The Forest (22 page)

She was a rather pleasant-looking woman: broad-faced, blue-eyed, Celtic, intelligent he guessed – obviously one of the Forest people. Perhaps he’d seen her before? She seemed to be hoping to talk to someone, although her eyes watched him cautiously. Fine eyes.

‘Yes, my child?’

‘Oh, Brother. They say Brother Matthew has been killed. My husband works for the abbey at harvest. Brother Matthew was always so kind. We wondered …’ She trailed off, looking anxious.

Brother Adam frowned. Probably the whole Forest would have heard something about yesterday by now. Besides the lay brothers, the abbey gave casual employment to many Forest people. No doubt kindly Brother Matthew was well liked. His frown was caused only by the memory of the incident impinging on his peace. How selfish of him. He smiled instead. ‘Brother Matthew lives, my child.’ The first reports of the incident, as usual, had been garbled. Brother
Matthew had taken a very nasty knock and lost much blood, but thank God he was alive, in the abbey’s infirmary and had already taken a little broth.

Her relief was so palpable that he was touched. How blessed that this peasant woman should care so deeply about the monk.

‘And those who did this?’

Ah. He understood. The religious houses had a name for protecting their own people from justice and it was resented. Well, he could reassure her on that score.

The abbot had been furious. There had been an incident like this before, about fifteen years ago: a huge party of poachers; a strong suspicion that the lay brothers in one of the granges had been party to the business. That, together with the prior’s bad report of Luke, had done it. ‘The lay brother who struck him will get no protection from the abbey,’ he assured her. ‘The Forest courts will deal with him.’

She nodded quietly, then looked thoughtful. ‘Yet might it have been an accident?’ she asked. ‘If the lay brother repents, wouldn’t they show mercy?’

‘You are right to be cautious in judging,’ he said. ‘And mercy is God’s grace.’ What a good woman she was. She feared for the monk, yet thought with compassion of his assailant. ‘But we must all accept righteous punishment for our transgressions.’ He looked stern. ‘You know the fellow has run away?’ She seemed to shake her head. ‘He will be caught.’ The steward of the Forest had been informed by the abbot that morning. ‘I believe they are taking out the hounds.’

With a kindly nod he left her. And poor Mary, her heart pounding, ran all the way back across the heath to the place where, last night, she had hidden her brother Luke.

Tom Furzey clenched his fists. They’d get what was coming to them now. Already he could hear the hounds in
the distance. He was not a bad man. But bad things had been happening to him recently. Sometimes he hardly knew what to think.

The Prides had always thought he was a bit slow. He knew that. But everything had been so friendly and easy before. They were all part of the Forest: all family, so to speak. That pony, though – that had been a shock. If John Pride could just casually take a pony foaled by his, Tom Furzey’s, own mare, with not so much as a by-your-leave: what sort of brother-in-law was that? He despises me, Tom thought, and now I know it.

It was strange. The first day he couldn’t quite believe it had happened, even with the foal in Pride’s pen, before his very eyes. Then, when challenged, Pride had just laughed at him.

And then Tom had called him a thief. In front of the others. Well, he was, wasn’t he? Things had snowballed after that.

But Mary: that was another matter. That first day, after she
knew
what had passed between him and her brother, she had gone round to Pride’s house as friendly as you like. ‘Didn’t you tell him to give the pony back?’ he had stormed. But she had just looked blank. Never even thought of it. ‘So whose side are you on, then?’ he had cried. The fact was, after years of marriage, she hadn’t really given him a thought. That was the hurtful truth of it. Poor old Tom, a useful husband for Mary: that’s all I am to the Prides, he reckoned.

But whatever she thought of him, she owed him respect as head of their family. What sort of example did it set the children if she let all the Forest see how little regard she had for him? He wasn’t going to be made to look a fool. He had put his foot down; forbidden her to go to John Pride’s. Wasn’t that right? His sister said it was. So did a lot of others. Not everyone in the Forest thought so well of the Prides and their high and mighty ways.

It hadn’t been easy, though, watching his wife, day by day, growing colder towards him.

Well, the Prides were going to be put in their place today. And after that … He wasn’t sure what. But something, anyhow.

His mind was full of these thoughts when he caught sight, nearly a mile away, of Puckle riding a Forest pony. He seemed to be dragging something behind him.

There were ten riders. The hounds were in full cry. The prior had given them a scent of Brother Luke’s bedding and they had been following it all the way from the grange. The steward of the Forest himself was leading them. Two of the other riders were gentlemen foresters, two more were under-foresters, the rest servants.

Since its inception, the New Forest had always been divided into administrative areas, known as bailiwicks, each in the charge of a forester, usually from a gentry family. Down the western side ran the bailiwicks of Godshill, Linwood and Burley. A big tract just west of the centre was known as Battramsley bailiwick. Recently, however, the largest bailiwick of all, the central royal bailiwick of Lyndhurst, which ran right across the heath to Beaulieu, had been subdivided, the hamlet of Oakley where Pride and Furzey lived falling within the southern section. Over all these presided the warden of the forest, a friend of the king, whose steward supervized the Forest for him day-to-day.

They were surprised, as they came to the hamlet, to see Tom Furzey in front of them, waving his arms and crying out: ‘I know where he is.’

The party pulled up. The steward looked stern. ‘You’ve seen him?’

‘Don’t need to. I know where he is.’

The steward frowned, then glanced at the fair, handsome young man riding beside him. ‘Alban?’

Philip le Alban was a lucky young gentleman. Two
centuries before, his ancestor Alban, born to Norman Adela and her Saxon husband Edgar, had not quite maintained his position in the increasingly French society of Plantagenet England; but his descendants, who had taken his name for several generations, had continued as under-foresters for various bailiwicks and, as a reward for this long service and because he had married well, young Philip le Alban had been promoted to forester of the new Southern bailiwick. No one knew the Forest or its inhabitants better. ‘Where is he, then, Tom?’ he asked pleasantly enough.

‘At John Pride’s house, of course,’ Tom cried and, without another word, turned and started leading them in that direction.

‘The runaway and John Pride are brothers,’ Alban explained. And since the hounds, it was true, were going in that general direction, the steward nodded brusquely as they followed Tom.

Pride was out, but his family were there. They stood silently while two of the men searched their cottage without result. The rest of the little farmstead yielded nothing.

But it was the cowshed at which Furzey was gesticulating wildly. ‘In there,’ he cried. ‘Look in there.’

He was so excited that this time the entire party, even the steward, crowded into the shed. But it took only moments to see that nobody was lurking there.

Tom looked crestfallen. But he wasn’t prepared to let it go at that. ‘He was here,’ he insisted; then, seeing their disbelieving faces, he burst out: ‘Where do you think John Pride is now? Making fools of you! Hiding his brother somewhere.’ They were starting to move out. This wouldn’t do. ‘And look at this pony,’ he cried. ‘What are you going to do about that?’ The foal was tethered in one corner, blinking its frightened eyes at him. ‘This pony’s stolen. From me!’

They were already outside again. His plan was dissolving. He had quite persuaded himself that they were
going to find Luke, lead John Pride away in chains and restore his pony to him. He rushed after them. ‘You don’t understand,’ he shouted. ‘They’re all the same, these Prides. They’re all criminals.’

Two of the men started to chuckle.

‘That include your wife, then, Tom?’ one of them asked. Even Alban had to repress a smile. To the steward, who had looked up sharply, he explained that Tom’s wife also had the runaway for a brother.

‘God save us!’ the steward exclaimed irritably. ‘Isn’t that just like the Forest?’ Turning to Tom, he exploded: ‘How the devil do I know
you
aren’t hiding him? You’re probably the biggest criminal of the lot. Where does this man live?’ They told him. ‘Search his cottage at once.’

‘But …’ Tom could hardly believe this turn of events. ‘What about my pony?’ he wailed.

‘Damn your pony,’ cursed the steward, as he started to ride towards Tom’s cottage.

They found nothing there either. Mary had seen to that. But a short while later the hounds picked up Luke’s scent in the trees nearby and followed it for many a mile.

Indeed, as time went by, the route they took became quite curious, winding about until at last it went in a huge circle round Lyndhurst where, so to speak, it continued for ever.

There had been no one to see, a couple of hours before, the lone figure of Puckle on his pony, dragging the bundle of Luke’s clothing Mary had provided.

‘Damn waste of time,’ the steward remarked to Alban. ‘I suppose that idiot was right this morning. The Prides are hiding him.’

‘Perhaps.’ Alban smiled. ‘But no one can hide in the Forest for ever.’

When the summons to the abbot came, one November morning, Brother Adam was well prepared. He had done what the abbot had asked a month before and reached his
conclusions. Strangely enough, given the worldly and political nature of the business, he had found that his continuing period of meditation and private study had given him strength and certainty. His mind was at peace.

So, he was glad to say, was the abbey. October had passed quietly. The migratory birds had wheeled and headed southwards across the sea. Then November’s greying clouds, like the sails of an ageing ship, had drawn eastwards across the sky; the yellowed oak leaves had fallen by the river bank and nothing had disturbed the abbey’s silence. At Martinmass in November, at the Forest’s minor court, the Court of Attachments, the verderers had sent the incident at the grange forward to the senior court, which would be held at the good pleasure of the king’s justices, when they visited the Forest the following spring. Young Martell and his friends had wisely turned themselves in to the sheriffs of their counties, who would produce them at the spring court. Luke, the lay brother, had not yet been found. Kindly Brother Matthew had wanted to forgive him, but the abbot had been firm.

‘Justice must be seen to be done, for our good name.’

As he walked towards the abbot’s quarters Brother Adam looked with pleasure at the scene around him. Punctuated by the clanging bell that, every three hours or so, summoned the monks to prayer, the monastery was always a hive of quiet activity. There were the weaving and cloth-making workshops, and the fulling mill by the river at which the estate’s huge clip of wool was cleaned. The skins of the sheep and cattle provided numerous departments: a tannery – smelly, so outside the gate; a skinner’s shop for making hoods and leather blankets; a shoemaker’s – very busy since every monk and lay brother needed two pairs of boots or shoes every year. By the cloisters was the parchment and bookbinding department. There was a flour mill, a bakery, a brewery, two stable ranges, a piggery and a slaughterhouse. With its forge, carpenter’s, candlemaker’s,
two infirmaries and a hospice providing accommodation for visitors – the abbey was like a little walled town. Or perhaps, with its Latin books and services, and the monks’ habits resembling the Roman dress of a thousand years before, it was more like a huge Roman villa.

Nothing, Adam reflected, was wasted; everything was used. Between the various buildings, for instance, the ground was carefully arranged in beds for vegetables and herbs. Fruits grew on trellises by sheltered walls, grapes on vines. There was honeysuckle for the bees whose hives, scattered about the inclosure, yielded honey and wax.

‘We are worker bees ourselves,’ he had once joked to a visiting knight. ‘But the queen we serve is the Queen of Heaven.’ He had been rather pleased with this conceit, although chiding himself afterwards for falling so easily into the sin of vanity.

Above all, the abbey was self-sufficient. ‘All nature’, he delighted to point out, ‘flows through the abbey. Everything is in balance, everything complete. The monastery can endure, like nature itself, to the end of days.’ It was a perfect machine for contemplating God’s wondrous creation.

And it was precisely this truth that was in his mind when he entered the abbot’s office, sat down beside the prior and gazed steadily forward, as the abbot turned to him and bluntly demanded: ‘Well, Adam, what are we to do about these wretched churches?’

It was a curious fact, born out of the experience of centuries, that if one thing brought trouble and strife to any monastery, it was, above all others, the possession of a parish church.

Why should this be? Wasn’t a church by its very nature a place of peace? In theory, yes. But in practice, churches had vicars, parishioners and local squires; and they all had one thing to argue about: money.