The Forest (42 page)

He knew she meant it, every word. ‘You know what my instructions are?’

‘To lead your muster, Clement, silence the shore battery and help the Spanish to land.’

‘Where?’

‘Between Southampton and Lymington. The Forest shore will not be easy to defend.’

‘You expect me to reply to this letter?’

‘There is no need.’ She beamed. ‘It is already done. I sent a letter to your sister, and Don Diego will convey it to the King of Spain himself. I have told them that you may be relied upon. Even unto death.’

He gazed southwards, over the Forest, towards Southampton and the distant blue haze by the coast. Was her letter, perhaps, already in the hands of Cecil’s spies? Would he live to see Christmas? ‘Thank you, Mother,’ he murmured, drily.

But his mother did not hear him. For she was already signalling to the servants to bring her litter.

The oak tree stood just apart from the wood.

The afternoon was warm.

In the wood, smooth, stately beech trees soared up to share the canopy with crusted oaks. The ground was mossy. All was quiet except for the faint rustle of the leaves and the tiny popping sound as, now and then, a green acorn fell to the ground.

Behind the tree, on a slight incline dotted with young oaks, lay a green glade down which the shadows stole at sunset.

Albion was alone as he rode towards the tree.

Oak: the genus
Quercus
, sacred since ancient times. There are five hundred species of oak tree upon the planet, but the island of Britain since the ending of the Ice Age contained mainly two:
quercus robur
, the common or pendunculate oak, whose acorns grow upon little stalks; and
quercus petraea
, the sessile oak, whose leaves have fewer lobes and whose acorns grow side by side with the leaf. Both kinds grew on the sandy New Forest soil. The common oak produced more acorns.

Albion gazed at the tree with pleasure. He had a particular interest in trees.

The New Forest and its administration had not changed greatly in the last four hundred years. The royal deer were still protected; the midsummer fence month still in force; the verderers still held courts and the foresters their bailiwicks. From time to time, also, gentlemen regarders – knights of the county often as not – would survey and check the Forest boundaries, although a steady trickle of small land grants to private individuals down the generations had made this a more complex task than it had been in olden times. But one change had been taking place. It was subtle, sometimes vague, yet increasingly present.

No one could say exactly when it had begun, but there had been an informal management of the trees in the Forest for centuries. The woodland crop was important: rods, poles, branches for wattle fencing, brushwood, fuel for fires and for charcoal. The trees supplied so many of man’s needs. Most of the supply came from the smaller trees and bushes like the hazel and holly. To obtain straight poles from a hazel, for instance, it would be cut just above the ground, causing it to send up multiple shoots which could be harvested every few years. This process was known as coppicing. More rarely, with oak trees, a similar cutting took place about six feet up, causing a mass of spreading shoots to emerge. This was termed pollarding, and the resulting tree with its stocky trunk and fan of branches was known as a pollard oak.

The only trouble with coppicing was that, when you had cut the underwood, the deer and other forest stock would come and eat up all the new shoots, destroying the whole process. And so the practice had grown up of inclosing small areas, usually with a low earth wall and a fence, to keep the animals out for three years or so, until the new shoots were too sturdy to be eaten. These inclosures were known as coppices.

A century earlier, just before the Tudors came to the English throne, an act of parliament had finally regulated the coppices. Inclosures could be made under licence and fenced for three years to allow regeneration. Since then the period had been extended to a generous nine years. These coppices were valuable and were leased out.

But beyond this activity there was the question of timber – of the felling of whole trees for the construction of large buildings, ships or other of the king’s works. In ages past there had been little need for timber from the New Forest, although huge trees might be provided for a cathedral church or other great project from time to time. But as building activity slowly rose in the Tudor period, the royal treasury began to look more carefully to see what income could be derived from its timber. In 1540, King Henry VIII had appointed a surveyor general to oversee the income, including that from timber, from all the royal woodlands, with a woodward for each county where the royal woodlands lay. The New Forest was not only, nowadays, a preserve for the king’s deer; very gradually the faint consciousness was stealing through the glades that it might also be a huge store of royal trees.

A few years earlier, Albion had managed to get himself appointed as the woodward for the New Forest. This had brought him some extra income; it had also caused him to learn a good deal more than he had ever known about trees. He had even become quite interested in them for their own sake. He looked with approval and even admiration, therefore, at the stately old oak.

It was a great, spreading oak; although its spread came naturally, and not from any pollarding. It was also famous. The first reason for its fame was that, situated some three miles or so north of Lyndhurst, it was one of the three curious trees that broke into leaf for a week at Christmas. But even this magical fact was not all for, somewhere in its long life, it had acquired a second reputation.

‘That was the oak tree that Walter Tyrrell’s arrow glanced off before it killed King William Rufus.’ So people said, and for all Albion’s life, at least, the forest folk had called it the Rufus tree.

Could it be so, Albion wondered? Did oak trees really live so long in the rather poor soil of the Forest?

‘The life of an oak is seven times the life of a man,’ his father had long ago told him. His own guess was that few of the great rotting, ivy-encrusted hulks with their twenty-foot girths were above four centuries old; and in this estimate he was roughly correct. The Rufus oak did not look five hundred years old to him.

Yet there was certainly something wonderful, even magical about the mighty tree.

The tree knew many things.

It was nearly three hundred years since Luke the runaway lay brother had planted it in a place of safety. Since then the wood had moved a little, as woods may do; deer and other grazing animals had eaten up the new shoots in the grassy glade and in this way the tree had been granted an open space of its own in which to grow. While its brethren in the wood, therefore, had grown up tall and narrow beside their neighbours, as oaks in natural woodland usually do, the branches of the Rufus oak had been free to spread outwards as well as upwards, seeking the light.

Despite the name that men had foolishly given it, the Rufus oak had begun its life two centuries too late to play any role in the dramatic death of the red-haired king – which had anyway taken place in quite another part of the Forest. But its life was already old, and complex.

The tree knew that winter was coming. The thousands of leaves, which had gathered in the light, would soon become a burden in the winter frosts. Already, therefore, it had begun to shut down this part of its huge system. The vessels that took the sap to and from the leaves were gradually closing. The remaining moisture in them was evaporating in the September sun, causing them to grow dry and yellow. Just as, in its different season, the male deer seals off the supply of blood to its antlers so that they dry out and are shed, so the tree in a similar fashion would shed its golden leaves.

Before the leaves, however, there would be two other fallings.

The acorns were already dropping in their green thousands. The crop of acorns for any oak will vary, depending mostly on the weather, from year to year; but unlike most other species, the oak as it grows older increases its production of seed, reaching the height of its fecundity in late middle age. Already the pigs were feeding upon the acorns as they pattered down below the spreading branches and scurrying mice would nibble them at night; and others would be taken further away by squirrels, or by jays who might fly some distance before burying them for safekeeping in the ground. Thus the oak was dispersing its seed for future generations.

The other falling was subtler and scarcely noticed. For during the spring the tiny gall wasp, which more resembles a flying ant than the common wasp, had laid its spangle-galls on the underside of the oak leaves. Now these galls, like little red warts, were detaching themselves and flittering down so that they could lie for the winter, hidden and insulated by the leaves that were about to fall on top of them.

Meanwhile, in the bark of the tree, the sap containing the essential sugar was sinking down to its roots, deep underground, to be stored there through the frosts.

Yet if it seemed that this was a season only of closure, it was not so. True, the falling of the leaves would see some of the oak tree’s companions of the spring and summer depart: the various warblers, the blackcaps and redstarts, would leave for warmer climes. But the hardy year rounders, the robins and wrens, the chaffinches, blackbirds and bluetits, although they might diminish or end their song, would still remain. The tawny owl had no thought of leaving the ancient oak; weeks had yet to pass before the myriad bats settled down into their winter sleep within its crevices. Others, thrushes and redwings, were just arriving in the Forest on their way from much harsher habitats. And the ivy that crept along its lower branches would actually use this season to flower, thus attracting the insects who would have been too busy, before now, to pollinate its flowers.

Indeed, the oak tree was about to supply the Forest with a prodigious quantity of food. It was not only the acorns. Upon the tree itself, its bark presented a continent of cracks and crevices in which countless tiny insects and other invertebrates moved about. In autumn the tits would descend upon this territory in flocks to feast upon them. Nuthatches would walk down while tree creepers went up, so that nothing was missed. But most important of all were the dropping leaves.

Death is not final in the Forest, but only a transformation. A rotting tree trunk lying on the ground provides home and food for a thousand tiny invertebrates; the falling leaves, as they decompose, are broken down by many organisms, especially woodlice and worms – although because of its acid soil, the Forest has few if any snails. But the greatest breakdown of material takes place afterwards and at a deeper level. For then it is the turn of the fungi.

Fungus – pale, loathsome, connected with mildew and rot, and poison, and death. And yet it is not. Is it a plant? Of a kind, although it is seldom green like the plants that sustain themselves, for the fungus contains no chlorophyll. Its cell walls, strangely, are made not of cellulose but of chitin, which also forms the walls of an insect’s body. It lives upon other organisms, like a parasite. The ancients, uncertain how to classify the fungus, said that it belonged to chaos.

And in the Forest the fungi are everywhere. Mostly they exist as strings of fungal matter, almost like bootlaces, called hyphae. Under the tree bark, under the rotting leaves, under the ground, they spread into a tangled web known as mycelium. And it is this hidden mass of mycelium that converts the rotted leaf mould, returning the nutrients – nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus – to the soil to nourish the forest’s future life.

It is only the fruit of the fungus that is normally seen and at no time did so much appear as at the autumn season in the oak woods. In the vicinity of the Rufus oak there were hundreds of species: the beefsteak fungus, like a raw steak on the base of an ancient oak bole; edible mushrooms and the poisonous death caps that mimicked them; red-and-white-spotted toadstools; the friendly penny bun, which is edible and whose mycelium draws sugar from the oak roots and gives them minerals in return; and the evil-smelling stinkhorn which, growing from a round underground pod called a witch’s egg, bursts into the upper world in a single day, with a slimy cap that draws the flies, before collapsing and shrivelling back only a day or two after its appearance.

These and many others shared the forest floor beneath the oak with tufted grass and moss, and yellow pimpernel.

When Albion reached the tree he dismounted. He had taken his time. After his mother had turned eastwards towards Romsey and Winchester, he had come slowly down into the Forest, pausing at hamlets here and there, hoping that the wood’s great quietness might calm his spirits. But it had not worked. Not only had his mother terrified him, but after her revelation, the business he must conduct the next day made him still more apprehensive. He was glad, therefore, to come and rest under the spreading oak. Perhaps that would bring him peace.

Why was it, he wondered, that the great oak had this power to revive him? What was its magic? Was it just the huge, gnarled strength of the tree? The fact that it remained there, a living thing yet unchanging, like an ancient rock? Both these things, he thought; and the falling acorns, and the rustling leaves. There was, however, something else – something he had often felt when he stood by the trunk of some full-grown spreading oak. It was almost as if the tree were enclosing him within an invisible sphere of strength and power. It was a strange feeling, yet palpable. He was sure of it, even if he could not say why.

In a way, his sense of the tree was accurate. For it is a fact that the roots of a tree mirror the spreading crown of its branches. As the branches spread out, so do the roots in proportion. If the tree’s branches die back, the roots do too. As above, so below. In this respect the system of the tree as a whole rather resembles, at top and bottom, the magnetic field of a bar magnet, or indeed of the Earth itself. And who knows what force fields, as yet unmeasured by man, may surround the physical manifestation of a tree?