seen Betty again a few days later. And although she had not liked it, it had been difficult to refuse her kinsman entry to the house. Wisely, he had never made any reference to these dangerous subjects again, but as far as she was concerned the damage was done. She had begged her daughter to have no more to do with him, to no avail. It wasn’t easy: Betty was twenty-four. And she might, that very day, have taken her back to the safety of the Forest if she had not received, this morning, a letter from John Hancock.

Do not, I urge you, return to Albion House. Rebellion has broken out at Lymington. They have sent to you for support already. For God’s sake stay in London and say nothing.

She had hastily torn up the letter and thrown it in the fire.

Say nothing. Would young Peter Albion say nothing? And Betty? She looked at her daughter desperately. ‘Dear child,’ she began softly, ‘if you are not careful we shall soon be hunted.’ She shook her head at the thought of it. ‘Like deer in the Forest.’

Stephen Pride walked slowly past Oakley pond. He was seventy-five, but he certainly didn’t feel it. Tall and lean, he still strode about – more slowly, a bit stiffly perhaps – just as he had all his long life. Common sense told him he wouldn’t live much longer, but whatever cause God had prepared to strike him down, he had no sense of it. ‘I’ve known men live to be eighty,’ he remarked contentedly. ‘Reckon I might.’

It had been one of the small joys of his long life to watch the pond by the hamlet’s green. Its fluctuations were always the same, year after year, with the seasons. By late autumn, after the rains had fallen, the pool was fairly full. In winter it often froze. Two years ago, in the coldest winter Pride could ever remember, the pond had been frozen solid from November to April. Then, when the spring showers came and the warmth of May, the pond’s whole surface would be covered with white flowers, as though the water itself had broken into blossom.

The wonder of the pond was the way it filled. There was no stream, as such, not even a rivulet. But as the rains fell on the nearby heath, somehow, as by a miracle, they drained off invisibly, tiny trickles you hardly saw that gathered by the hamlet into a small snake of water that ran across the green and spread out into the shallow depression beside it.

By summer, however, the pond began to evaporate. The warm heath soaked up any showers that fell upon it. The snake of water disappeared. Day by day the animals cropping the lush grass by the pond’s edge advanced a little further. By the fence month in midsummer the pond was only half its springtime size. By August it was often completely dry. As he looked at it now, two cows and a pony were grazing in the green depression beside the three or four large puddles remaining at its centre.

Stephen Pride was feeling relieved. He had been to Albion House that morning and had just walked back. The news there had been exactly as he’d hoped: Dame Alice was still in London and no word had come to say she was returning. That was good. He’d known and loved Dame Alice all her life, and he didn’t want to see her back at present, not the way things were at Lymington.

Because of his wife and her family, Pride usually knew more than most of the Oakley people about what was going on in Lymington, but nobody could have failed to be aware of the way feeling was running there in the last few years. If the little harbour town had been seething, so had almost every borough in England.

There might be some in the county who still hankered for the old Catholic faith, but the century since the Armada had thinned their ranks greatly by now. As for the townsfolk, they wanted none of it. The merchants and small traders of Lymington had disliked Charles I and distrusted Charles II. A few years ago, when concerns about the Catholic succession had been especially high in Parliament, a rogue named Titus Oates had invented a Catholic plot to depose Charles and put James in his place. The Jesuits were to take over the country; honest Protestants would be murdered. The whole thing was a fiction from start to finish, by which Oates aimed to make himself a rich celebrity. But the English were so afraid of Catholicism by then that they believed it. Hardly a week went by without Oates creating some further tale. Up and down the country people started imagining Jesuits peeping from behind windows or lurking round corners. And the growing port of Lymington was no exception. Half the town was looking for Jesuits. The mayor and his council were ready to arm the citizens.

So when Monmouth had raised his banner for the Protestant cause, Lymington had not hesitated. Within a day the mayor had several dozen men under arms. The local merchants and gentlemen were mostly with him. Pride himself had seen half a dozen local worthies riding past Oakley on their way up to Albion House to seek Alice’s support. A message had already been sent by a swift horseman to Monmouth to assure him: ‘Lymington is with you.’ The afternoon before, there had been a march through the streets with pipes and drums, followed by ale and punch for everyone at the house of one of the merchants. It was like a carnival.

And Stephen Pride the villager, like John Hancock the lawyer, looked on cautiously. ‘Let the townspeople get excited,’ he had told his son Jim. ‘But those of us in the Forest may be wiser. No matter what happens with Monmouth, I’ll still have my cows and you’ll still be underkeeper. I just thank God’, he added, ‘that Dame Alice isn’t here. They’d draw her in whether she wanted it or not.’

He was in a reasonably cheerful mood, therefore, when he caught sight, a hundred yards past the pond, of a group of people listening to an argument. He went towards them.

It wasn’t often you saw the two Furzey boys together. They were actually middle-aged men now and, since Gabriel’s death a few years ago, George Furzey had taken over his cottage; but to Stephen Pride they were still the Furzey boys. God knows they both looked just like old Gabriel. George was a little bigger, but they both bulged at the waist in the same way. And, Stephen thought privately, they were both just as obstinate as their father.

William Furzey had never made much of himself over at Ringwood: he worked for a farmer as a stockman, looking after the cattle. A long way to go for no good reason, it had always seemed to Pride, but then he could never quite approve of anyone who went to live outside the Forest boundary. He’d come over to see George Furzey about something, evidently, and now they were standing side by side like a pair of infuriated bantam cocks. The cause of their fury, he now saw, was his own son.

‘You ain’t got the right,’ George Furzey was protesting, ‘an’ I ain’t going to do it anyway.’ He looked at his brother who was too busy hating Jim Pride to take time off to speak. ‘So that’s that.’

The trouble, as Jim Pride had put it to his father only a week ago, was predictable. ‘George Furzey doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.’

If the Furzeys had never accepted the fact that they hadn’t the right of Estovers – if, to this day, they refused even to acknowledge Alice Lisle with a nod when they saw her and called her a thief – then the one thing that had been intolerable to them was when, a year ago, Jim Pride had been transferred from the post of underkeeper at Bolderwood to that of underkeeper in the South bailiwick.

For Stephen Pride this transfer had been very welcome. Bolderwood was almost nine miles from Oakley, but now he could see his son and his grandchildren almost every day.

For George Furzey, however, Jim’s presence meant something very different, for the underkeeper was responsible for supervising common rights, including that of Estovers. ‘I’m not answering to Jim Pride,’ he had told his family. He wasn’t going to be made a fool of by the Prides. And he had made a point of collecting firewood from the Forest just to prove his point.

Yet even then, matters needn’t have come to a head. Jim Pride hadn’t been an underkeeper for fifteen years without learning some wisdom. If Furzey had quietly taken some underwood when he needed it, Jim would have ignored it. But, of course, George Furzey was incapable of doing that.

Two days ago at the little inn at Brockenhurst, he had announced for everyone to hear: ‘I don’t take no notice of Jim Pride. If I want Estovers I take them.’ Then, looking round in triumph, he added, ‘I’ll take wood for cooper’s timber, too’ and had given everyone a broad wink. The right of Estovers applied only to wood that was to be used by a cottager for his fire. Cooper’s timber was wood that was to be sold for making barrels or fencing, and was illegal.

It was a stupid and unnecessary challenge, and it left Jim Pride with no option. ‘I’ve got to come down on him now,’ he told his father.

So that morning he had arrived at Furzey’s cottage and informed him, as politely as he could: ‘I’m sorry, George, but you’ve been taking wood you aren’t entitled to. You know the rules. You’ve got to pay.’

George and William Furzey looked at old Stephen now – the sight of him, it seemed, only infuriated them more – and after William had taken time, with careful deliberation, to spit on the ground, George summarized his position with a shout: ‘I’ll tell you who’s going to pay, Jim Pride. You’re going to pay. You and that old hag Lisle! You and that witch. You’re the ones that are going to pay.’

With that, the two Furzeys turned and stamped back to their cottage.

Colonel Thomas Penruddock sat on his horse and coolly observed the crowd which, whatever it really felt, showed signs of rejoicing. His cousin from Hale was beside him.

Behind the two Penruddocks was Ringwood church with its broad, cheerful square tower. In front of them was the vicarage with guards on the door. Inside the vicarage, being questioned by Lord Lumley, was the Duke of Monmouth. There was no small excitement in the air. Ringwood had never been at the centre of English history before.

The last two days had been hectic. As soon as it was known that Monmouth was on the run a huge reward – five thousand pounds – had been offered for his capture. Even a sighting would be worth something. Half the south-western counties were out looking for him. Lord Lumley and his soldiers had clattered into Ringwood and had been scouring the New Forest. They had raided several houses in Lymington, where the mayor had already taken ship and fled abroad.

But now Monmouth was captured and unless he could find some way to persuade his uncle, the new King James, to pardon him, he was undoubtedly going to die.