The Forest (80 page)

‘It does not surprise me. It is natural, given your position.’

‘Even when you come to dinner, I cannot risk being seen in private conversation with you. Tongues would wag.’

‘I do not doubt it.’

‘Quite. I am instructed to say, Count, that His Britannic Majesty’s government has need of your help.’ This was not quite true. No one had actually instructed him to say so because, knowing only too well the inefficiency, and quite
likely the corruption, of official channels, Grockleton had decided to act on his own initiative without official approval. Of course, if he succeeded they
would
approve, so it all came to the same thing.

‘My dear friend, I am at your government’s service.’

‘Then let me tell you, Count,’ he began, ‘exactly what I need.’

It was not only, as both men knew, a question of smuggling brandy and other goods. As well as the huge illicit trade there was traffic in gold and in information. The patriotism of a later age was not much developed yet and certainly not along the southern coast. British naval officers fought in the hope of prize money from captured ships; their men fought because they had been kidnapped by the press gangs and taken to sea. Even a commander as loved as Nelson dared not let his men ashore at an English port – for if he did, he’d never see most of them again. So would the smugglers of southern England buy brandy, trade gold, sell information to their country’s enemies? They would. They did.

But above all, for the dwellers by the New Forest coast, it was a question of simple trade in contraband. And they were so well organized, in such large bands, that not all the riding officers together could have stopped one of their great night-time caravans. In order to do that you needed troops.

It had been tried. Detachments of dragoons and other regiments had been quartered at Lymington from time to time. There were plans for building a new barracks over at Christchurch. The cavalry were never locally recruited, of course; that would be useless. But even so, they were not always keen to take on the smuggling bands. In the last ten years there had been two pitched battles. On each occasion a number of troopers had been killed. And since the troopers were in sympathy with the smugglers anyway, it was not a popular assignment.

‘My chances of intercepting contraband with English
troops’, Grockleton informed the Frenchman, ‘are not good.’

But what about French troops? The idea had come to him a week ago and it might turn out to be a stroke of genius. The French troops had no local ties, no sympathies with the smugglers, nothing. They were bored, looking for something to do. There were, altogether, more than a thousand of them. And they were only there on the sufferance of the British government. If he could make a major interception using them it would not only earn him the grateful thanks of the government; his share of the confiscated loot would make him a modest fortune. He might be unpopular but he could probably retire.

If, on the other hand, the Frenchman failed to support him he could let it be known in London at once. The king himself would hear and be seriously displeased.

All of this, without needing to be told, the Frenchman perfectly understood. ‘It will have to be done with total secrecy,’ he replied when he had heard Grockleton’s plan.

‘Certainly.’

‘I dare not tell my men even upon the day. A parade, some excuse to assemble under arms will be needed, and then …’

‘My feelings exactly. I may have your co-operation, then?’

‘Totally. It goes without saying. I am His Britannic Majesty’s to command.’

‘Then, Sir, I thank you,’ said Grockleton and pushed his brick back into place.

For a moment or two the count and his colleague walked along the lane in silence.

‘Well,
mon ami
,’ the count said at last, ‘you heard all that?’ The other nodded. ‘It puts us,’ the count went on, ‘you know, in a difficult position. Do you think I did right?’

‘I do. You have no choice.’

‘I’m glad you agree. Not a word of this must be known, I need hardly remind you.’

‘You may trust me.’

‘Of course. Now, as we came, let us return, by separate ways.’

Night had come to Albion House and, as she had so often in her young life, Fanny was sitting in the parlour with two old people. In the fireplace the cindery logs produced only an occasional flicker of flame; the candles threw a gentle glow on to the dark oak panelling. Fanny might have ambitious plans for remodelling the house one day into a classical Gothic folly but, for the present, the old parlour had hardly changed since the days of good Queen Bess.

It was very quiet. Sometimes she would read to the old people, but tonight they had preferred to sit still in their chairs, enjoying the silence of the house, which was broken only by the soft tick of the long-case clock in the hall and, more occasionally, by the tiny rustle of a falling cinder in the fire. At last, her father spoke: ‘I can’t see why she is going all the way to Oxford.’

This was greeted with a silence during which the clock quietly sounded another forty ticks.

‘Of course she should.’ Her aunt Adelaide.

Fanny knew better than to interrupt. Not yet, anyway. Only twenty ticks now intervened.

‘How long shall you be gone, Fanny?’ A hint of reproach, of sadness, bravely borne.

‘Only six days, Father, including the journey.’

‘Quite right,’ said Adelaide firmly. ‘We shall miss you, but you are right to go away to see your cousin.’

‘She’s going to see Oxford. It seems a long way.’ They had come full circle. A greying cinder fell.

Francis Albion was eighty-eight years old. People said he had stayed alive so long to see his daughter grown up and it was probably true. Then people said that he wanted to see
her safely married. But since any mention of that subject seemed to fill him with dismay, this clearly could not be the case. And there were even those who wondered if, having grown so used to being alive for such a prodigiously long time, Mr Albion might not be doing it for himself.

The fact was that Francis Albion had never expected to have a child at all. The last of Peter and Betty Albion’s children, who had expected his elder brother to continue the family line, he had been a wanderer much of his life. A lawyer in London, an agent in France, a merchant for a while in America, he had always made enough to live as a gentleman, but not enough to marry. By the age of forty, when the death of his brother left him heir to the Albion estate, he was a confirmed bachelor with no desire to settle. His sister Adelaide had kept Albion House going alone for another twenty years before he had finally returned, as he put it, to take up his family obligations in the Forest.

These were not onerous and he made sure they were profitable to him. They soon included the position of gentleman keeper of one of the walks, as the minor divisions of the Forest were now called. His discharge of this responsibility was typical. Even by the genial standards of the eighteenth century the administration of the New Forest had become notoriously lax. When the crown, in one of its occasional attempts to sort the old place out, had held a royal commission some years before, the commissioners, having pointed out that the woodward of the Forest had kept no accounts for eighteen years, also noted rather sourly that when they inspected the coppice in Mr Albion’s walk, where the king’s timber was supposed to be grown, they had found it used as a huge rabbit warren, with not a single tree to be found in the whole inclosure.

Having assured the commissioners that something would be done, Francis Albion’s only comment to his sister was: ‘I had a thousand rabbits out of there last year and I’ll have another thousand next.’

What then, at the age of sixty-five, had induced Mr Albion to marry Miss Totton of Lymington, thirty years his junior?

Some said it was love. Others that, after his sister Adelaide had suffered a severe cold, it had occurred to Albion that she might not always be there to look after him. Whatever the reason, Mr Albion proposed and Miss Totton accepted, and came to live at Albion House.

It was strange, really, that Miss Totton had not married long before. She was pleasant-looking, respectable; she wasn’t poor. Perhaps she had been crossed in love when young. Whatever the reason, at the age of thirty-five, she had obviously decided that marriage into the Albions, even as a nurse, was preferable to her present situation. Her half-brother, as head of the Totton family, was pleased with the Albion connection, and Adelaide seemed genuinely glad to see her brother married. She kept to her own wing of the house and the two women had got on well.

The marriage had been rather successful. Miss Totton had not expected much, but marriage seemed to have given Francis Albion a new lease of life. Even so, it came as quite a shock to him when, in his sixty-eighth year, his wife informed him that she was pregnant.

‘Such things can happen, Francis,’ she told him with a smile. They called the baby Frances, after her father; and, as was the fashion of the time, she was always known as Fanny.

There were no more children. Fanny was therefore the heiress. Old Mr Albion was happy because he had a daughter, which caused some pleasant admiration at his age. Fanny’s mother was happy: not only had she a child to love, but to be the mother of the next owner of Albion House was a much finer thing than to be the married nurse to an elderly gentleman. Adelaide was happy because she, too, had a child to love. Mr Totton of Lymington was delighted, because now his children, who were the same age, had a
close cousin who was heiress to one of the local estates. Why, even Fanny herself was happy, being rich and loved. And so she should have been. For all she had to do, in such happy circumstances, was to live up to everyone else’s desires.

Fanny had been ten when her mother died. The family had been shocked, not only on account of their grief, but with concern for the future of the child.

‘What shall we do now?’ Francis Albion had cried to his sister.

‘Live a long time,’ she had sternly replied.

They had both done so. Fanny had not been orphaned; if Francis and Adelaide had been more like grandparents, Fanny had nonetheless had a happy home. If her father, as he grew into old age, was somewhat timid and plaintive, her own youthful spirits and the frequent company of her Totton cousins easily overcame this influence. And if her Aunt Adelaide tended to repeat herself, Fanny could, all the same, enjoy the intelligence that was still there, as sharp as ever.

And then there was Mrs Pride.

Mrs Pride. Were all housekeepers known as Mrs, regardless of whether they had been married? Fanny had never met a housekeeper who wasn’t. It was a term of respect, a recognition that, within their own domain, they were mistress of the house. And there was absolutely no question about who ran Albion House. Mrs Pride did.

She was a very handsome woman: tall, her grey hair swept elegantly back, her walk stately; any man would guess at once that she must have a magnificent body. The only reason she had not married, in all likelihood, was that she preferred running a manor house to the much harder life she would have had as the wife of a farmer or forest smallholder, or even a Lymington shopkeeper.

She was always deferential. If the sheets needed renewing she would get permission from Adelaide to attend to it.
When it was time for the spring clean she would enquire what date would be convenient. If a chimney looked about to fall down, even, she would politely ask Francis what he would like her to do about it. She knew every nook and cranny, every rafter, every store, every expenditure. Mrs Pride was, in truth, the mistress of Albion House; the Albions only lived there.

To Fanny she became a second, silent mother. For years Fanny did not know it. If she decided to go for a walk and Fanny went with her, Mrs Pride might want to sit a while so that Fanny could play in the water at the ford. When she happened to see sketching materials in Lymington she took the liberty of buying them, just in case Adelaide might wish to give them to Fanny. She remarked on Fanny’s drawing prowess to the vicar after church and meekly supposed that there would be tutors visiting the house to give her lessons in other accomplishments too – at which Mr Gilpin took the hint at once and saw that these things were attended to. And so quiet and effective was she that, at almost fifteen, Fanny still thought that she was just the loving, friendly figure who saw that she was clothed and fed, and who seemed always glad of a little company when she sat in her little parlour in the early evening for a pot of tea and some delicious brandy cakes.

Fanny glanced across at her father. He had closed his eyes, after these last remarks. It was strange, in a way, this timidity of his, when one considered his life. Sometimes, even now, he would tell her about his travels, describing the gorgeous French court of Louis XV, or the busy port of Boston, or the plantations of Carolina. He still recalled every great event.

‘I remember the excitement in London, back in forty-five,’ he would say, ‘when the Scots tried to march south under Bonnie Prince Charlie.’ Every victory of the British on the high seas or out in India seemed to have a story to go with it, and when she was a child he used to relate these to
her vividly, so that, without knowing it, she had learned much of the history of her times from him.

She was sad to see his decline, but glad that she was there to be at his side in these final years.