The Forest (67 page)

‘This is where Tyrrell shot my ancestor William Rufus, Nellie,’ the king announced. He glanced at Sir Robert Howard. ‘That’s almost six hundred years ago. Can this tree really be so old?’

‘Undoubtedly, Sir,’ said the Master Keeper, who hadn’t the faintest idea.

‘What exactly is the story?’ young Monmouth asked.

‘Yes.’ King Charles looked sternly at Howard. ‘Let’s have it exactly, Master Keeper.’

And the aristocrat, a little red, had just started to bluster some vague and garbled version of the tale he’d obviously forgotten, when to everyone’s surprise there was a movement from the back, and a tall figure stepped forward and made a low bow. It was Purkiss.

Stephen Pride watched in astonishment as his friend calmly made his way to the front. Now Purkiss, in a respectful voice and with a serious countenance enquired: ‘May I, Your Majesty, recount the true story of this tree?’

‘You certainly may, fellow,’ King Charles said affably, while Nellie pulled a face at Howard.

And so Purkiss began. First he explained about the oak tree’s magical Christmas greening and, when Charles looked doubtful, the gentlemen keepers assured him this was perfectly correct. The king leaned forward in his saddle after that, paying close attention to Purkiss’s every word.

Purkiss was good. Pride listened with admiration. With the quiet reverence of a verger conducting the faithful round a cathedral, he gave the story of Rufus’s death with every detail recorded or invented in the chronicles. He described the evil visions of the Norman king seen the night before; what he had said to Walter Tyrrell in the morning; the monk’s warning. Everything. Then, solemnly, he pointed to the tree. ‘When Tyrrell loosed the fatal arrow, Sire, it grazed the tree and then struck the king. It left a mark, they say, which once could be seen up there.’ He pointed to a place some way up the trunk. ‘It was only a young tree then, Your Majesty, so the mark was carried higher with the years.’

He explained how Tyrrell fled across the Forest to the River Avon at Tyrrell’s Ford and how the king’s body was carried on a forester’s cart to Winchester. He concluded with a low bow.

‘Well done, good fellow!’ cried the monarch. ‘Wasn’t that well done?’ he asked the courtiers, who agreed that it was excellent. ‘That’s worth a golden guinea,’ he said, producing a gold coin and handing it down to the Brockenhurst man. ‘How do you come to know all this so well, good friend?’ he then enquired.

‘Because, Your Majesty’ – Purkiss’s face was as solemn as a judge’s – ‘the forester who carried away the king’s body on his cart was my own ancestor. His name was Purkiss.’

There was a peal of laughter from Nellie.

King Charles bit his lip. ‘The devil he was,’ he said.

Pride stared at his friend with stupefaction. The cunning
rascal, he thought. The cleverness with which the thing was done; the way Purkiss had carefully stopped and let the king draw this last, astounding piece of information from him. And the man was still standing there, without even the hint of a smirk on his face.

As for King Charles II of England who, whatever his vices or his virtues, was certainly one of the most accomplished liars who ever sat upon a throne, he gazed down at Purkiss with professional admiration. ‘Here’s another guinea, Purkiss,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if your ancestor’s name appears one day in history books.’

Which it did.

It was not often that Alice Lisle couldn’t make up her mind. Some people would have been surprised to know that such a thing ever occurred. But this morning, as she looked coldly at her family and at Mr Hancock the lawyer, she hesitated; and her hesitation was not unreasonable. ‘I wish that somebody would tell me’, she remarked in her usual businesslike manner, ‘how I am to ask a favour of a man when my husband killed his father.’

For they wanted her to ride across the Forest and see the king.

There were many who thought that Alice Lisle was hard. She didn’t really care. If I’m not strong, she had long ago concluded, who will be? If she was attacked, who would defend her? She had looked about. She didn’t see anybody.

It wasn’t as if she had a husband any more. Sometimes she would have liked one: somebody to hold her, comfort her and love her; especially during that period, just after John Lisle’s death, when she was passing sadly from her childbearing years towards the age of fifty. But there had been no one, so she had faced it all alone.

God knows there had been plenty to do. And she had managed fairly well. Her triumph had been the marriage of her stepson. With the help of family friends she had found
him a handsome girl who was heiress to a rich estate near Southampton. Her late husband would have been proud of her, and grateful, for that. As far as her own daughters were concerned they had so far married godly men, but none of wealth; and this, Alice frankly admitted, was probably her own fault.

The religious meetings she had begun at Albion House had soon grown into something more. Word spread quickly among the Puritan community. Since the new restrictions upon them, men who had been living as well-beneficed ministers had to toe the line of the Anglican Church; those who refused lost their livings. So there was no shortage of respectable men who were only too glad of the hospitality of a country house from which to preach. Soon she found she was letting them stay at Moyles Court as well and people were coming to hear preachings from Ringwood, Fordingbridge and other villages up the Avon river almost as far as Sarum. Some of the preachers, inevitably, were handsome unmarried men.

Margaret, as she had foreseen, had married Whitaker. Tryphena had wed a worthy Puritan gentleman named Lloyd. But Bridget, Alice considered, had found the most distinguished man of them all, a scholarly minister named Leonard Hoar, who had been in America and studied at the new university of Harvard before returning to England as a notable preacher. There had been talk of his returning with Bridget to Puritan Massachusetts when a good position came up, perhaps at Harvard. Sometimes Alice thought there was too much nervousness in his disposition, but his brilliance was undoubted. She was sorry that she seldom saw them.

For the moment, then, Alice could consider her daughters settled, except for little Betty. And as Betty was still only nine, there was time enough before she needed to worry about her.

Other matters, however, were not so settled. Money was
always a problem. None of her Puritan sons-in-law was rich and with the new regime there wasn’t a chance of preferment. ‘And because I’m a woman,’ she told her family frankly, ‘men always think they can cheat me.’

There was the Christchurch merchant who had owed money to John Lisle, although he denied it; there were the Lisle relations on the Isle of Wight, withholding part of her stepson’s inheritance – they were still trying to wriggle out of that. When the Christchurch merchant told her she was a peevish, troublesome woman she had coldly demanded: ‘And if I weren’t, would you pay me what you owe? Would you feed and clothe my children? I think not. First you try to rob them,’ she told him scornfully, ‘then you call me names if I complain.’ She had learned to be tough.

‘No one is going to love me,’ she had remarked to Hancock the lawyer, ‘but perhaps they will respect me.’

She looked at the three people before her now. Whitaker: handsome, honest, a fine man, but not a man of business. Tryphena: her husband was no fool, but he was away in London. Narrow-faced Tryphena herself was a good woman and a loyal daughter, but even now, in her thirties, she was as literal as a child; the idea of being subtle, or even tactful, had simply never crossed her mind. John Hancock the lawyer, however, had good judgement. With his neatly curled grey hair and his stately manners, he should really have gone to practise in London, but he preferred to live down near Sarum. Like all good advocates he understood that the law is a negotiation and that indirect means are as good as direct. It was to John Hancock that she would listen.

‘You really think I should go and see the king?’

‘Yes, I do. For the simple reason that you have nothing to lose.’

Alice sighed. The problem involved no less a personage than the king’s brother James, Duke of York. In this case it was Alice who was defending herself against the charge of withholding money. For after being given part of John
Lisle’s forfeited estate, the duke had somehow become convinced that Alice was secreting some of Lisle’s money, to which he was entitled. He had even started a lawsuit against her, which had already dragged on for some years.

‘I think that the Duke of York, who is an honest but obstinate man, really believes you are secreting this money and that if he were convinced you were suffering hardship, he would drop the case,’ Hancock explained. ‘He is of the opinion that you are cheating him because you are John Lisle’s widow. The king is a much easier man than his brother. If you can convince him, he would persuade James. At least you should try. You owe it to little Betty.’

‘Ah. You hit me there, John Hancock.’

‘I know. I am ruthless.’ He smiled. Betty, playing outside: the threat of the duke’s lawsuit was a cloud over her future fortune.

‘I know why you are unwilling to go,’ Whitaker remarked amiably. ‘It’s the king’s reputation with women. You fear he’ll make an attempt upon your virtue.’

‘Yes, Robert,’ Alice said drily. ‘Of course.’

‘I hardly think’ – Tryphena had been listening carefully and now she frowned – ‘that the king would make any attempt upon Mother. His interest is only in women who are young and beautiful.’

So it was agreed that Alice should go and that she should take little Betty with her. ‘Perhaps’, Alice said wryly, ‘the sight of the child may soften the king’s heart, even if the sight of me is unlikely to excite him.’

While Tryphena prepared the girl for her outing, Alice did, all the same, take some trouble over her own appearance so that, as she surveyed herself in the glass, she could murmur a little wistfully: ‘John Lisle didn’t marry such an ill-looking woman, at least.’

It was noon when they left Albion House and started up the lane that led northwards towards the small ford. They
missed their visitor, approaching from the south, by only a few minutes.

Gabriel Furzey rode slowly through the gate to Albion House. He’d been glad when Stephen Pride went off with his son Jim, so that none of the Prides was around to see him as he went on his errand.

The truth was Gabriel Furzey was in trouble.

The presence of Charles II in the New Forest that year was not entirely a matter of royal whim. The Forest was very much in the royal mind just then. The merry monarch was always on the lookout for extra income and, like his father before him, he had realized after a time that the royal forests might be a useful asset. The second King Charles was going about things in a much jollier manner; but he was just as thorough. He did more than institute a Forest Eyre; his Commission of Inquiry was going into everything. The regarders were checking every boundary in the Forest. The encroachments and land grants were all carefully recorded; timber selling, charcoal selling, the administration of the forest officers – all were inspected. The king was letting them know that his Forest was to be properly managed in future. There was even a deer census, which revealed that the New Forest still contained some seventy-five hundred fallow and nearly four hundred red deer. Clearly the king wanted to know exactly what the place was truly worth. And, the largest task of all, his justices were ordered to record exactly who held what rights in the Forest and what they should be paying for them.

‘A complete register of claims, right down to the last hog to eat the acorns on the forest floor,’ Hancock the lawyer had described the inquiry to Alice. The justices in Eyre had already held two sessions about the claims. A final one, at which Alice’s would be dealt with, was due shortly. ‘As well as establishing what everyone owes,’ Hancock had pointed out, ‘this will cut off any further claims. Either a claim is
recorded, or it’s invalid. It also seems to me’, he added, ‘that the king is cleverly preparing the ground for the future. Once our claims are recorded, we can’t complain about anything he may do at a later date. So long as he doesn’t infringe what is already registered he can look for ways to profit from the Forest in any way he can.’

Whatever the royal motives might be, one thing was very clear: these claims would be final and binding. If yours wasn’t in here it would never be recognized in the future. Every landlord and peasant in the Forest had understood that perfectly by now and they had all turned up before the justices at Lyndhurst. The basis of most claims was the less formal register made thirty-five years before. Whatever was in that would be recognized. If there were further claims they could be added but would need to be proved.

And that, for Gabriel Furzey, was the trouble.

It was his own fault, that was the worst of it: a moment of obstinacy and bad temper a long time ago. Worse still, it was Stephen Pride who had urged him to go and make his claim with young Alice; Stephen Pride who knew he hadn’t. So now the Prides of Oakley had all their rights and he didn’t.

Not that it had made any difference. All through the years of political strife, when no one had bothered much about the Forest, the people of Oakley had gone about their lives as they always had before. He had pastured his few cows, cut turf, collected wood and no one had ever questioned it. Until recently he had clean forgotten about that business of claims back in 1635. And then this New Forest Eyre had come along.