The Forest (81 page)

‘Perhaps’ – her Aunt Adelaide’s voice broke into the silence, now – ‘you will meet a handsome beau at Oxford.’

‘Perhaps.’ Fanny laughed. ‘Mr Gilpin told me today I should fall in love with a poor professor.’

‘I don’t think that’s what a Miss Albion would do, is it, Fanny?’

‘No, Aunt Adelaide, I don’t think it is.’

She loved her aunt’s aristocratic old face. She hoped she would look like that one day too. It seemed to her that Adelaide could not have had a very happy life, but she never complained. If Mrs Pride ran the house in the practical sense, her aunt Adelaide was still its family guardian – the guardian angel, really.

It was evenings like this, when her father was dozing or had retired to bed, and she and Adelaide were sitting quietly together, that Fanny treasured most. The old house so silent; the shadows, like familiar ghosts, always in the same places on the panelling in the candlelight – at such times, her aunt would begin to talk. And she started to do so now.

Fanny smiled. Her aunt told the same stories over again, yet she was always happy to hear them. It was probably because, although her father’s stories were interesting, they concerned only his own life; whereas Adelaide spoke about a more distant past – her mother Betty, her grandmother Alice, the story of the Albion inheritance going back centuries. Fanny’s own inheritance. Yet the wonderful thing was that when her aunt Adelaide told it, all these things seemed to have happened only yesterday.

‘My mother was born just after the Restoration of King Charles II,’ Adelaide could say. That was more than a hundred and thirty years ago. Yet Betty Lisle was a living memory. Adelaide had shared this house with her for forty
years. ‘That’s her favourite chair, where you sit now,’ her aunt would say. Or, one afternoon in the garden: ‘I remember the day my mother planted that rose tree. It was sunny, just like this …’ The very house itself seemed to become like a living person too. ‘The brick skin of the house was put on when grandmother was a girl by her father. But he left the timbers and this old panelling’, she would add, with a nod to the wall, ‘just as it was in Queen Elizabeth’s day. Of course’ – and here followed a vivid personal description of the terrifying figure in red and black – ‘it was from this room, on a night like this, that old Lady Albion went out to try to raise the county to join the Spanish Armada.’

How could anyone fail to love such family history? But – here was the real difference between her aunt’s and her father’s stories – Adelaide’s were told with such feeling for the people she spoke about. She would tell Fanny how this one had known hardship, or that one lost a child and grieved, so that the ghostly figures peopling the house became like friends whose joys and sadnesses one shared and whom, were such a thing possible, one wanted to sustain and comfort.

‘I try to keep things as they were for my dear mother and father,’ Adelaide liked to say. And even if I do decide to add some Gothic features, thought Fanny, I too will continue as loyal guardian of the family shrine.

There was only one story, though, which used to move Aunt Adelaide to tears and that was the tale of her grandmother, Alice Lisle.

It was ironic, really, that Monmouth’s rebellion and the execution of Alice Lisle should have come when they did. For within three years of Monmouth’s attempt to seize the throne for the Protestant cause, King James II had so infuriated the English Parliament with his promotion of Roman Catholicism that they were ready to throw him out; and when, at this crucial point, his Catholic wife
unexpectedly gave birth to a healthy son and heir, they did. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 effectively ended the civil and religious dispute that had been going on since the Stuarts came to the English throne. It was practically bloodless. The English didn’t want Catholic rule and they got their way. James and his baby son were out. His Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William took over instead. Had Monmouth been alive then, Parliament might have chosen him but, like so many Stuarts, he had been vain and impetuous. So William and Mary it was. After them, the other Protestant daughter Anne. And after Anne, a grandson of one of Charles I’s sisters, the Protestant King George, head of the German House of Hanover whose grandson George III was still reigning now.

Kings ruled through Parliament these days. Neither they nor their heirs were allowed to marry Catholics. Catholics and dissenters might practise their religion, but they could not attend university or hold any public office. Eighteenth-century England would not be quite what Alice Lisle might have wanted, but to a large extent the cause for which both she and her husband had been murdered had now been won.

Ironic politically, but the personal tragedy remained, like a tree that continues growing, almost the same, despite a change in yearly weather. A century had passed, but the Forest had not forgotten Alice. And in Albion House she was still a living memory.

Aunt Adelaide might have been born twenty years after those terrible events, but she knew them from her parents, and relations like her old aunt Tryphena, and local figures like Jim Pride, who had all been there at the time. Through their eyes and their descriptions, she had witnessed the arrest, the shameful trial and the execution. She still shuddered whenever she passed Moyles Court or the Great Hall at Winchester. Moyles Court had passed out of the
family, now, but Albion House had been Alice’s true home, the place she had loved, and her presence abided.

Yet perhaps Alice might have faded back, with time, to join those other shadows in the evening candlelight. If it had not been for Betty.

For the first year after her mother’s execution, Betty had retreated back to Albion House and remained there in a state of shock. When Peter wrote to her she replied vaguely; when he came to see her she sent him away. She couldn’t see him. She didn’t quite know why, but everything seemed impossible. He persevered, though, for three long years and at last she came out of her depression enough to marry him.

Was their marriage happy? As she grew older, Adelaide sometimes wondered if it had been. There had been several children who died young; her elder brother who had later married and died without any heirs; then herself and lastly Francis. Peter had often been away in London while Betty remained alone at Albion House. By the time Adelaide was ten she had realized her mother must be rather lonely. A few years later, when he was not quite sixty, Peter had died in London; of overwork, it was said. He had been planning to spend more time in the country.

After that, with Francis sent to stay with an Oxfordshire vicar for his schooling and then away studying law, Betty had slowly contracted into the house, like a creature retreating into its shell. She would go out to visit neighbours, of course, or to shop in Lymington. But the house became her life, where Adelaide kept her company and, as that life stretched on down the years, the shadows of the house gradually gathered, enfolding them. The chief shadow was Alice.

‘To think that I was here with Peter that terrible night,’ Betty would sometimes cry with self-reproach. And pointing out that she could hardly have done anything, and might have been arrested, did no good. ‘We should never have gone to Moyles Court anyway.’ True, perhaps, but useless. ‘She only
left London because of Peter.’ Also true – Tryphena had told her – but equally useless to worry about now.

Adelaide was a sensible and quite a cheerful young woman. Her mind was strong. But hearing these litanies year after year raised around her a sense of life’s tragedy and her mother’s pain that was like a cloud.

With this tragic cloud came another – black, like thunder, rolling across the sky. The name of this dark shadow was Penruddock.

There were no Penruddocks in the Forest now. The Penruddocks of Hale had departed early in the century. The Penruddocks of Compton Chamberlayne were still there; but that was thirty-five miles away, over the horizon, in another county. Adelaide didn’t know any Penruddocks in person, therefore. But she knew what to think of them.

‘All royalists, of course,’ Betty would say. ‘But treacherous with it. When I think how my mother had actually tried to help them when they were in trouble. And this was their thanks.’

The treachery of the Furzeys had never been fully understood by the Albions, as it had by the Prides. And even if it had, it would only have earned them a bleak contempt. But the cruelty of another gentry family was a very different matter.

‘Sneaking around the house with his filthy troops all night. Trying to break down the door. Letting his men steal mother’s linen. And then shoving her on the back of a trooper’s horse in just her nightdress. An old woman like that. Shameful!’ Betty would cry, her eyes flashing suddenly with rage and scorn. ‘Evil!’

Adelaide had a clear picture of Colonel Penruddock, with his saturnine face and cruel, vengeful nature. Such a crime between families could never be forgiven; nor, she believed, should it. ‘That family’, she therefore told Fanny, in her turn, ‘are wicked, evil people. Never have anything to do with them.’

She had said so once again that evening and Fanny had just assured her with a smile that she certainly wouldn’t, when they both turned, Fanny in some alarm, at a terrible sound. It was a cough, a rasping, wheezing cough, followed by a gasp. It came from old Francis Albion. He seemed to be struggling for breath. Fanny went pale. She rose; hurried to his side. ‘Should we send for the doctor?’ she whispered. ‘Father seems to be …’

‘No, we should not.’ Adelaide did not move from her chair.

Francis had opened his eyes now, but they were staring up into his head in the most alarming way. He had gone pale. The cough began again.

‘Aunt Adelaide,’ Fanny cried, ‘he’s …’

‘No, he is not!’ said her aunt with some asperity. ‘Stop pretending to die, Francis,’ she cried. ‘Stop it at once.’ She turned crossly to Fanny. ‘Don’t you see, child, he’s trying to prevent you going to Oxford?’

‘Aunt Adelaide! What a thing to say of poor papa.’ Her father was gasping for air now. ‘Of course I wouldn’t go if he is unwell.’

‘Fiddlesticks,’ said Adelaide. But the awful sound went on.

Isaac Seagull, landlord of the Angel Inn, let the damp breeze play on his face as he gazed over Pennington Marshes.

He was a tall, wiry man, as tall as Grockleton if he stood straight. But usually Isaac Seagull stood with his round head stooped forward. His hair, still all black, was worn in a plait down his back. His face, as chinless as his Seagull ancestors, was usually cheerful; but at present it was serious. Isaac Seagull had something on his mind.

The organization of smuggling in the New Forest area was a large and complex affair. First of all there were the ships that supplied the goods. These came from various
ports across the sea, but the busiest were those of Dunkirk, which picked up Holland trade, Roscoff in Brittany, and the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. The main transports were called luggers, which varied in size but had broad, shallow draughts and huge capacity. They usually came across in armed convoys. When it was necessary to avoid the few Customs vessels sent against them the luggers could either turn into the wind and row away, or dash into the mudflats where the revenue vessels couldn’t follow them. Sometimes the smugglers also used swift clippers, which could outrun almost anything.

The man in charge of the ship, or convoy, was the captain. But then, when the shipment came to shore it had to be met by a huge caravan that was to transport and distribute the goods. The organizer of this operation was the lander.

Isaac Seagull was the lander for the New Forest.

But behind the lander and the captain was another, more shadowy figure. The man who put up the money for the whole operation, who could buy the goods, pay for a clipper: the entrepreneur. This was the venturer.

Who was he? Nobody knew. Or if they did, they said nothing. The parish clerk at Lymington church kept all the books, so he must have known. A local bailiff took contributions from any of the farmers or merchants who wanted to invest in the enterprise; so he probably knew. The scale of operations was so large, sometimes, that it could only have been someone with very deep pockets, one of the local aristocrats, a member of the gentry.

Grockleton believed it was Mr Luttrell. Owner of a fine house called Eaglehurst, down past Mr Drummond’s Cadland estate, at the junction of the Solent water and the Southampton inlet, Mr Luttrell had built a tower, which gave him a view of the whole Solent water and the Isle of Wight. That brandy shipments of some kind came to Luttrell’s Tower was not in doubt, but this could be just
some minor dealing for his own account. Was Luttrell really the secret figure, the venturer behind the whole huge New Forest coastal trade? Perhaps it wasn’t even a single gentleman at all. Perhaps it was all of them.

Whether or not they were actual participants, two things could be said not only of the gentry, but of every inhabitant of the south coast of England at this period. The first was that, aristocrat or peasant, clergyman, magistrate or poacher, they were all at the very least the knowing recipients of illegal merchandise. The second was that nobody saw anything. Two kegs of brandy might be delivered to the Lymington magistrate’s next-door neighbour, yet he was quite unaware of it. The pulpit might be full of brandy bottles but the vicar found plenty of room for his feet as he preached. Three hundred packhorses might wind along the edge of his lordship’s park; his lordship never woke. Why, even Mr Drummond, His Majesty’s personal banker, living in plain sight of Luttrell’s Tower, never saw a thing. Nothing at all.