The Forest (33 page)

It was a cast of mind that kept him calm and even-tempered in adversity: a strength, on the whole though his wife had sometimes thought it made him cold.

So when Burrard had proposed the wager, he had calculated carefully.

‘I bet you, Henry,’ his friend had exclaimed, ‘that the next time you have a vessel going across, fully laden, to the Isle of Wight, I can run a laden boat against you and get back first.’

‘At least one of your ships is faster than anything I’ve got,’ Totton had stated.

‘I won’t run one of my own.’

‘Whose, then?’

Burrard considered a moment, then grinned. ‘I’ll run Seagull against you.’ He watched Totton, eyes gleaming.

‘Seagull?’ Totton frowned. He thought of his son and the mariner. He preferred to keep some distance between them. ‘I don’t want to have wagers with Seagull, Geoffrey.’

‘You aren’t. You know Seagull never bets anyway.’ Strangely enough, this was true. The sailor might have a devil-may-care attitude in most of his dealings with the world, but for some reason known only to himself he would never bet. ‘The wager’s with me, Henry. Just you and me.’ Burrard beamed. ‘Come on, Henry,’ he boomed affectionately.

Totton considered. Why was Burrard betting on Seagull? Did he know the relative speeds of the boats? Unlikely. Almost certainly he just had a hunch that Seagull was a cunning rascal who would somehow pull it off. He, on the other hand, had observed Seagull’s boat many times and had also taken careful note of the speed of a neat little vessel at Southampton in which he had recently acquired a quarter share. The Southampton vessel was definitely a little faster.

‘The bet is against Seagull’s vessel,’ he stated. ‘You have to persuade Seagull to make the crossing for you or the bet’s off.’

‘Agreed,’ his friend confirmed.

Totton nodded slowly. He was just weighing up the factors when young Jonathan appeared in the doorway. It might not be such a bad thing, he thought, for his son to see his hero the mariner lose a race. ‘Very well. Five pounds,’ he said.

‘Oh-ho! Henry!’ Burrard whooped, causing other faces in the place to turn in their direction. ‘That’s a big one.’ Five pounds was a large wager indeed.

‘Too rich for you?’ Totton asked.

‘No. No. I didn’t say that.’ Even Burrard’s cheerful face was looking a bit taken aback, though.

‘If you’d prefer not …’

‘Done. Five pounds!’ Burrard cried. ‘But you can buy me a drink, Henry, by God, for that.’

As young Jonathan advanced, it was obvious to the boy from all the faces round that, whatever it was, his father had just done something that had impressed the men of Lymington.

It was perhaps to hide a trace of nervousness that Geoffrey Burrard, catching sight of young Jonathan, greeted him with unusual bluster. ‘Ho! Sirrah!’ he cried, ‘What adventures have you been having?’

‘None, Sir.’ Jonathan was not quite sure how to respond, but he knew that Burrard was a man to treat with respect.

‘Why, I supposed you’d been out slaying dragons.’ Burrard smiled at Jonathan and, seeing the boy look doubtful, added: ‘When I was your age, you know, there was a dragon in the Forest.’

‘Indeed,’ Totton nodded. ‘The Bisterne dragon, no less.’

Jonathan looked at them both. He knew the story of the Bisterne dragon. All the Forest children did. But because it concerned a knight and such an antique beast, he had just assumed it was an ancient tale like that of King Arthur. ‘I thought that was in olden times,’ he said.

‘Actually not.’ Totton shook his head. ‘It’s quite true,’ he explained seriously. ‘There really was a dragon – or so it was called – when I was young. And the knight at Bisterne killed it.’

Looking at his face, Jonathan could see that his father was telling the truth. He never teased him anyway. ‘Oh,’ Jonathan said, ‘I didn’t know.’

‘What’s more,’ Burrard continued in a serious tone and with a wink to the company that the boy did not see, ‘there was another dragon seen over at Bisterne the other day. Probably descended from the first one, I should think. They’re going to hunt it, I believe, so you’d better be quick if you want so see it.’

‘Really?’ Jonathan stared at him. ‘Isn’t it dangerous?’

‘Yes. But they killed the last one, didn’t they? Quite a sight, I should think, when it’s flying.’

Henry Totton smiled and shook his head. ‘You’d better get home,’ he said kindly and kissed his son. So Jonathan obediently left.

By the time Henry Totton came home himself, he’d forgotten about the dragon.

They set out soon after dawn. Willie would have been ready to go the day before, as soon as he heard about it, but as Jonathan pointed out, they needed a full day, starting at dawn. For it was a twelve-mile walk each way to Bisterne, where the dragon was.

‘I’ll be with Willie until dusk,’ he had said to the cook as he slipped out quickly, before anyone could ask him where he was going.

The journey, although quite long, was a very easy one. The manor of Bisterne lay in the southern portion of the Avon valley below Ringwood near the place called Tyrrell’s Ford. So they only had to cross the western half of the Forest, move along its southern edge and then descend into the valley beyond. Leaving early, even at a walk, they could be there by mid-morning, with no need to return until late afternoon.

Willie was waiting for him at the top of the street. Anxious to get well away before anyone stopped them, they went quickly along the lane that led through the fields and meadows of Old Lymington, crossed a stream by a small mill and within half an hour were passing the manor of Arnewood, that lay between the villages of Hordle and Sway.

It was a clear, bright morning, promising a warm day. The countryside west of Lymington was one of intimate little fields with hedgerows and small oaks in rolling dips and dells. The pale-green leaves were starting to break out on the bare branches; white blossom from the hedges was being scattered on the lane by the light breeze. They passed a ploughed field whose furrows were receiving a visit from a flapping mass of seagulls.

To anyone familiar with the inhabitants of Lymington, the two boys passing Arnewood manor would have been easy to identify, since each was a perfect miniature of his father: the serious face of the merchant on the one boy, the cheerful chinlessness of the mariner on the other, were almost comical. Within an hour, however, they were leaving the world of Lymington well behind. They came to a wood through which there was a narrow track. And then, passing through a belt of stunted ash and birch, they emerged on to the wide open world of the Forest heath.

‘Do you think’, Willie asked nervously, ‘the dragon comes here?’

‘No,’ said Jonathan. ‘He doesn’t come over this way.’ He had never seen his friend hesitant before. He felt rather proud of himself.

It was a five-mile walk along the southern edge of the heath, but the going was easy on the close-cropped, peaty forest turf. The morning sun was behind them, catching the sparkling sheen of the dew on the grass. The great sweep of the heath was sprinkled with the sharp yellow stare of the gorse brakes. Here and there, on the little hillocks away on their right, small round clumps of holly trees could be seen. Holly holms the English had anciently called them. But more recently they had acquired another name. For since the deer and ponies ate their overhanging branches as far up as they could – to the browse line as it was termed – the trees had each acquired a mushroom shape and, taken together, a clump of holly trees on a hillock appeared to have a sort of hanging brim. Therefore the Forest folk nowadays referred to them as holly hats.

They walked for an hour and a half on the springy turf. They had walked nearly five miles along the edge of the heath when they came to the big rise known as Shirley Common. And then, as they reached the crest, they stopped.

The Avon valley lay below.

It was a richer world. First a small field, where bracken had been cut and heaped and some goats were now browsing; then groves of oak and beech and further fields swept gracefully down the slopes, until they reached the parkland and lush meadows along the wide banks of the Avon, of whose silver waters, here and there through the trees, they caught a tantalizing glimpse. Then, beyond the valley, the low ridges of Dorset stretched into a bluish haze. You could see at once that this was a landscape fit for knights and ladies, and courtly love. And dragons.

To the north, however, two miles away across a broad sweep of brown and open heath, the wooded ridge rose up, behind which lay the dark forest village of Burley.

‘I think’, said Jonathan, ‘we might see the dragon now.’ He looked at Willie. ‘Are you afraid?’

‘Are you?’

‘No.’

‘Where does the dragon live?’ asked Willie.

‘There.’ Jonathan pointed to the long Burley ridge with its northern promontory of Castle Hill. The ridge at this time was known as Burley Beacon.

‘Oh.’ Willie looked at the place. ‘It’s quite close,’ he said.

It had probably been a solitary wild boar. There were not many left in England, now. They had all been hunted away. There were pigs that ran in the Forest, of course, in the mast season every autumn; and occasionally one of these might turn wild and be mistaken for a boar. But the real wild boar, with its grizzled hair, powerful shoulders and flashing tusks, was a terrible creature. Even the bravest Norman or Plantagenet noble, with his hounds and his huntsmen, might know fear when this huge ball of fury charged out of his cover towards him. It was the most exciting chase, though. All over Europe the boar hunt was the noblest aristocratic sport, after the joust. The boar’s head was the centrepiece of any great feast.

But the island kingdom of England, though graced with many forests, lacked the vast empty tracts of France or the German lands. If a wild boar lived, his presence would be known and noblemen would hunt him. Four centuries after the Norman Conqueror came, few English boars remained in the south. Now and then, however, one would appear. For some reason it might not be caught. And over the years, perhaps living in isolation, it could grow to a huge size.

It seems likely that this is what occurred in the Avon valley some time around 1460.

The manor of Bisterne lay in a beautiful setting on the broad valley floor, on the forest side of the Avon a little way north of Tyrrell’s Ford. Bede’s Thorn it had been called in Saxon times, which had evolved in stages to Bisterne. Kept by its Saxon owner after the Conquest, it had passed by inheritance to the noble family of Berkeley from the western county of Gloucestershire; and it was Sir Maurice Berkeley, married to the niece of no less a personage than mighty Warwick the Kingmaker, who, just before the start of the Wars of the Roses, had often delighted to stay at his Bisterne manor and hunt in the Avon valley with his hounds.

The boar, it seems, had a lair somewhere up on Burley Beacon, overlooking the valley, and had been known to raid the farms there. Some time around Martinmass, when most of the livestock were slaughtered, it had come down to Bisterne, following the streams that led down from Castle Hill, until, near the manor house, it had come to Bunny Brook. By the manor farm it had found milk pails cooling in the stream, taken the milk, and then killed one of the farm’s remaining cows.

Its appearance at this time would have been terrifying indeed. It was not only the black beast’s blazing eyes, frothing mouth and tusks. If thwarted, the wild boar has a hideous scream; its breath in the cold November air would have steamed; boars also move across the ground with the strangest silence. As it ran across the Bisterne fields by the pale light of dawn it would have seemed an unearthly creature.

And no wonder, one cold November night, the brave Sir Maurice Berkeley went out to fight the monster. The encounter took place in the valley and it was bloody. The knight’s two favourite hounds died in the mêlée and Sir Maurice, having killed the beast himself, received wounds that became infected. By Christmas he was dead.

Some legends are invented later, from half-forgotten events; others spring to life at once. Within a year, the whole county knew of Sir Maurice Berkeley’s battle with the Bisterne dragon. They knew the dragon flew over the fields from Burley Beacon. They knew the knight had killed him single-handed and died of the dragon’s poison. And if the wider world was soon distracted by the knightly dramas of the Wars of the Roses, in the New Forest and the Avon valley, as the years passed, men remembered: ‘We had a dragon not so long ago.’

It was another two miles from the crest of Shirley Common to Bisterne manor, and the boys took their time descending. Sometimes they could see the spur of Burley Beacon, at others it was hidden; but they kept an eye out in that direction in case the dragon should take wing from its hill and come flying towards them.

‘What’ll we do if we see it coming?’ asked Willie.

‘Hide,’ said Jonathan.

On the lower part of the slope the track led through woodland. The slanting morning sunshine made a pale-green light in the undergrowth. Mosses gathered by the bases of the trees, ivy on the trunks. They heard a pigeon cooing. The path veered left out of the trees and led down the side of the wood. A grey hen scuttled across in front of them from the long grass. And they had only descended another hundred yards when suddenly on their right there was a flapping sound and, in a flash of dark metallic blue, a blackcock with his lyre tail, disturbed by something, burst over their heads out of the trees.

‘That made you jump, Willie,’ said Jonathan.

‘So did you.’

Soon after this they came down on to the open valley floor and saw at once that they had entered a world where a dragon might appear at any time.

The world of Bisterne was very flat. Its large fields stretched over two miles westwards to the Avon’s silver waters which, as they often did in spring, had spread out over the lush water-meadows in a magical, liquid sheen. The manor house – it was more of a hunting lodge for the Berkeley knights, really – was a single timber-and-plaster hall with a stable yard attached, standing by itself in the middle of open parkland where cattle grazed and rabbits in an enclosed warren bobbed on the close-cropped grass. Away in the distance were the slopes behind which Burley Beacon lay; and dotting the landscape from hedgerow and field, single oaks or elms were holding out their bare arms as though expecting the winged monster to fly down from the Beacon and perch upon them.