The Forest (96 page)

Not Mr Grockleton’s fictitious cousin, but an aunt of his wife’s, from a rich Bristol tradesman’s family, left the modest legacy that allowed the Grockletons to retire. It was with some surprise, however, that her many friends, who even included – more or less – the Burrards, learned that Mrs Grockleton did not intend, after all, to stay in Lymington. Her academy was thriving. No less than four girls from prominent landed gentry attended some of its classes. The yearly ball she now gave for the girls had become a very pleasant fixture at which only the very best of the merchant families like the Tottons and the St Barbes were to be seen with the gentry. Mr Grockleton, who had never intercepted a single cask of brandy, had even been known, rather wryly, to drink the occasional bottle left at his door by order of Isaac Seagull, who had grown quite fond of him. Why, then, should they want to move?

The fact was, although she was too polite and kind to say it, Lymington had failed Mrs Grockleton. Indeed, so had the Forest. ‘It’s those salt pans,’ she would say sadly. For the salt pans, the little windpumps and the boiling houses were still there. True, there were one or two very agreeable houses built recently at Lymington with views of the sea. A captain and two admirals graced the place, with the promise of more to come: and admirals, though they might be fierce, were very respectable.

Yet something was missing from the town even so. Perhaps it was the French. In 1795 most of them had departed on a campaign against the revolutionaries in France. They had landed there in force, fought bravely, but in vain. The expedition had not been very well supported by the British government. Few of the brave Frenchmen returned. All that was left to remind Lymington of their sojourn there were one or two aristocratic widows, a larger number of local girls who had either fallen in love with, or married, French troops and, inevitably, a number of illegitimate children, all of whom were likely to be a charge to the parish.

No, it was not enough. With its salt pans and its smugglers, Lymington, while well enough, was never going to become a place of fashion.

But what of her own position? Wasn’t she a friend of Fanny and Wyndham Martell? And of Louisa, dear Louisa, who had married Mr Arthur West? Wasn’t she, if not a regular guest at dinner, at least on terms of friendly acquaintance with the Burrards, the Morants, even Mr Drummond of Cadland? She was and that was just the trouble. She had achieved her objective. The enemy had been vanquished. She had met them and they were mortal. It might have surprised these good people to know it, but in her own capacious mind, at least, Mrs Grockleton had moved past them. The Forest was no longer large enough to contain her.

So the Grockletons went to Bath.

And with Mr Grockleton’s retirement and departure, the coast had been clear for Puckle to return.

It was all done very quietly. Isaac Seagull saw to that. His old cottage was ready for him. So was his job. And, by some Forest magic, when he walked back into the shipyard you really might have thought that no one even knew he had been gone.

And indeed, he discovered one other, pleasant continuity upon his arrival. For the great tree he had escorted across the Forest from the Rufus stone was also there, as it were, waiting to greet him. So large and fine were its timbers that Mr Adams had been holding it at the yard until he had a ship that was worthy of it. That ship had been the mighty
Swiftsure
. In this way, the acorn from the magical, midwinter-leafing tree had entered and become a part of one of Nelson’s finest ships.

That had been four years ago, as work had just started on
Swiftsure
, and he had been working on her ever since. Her launching tomorrow, therefore, in some strange way seemed a kind of affirmation to him. He had returned home, and brought a great ship into the world. At least, he would have, after tomorrow when she was launched.

The launching of a great ship was a complex and tricky business. Essentially it was necessary to transfer the vast weight of the vessel from the keel blocks on which it had been built to a slipway down which it must safely enter the water.

For days, now, Puckle had been helping the men building the wooden slideways. These were railtracks made of elm and, since they had to run down well into the water, most of the work on them had to be done at low tide. It was a muddy affair.

The business of transferring the huge weight of the ship had to be done with the utmost care. While it was being built, the ship had rested upon keel blocks made of elm wood, about five feet high and placed five feet apart. Around the outside of the hull, tall wooden poles, thirty or forty feet high, like ship’s masts, acted as scaffolding. Starting from the end nearest the water, the riggers had swiftly moved, driving in huge wooden wedges to lift the ship off the blocks and then putting in the timber props that would guide her on her path down the rails. It was a long operation requiring great skill. For everything had to go right. If the ship lurched, it could crash on its side. If the angle of the slideways were too shallow she might not launch. Too steep and she might rush down into the water and go careering off, to get stuck on the mud banks across the river. Such things had happened. If all went well, however, the rising tide coming up under the stern would just ease the ship off the blocks, the wedges holding her would be knocked away and, slowed by drag ropes, she would slide gently down into the Beaulieu River, stern first, to be towed away downstream and out into the Solent.

Puckle walked round the ship. He loved the line of the huge keel and the workmanship that had gone into it. The inner keel was made of sections of elm. Outside this was another outer keel of oak. When the ships ran down the sliderails, or if ever, later, they ran aground, it was this outer keel that would endure the scraping, protecting the inner keel from harm.

He would be staying at the yard that night, for before the ship could be launched there was still one vital job to do.

The normal time to launch a ship at Buckler’s Hard was an hour before high tide. At lowest tide, therefore, which, that night, would come shortly before dawn, gangs of men would go down to grease the slideways with melted tallow and soap. Puckle had asked to be one of them. He wouldn’t have missed this last pre-dawn preparation for anything.

*

There was a quarter-moon that night and the sky was full of stars. At Albion Park the pale, classical façade of the house stared across the faintly glimmering sweep of its lawns to the gently shelving belt of small fields and woods that sank down, as though in a contented dream, to the Solent water. Beyond that, clearly visible in the moonlight, the long line of the Isle of Wight lay like a gentle guardian.

In that handsome, ordered house, everyone was asleep. The five children of Fanny and Wyndham Martell slept happily in their nursery wing. Mrs Pride, a little elderly, now, but still very much in control – not a fly stirred in that house without her permission – slept peacefully. The entire household would be driving across to join the more than a hundred carriages, which would arrive to watch the launching of
Swiftsure
in the morning.

Everyone slept. Or almost everyone.

Mr Wyndham Martell was not asleep. He had been awakened an hour before by a sound from his wife and now he sat watching her thoughtfully.

It was just in the last few weeks that she had taken to talking in her sleep. He did not know why. She had done so before, usually in little bursts that lasted for a week or two and then subsided, as though there were complex hidden tides in her mind about which he scarcely knew. Sometimes he could make something out. She had murmured about her aunt, about Mrs Pride, about Alice Lisle. There had also been conversations with what appeared to be Isaac Seagull. Mr Gilpin was the recipient of some of her confidences, too. But there was one dream she had which seemed to cause her particular distress; she would toss and turn, and even cry out. She had just had it again tonight.

Wyndham Martell loved his wife very much. He wanted to help her, yet was not sure what to do. Most of the conversations she had made no particular sense. Even when she was in distress, it was not always possible to understand the moans and cries she emitted. And by morning, when she awoke, she would smile at him lovingly and be well enough.

Tonight, however, he thought he had understood something more.

Wyndham Martell got up and walked to the window. The night was warm. Across the park he could see to the coast, out past the distant spit of Hurst Castle and the open sea beyond. He smiled to himself: that was the province of Isaac Seagull the smuggler. His wife’s cousin. He remembered well the night Louisa had told him that and how her malice had made him feel so sorry for Fanny. Perhaps, he thought wryly, it was the very unfolding of that dark secret that had led him to the wife he loved.

Maybe everyone, he reflected, had dark secrets within them of which they might or might not even be aware.

And then, because he loved his wife and all her secrets, he quietly left the room, went down to his private library and, sitting down at his desk, took out a piece of paper. He was going to write his wife a letter.

He paused a little while, thinking carefully, then began.

My dearest wife

Each of us has secrets and now there is something which I, too, have to confess.

It was a long letter. Dawn was almost breaking before he finished and sealed it.

At Buckler’s Hard, Puckle was busily at work. The tide was out. Slipping about contentedly in the riverside mud, he moved the heavy soaked leather rag over the wooden rail. Above him the dark bulk of
Swiftsure
loomed beneath the fading stars like a friend. Across the Beaulieu River a bird suddenly started singing and, glancing eastwards, Puckle saw the first faint hint of the light of dawn.

Swiftsure
would be launched that day. As he glanced up again at the vessel, although he had not the words quite to express it, Puckle reflected once again how, in this huge wooden ship, the trees had become transmogrified into a second and perhaps equally glorious life. And his heart was filled with joy to know that the Forest itself, with all its secrets and many wonders, would, in this manner, pass down the slideway to be joined with the endless sea.

PRIDE OF THE FOREST

1868

Brockenhurst railway station: a sunny day in July. The tall-funnelled steam engine had a burnished coppery gleam, like a snake that has just shed its skin, as it hissed and smoked by the platform. Behind it a line of thickset brown carriages, their windows wiped and their brasses buffed by the smartly uniformed guards, stood waiting to receive their passengers, who would be taken with a proud rattle and at speeds of over thirty miles an hour the seventy miles to London.

The London and South-Western Railway line was a fine affair, a symbol of all that was best in the new industrial era. A decade or so before, it had been extended westward across the Forest to Ringwood and down into Dorset. But as well as paying compensation to the Forest for this intrusion, the director of the line, Mr Castleman, had agreed to follow a winding route that would inflict minimum damage on the woodlands so that his line was known as Castleman’s Corkscrew. At Brockenhurst, where the cattleyard and pony-yards abutted the station, the engines would also pause to take on more water.

The two figures who walked along the platform made a curious contrast. The older man, almost sixty, was every inch a Victorian gentleman. As the day was warm he wore no outer garment over his grey frock coat. His wing collar was encircled by a cravat tied in a floppy bow. He carried a silver-handled cane. His tall black top hat had been brushed until it shone; there was not a speck of dust upon his trousers. As for his shoes, the boot-boy had spat and polished to such good effect before dawn that they gave off little flashes as they caught the sun. Florid faced, blue-eyed, white-haired with a long drooping moustache, Colonel Godwin Albion would have been pleased to know that he resembled his Saxon ancestor Cola the Huntsman and, in all probability, would have agreed with him on most matters of importance.

If Colonel Albion was even a fraction nervous at the prospect ahead of him he no more showed it now than he had, a dozen years before, when he led his men into battle in the Crimean War. If he could face the Russians, he reminded himself, then he could certainly face a Select Committee of his fellow countrymen, even if they were all peers of the realm. He squared his shoulders, therefore, and went forward bravely.

The figure beside him, about ten years younger, was also looking his smartest, in a different manner. He was dressed in his Sunday best – a rather more shapeless frock coat made of sturdy material. On his head, a wide-brimmed countryman’s hat. His boots, under the Colonel’s strict instructions, were shining. Like most working men, he couldn’t see the point of the high polish that the gentry and the military favoured on their boots, which were bound to get dusty again. His beard was neatly combed and his wife had continued brushing his coat until the Colonel had come for him. But as Mr Pride, tenant smallholder of Oakley, strode cheerfully along with a slightly loping gait, beside his landlord, he was probably less concerned than the Colonel about the prospect before him.

Besides, if the Colonel wanted him to do this, then as far as Pride was concerned, that was reason enough. He’d known the Colonel all his life and his parents too. As well as being his landlord, the Colonel was a man you could trust. When, a few years back, the Colonel had started a local cricket team on Oakley green, and Pride had shown a distinct aptitude as a spin bowler, there had sprung up an extra bond between them which, as far as social position allowed, could almost be called a friendship.

Only one cloud darkened his horizon. His son George. They’d scarcely spoken this last few years. Until three days ago when the boy had turned up begging him not to go, afraid he’d lose his job. His brow darkened when he thought of that; he didn’t want to ruin his son.

‘You shouldn’t have gone to work for Cumberbatch then,’ he’d said coldly. And he’d gone with the Colonel.

He had never been to London before. He had read about it. Like his father Andrew before him, he had attended the little school founded by Gilpin and he took quite an interest in the newspapers. But this would be his first time in the capital; so the day was rather an adventure. The fact he was about to face a panel of peers meant nothing in particular to him. He supposed they would be like the gentlemen verderers. And anyway, whether they were devils incarnate or a choir of archangels, he knew who he was. He was a Pride of the Forest. That was good enough for him.

The Colonel, however, with subtler distinctions on his mind, was not sorry as they came along the platform to see another top-hatted figure, with a rich brown beard, waiting by the entrance of the first-class carriage. For though his fellow landowner, the lord of the great Beaulieu estate, was only a little over half his age, he was the son of a duke, which was no small thing to be in Victorian England.

‘My dear Colonel.’ The aristocrat raised his hat and even gave Pride half a nod.

‘My dear Lord Henry.’

‘We are here, I believe,’ Lord Henry smiled at them both, ‘to save the New Forest.’

In the year 1851, the fifteenth of the reign of Queen Victoria, the British Parliament had passed an Act that was to mark the greatest change in the New Forest since the days of William the Conqueror.

They decided to kill all the deer.

Nobody knew exactly how many deer there were: surely seven thousand; perhaps more than ten. Red and fallow, stags and hinds, bucks and does, calves and fawns – they were all to die. The Deer Removal Act was the title by which this measure was to be known.

Of course, it was centuries since, as a deer farm, the New Forest had had any economic justification. The deer culled each year went to the ancient officers, or to landowners whose property lay in the area. Indeed, it was calculated that each deer killed actually cost the Crown the astonishing sum of a hundred pounds! The Forest was an anachronism, its offices were sinecures, its lovely deer served no purpose. But that was not why they were all to die.

They were to die to make way for more trees.

Ever since the first, late medieval coppices, the Crown had taken an interest in its Forest trees. When the merry monarch Charles II had begun his plantations, he had started a more organized approach to the question of timber; but the first time that Parliament had really addressed the subject was an Act of 1698, when it was decided to set up inclosures for growing timber. Stock – deer, cattle and ponies – would be fenced out until the saplings were too well grown to be eaten by them. Then the inclosure would be opened up again for the stock to graze the undergrowth, and a new inclosure made elsewhere. But although some inclosures of oak and beech had been made, the business had never been followed through. Indeed, most of the oaks felled for the naval ships at Buckler’s Hard came from the open Forest, not from plantations. The old medieval woods and heaths stayed very much as they had always been.

Wasn’t it all a shocking waste? The British Empire was expanding, the Industrial Revolution had ushered in a modern world of steam and steel. In the year 1851 the Great Exhibition in London, with its huge Crystal Palace of iron and glass, was drawing trainloads of eager visitors from all over Britain to see the results of industrial progress on a world-wide scale. In the countryside farm machinery was coming to the land; a huge new programme of inclosure had partitioned the wasteful old communal fields and common wastes into efficient private units. People had been thrown off the land, admittedly, but there were jobs for them in the growing manufacturing towns. Surely it was time to create tidy plantations in the Forest’s unreformed wilderness.

In 1848 a House of Commons Select Committee investigated the Forest. They were shocked by what they found: Forest officials paid for doing nothing; those in charge of the woods selling off timber for themselves; venality, criminality. In short, the place was much as it had been for the last nine hundred years. They saw that reform was needed at once.

They proceeded with a logic which could only evoke admiration. The deer, since they served no purpose, must go. But if the Crown was no longer farming the deer, then it must be compensated. Any voices protesting that by getting rid of the deer the Crown was actually saving itself from a loss, were stifled. The compensation was fixed at fourteen thousand acres to be enclosed for woods – this in addition to the six thousand or so designated, though not all taken up, under the old 1698 Act. Finally, to make the new interest of the Crown very clear, the commoners who shared the Forest were to fall under the control of the Office of Woods. There was no consultation with the commoners. In the brief period before the proposal and the legislation the five greatest landowners in the Forest managed to have the proposed new inclosures reduced to ten thousand acres. Then the measure was whisked through.

Soon after this, the day to day administration of the Forest was placed in the hands of a new Deputy Surveyor. His name was Cumberbatch.

Had he been wrong to bring Pride? Not many people in the Forest had any use for the Office of Woods, but Pride’s loathing of Cumberbatch was legendary. On the other hand, he could be a wonderful witness. The best sort of smallholder the Forest had to offer. It was a risk, of course, but he’d coached his tenant carefully.

Just so long as he kept his temper.

The presence of Lord Henry, by contrast, was deeply reassuring. Not only was Lord Henry’s elevated social position a help, but as the owner of Beaulieu also sat as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons, he had real influence at Westminster.

In a way, Albion considered, their situations were similar. When Wyndham Martell had died, he had divided his estates between his three sons: the old Dorset estates going to the oldest son, the land in Kent to the second, and the smaller New Forest estate deriving from Fanny going to Godwin who had taken his mother’s name instead of his father’s as more fitting for the owner of the old Albion inheritance. Large though Wyndham Martell’s possessions had been, those of the duke were vast. Though a descendant of the Stuart kings through the unfortunate Monmouth, as well as being a Montagu, a large part of his ancestry came from the Scottish aristocracy. His lands, north and south of the border, ran to hundreds of thousands of acres. It was a small matter for him to grant his second son the eight thousand acres of the Beaulieu estate as a wedding present; but it was a great matter for the New Forest. For although the duke and his family had always been good landlords of Beaulieu through their stewards, it was hardly the same thing as having an owner in residence; whereas now Lord Henry – as the son of a duke the title of lord was placed as a courtesy before his name – had set about plans for rebuilding the ruined abbey as a family home and was taking a keen interest in the place.

It was time to board the train. The Colonel had given Pride a ticket for the second-class carriage. He and Lord Henry prepared to step into the first-class and he had just got one foot in through the door when a voice hailing him from further down the platform caused him to turn, start violently and almost lose his balance.

‘Watch out,’ said the voice, cheerfully. ‘You nearly fell down.’

The owner of the voice, who now came with an easy, swinging gait towards them, was in his twenties. He was dressed in a loose velvet coat and a wide felt hat. Under his arm he carried a satchel. These attributes, in addition to his small pointed goatee beard and the long curls of fair hair that reached his shoulders, all suggested that the young gentleman was an artist of some kind.

‘Going to London?’ he enquired amiably.

The Colonel did not reply, but his jaw set and his hand clenched as though he were about to slash a Russian with his sabre.

‘I’m going up to look at some pictures,’ the young man continued, then, glancing at Lord Henry: ‘Have we met?’

And now, if only to stop this infuriating flow, Colonel Albion turned to face the young man. ‘I have nothing to say to you, Sir,’ he roared. ‘Good day!’ And he hurled himself forward into the carriage as furiously as if it were a Russian battery.

‘Suit yourself,’ said the young man cheerfully, and went to another door. The engine at the front, no doubt in sympathy with the Colonel, let out a huge huff of steam.

Only some time later when the engine was puffing them with a busy rattle towards the environs of Southampton, did Lord Henry venture to enquire: ‘Who was that young man?’

And now poor Albion buried his face in his hands and through gritted teeth informed him: ‘That, Sir, was my son-in-law.’

‘Ah,’ Lord Henry enquired no more. He had heard of Minimus Furzey.

It wasn’t long before Albion saw their game. The Committee Room was crowded. Cumberbatch and his friends, the Forest landowners, everyone was there; and sitting behind the long table facing the room were ten men, law lords or peers of the realm, every one. He saw their game by the way they looked at him.

Colonel Albion had always felt rather proud of the fact that he was descended from two of the most ancient families in southern England. He wasn’t arrogant about it but there was a satisfaction in knowing that no one, not the mightiest in the land, could ever tell him he wasn’t a gentleman or that he didn’t belong. He was also proud of the fact that, though he had purchased his captaincy, he had advanced to the rank of colonel entirely on his merits. His social place amongst the Forest gentry was as solid as a castle on a rock.

But the aristocrats who faced him now were of a different sort. Their families mightn’t be as ancient, but they didn’t care. Their estates were far larger; they belonged to that more rarefied club that governed the country. And to them – they were too polite to say so but he saw it in their eyes – he was just a florid-faced squire.

‘Colonel Albion, you are a Commissioner, are you not, of the Deer Removal Act?’

‘I am.’ There were thirteen Commissioners whose job it was to oversee the working of the Deer Removal Act and, in particular, to approve any new inclosures. Three came from the Office of Woods, including Cumberbatch, then there were the four verderers, chosen by the county, though their power was only a shadow of what it had been in medieval times. The rest were the gentlemen or freeholders who held rights of commoning on the Forest. Albion, with extensive rights and numerous tenants, was a natural person to sit on the Commission.