The Forest (99 page)

Could it be that her judgement was at fault? Bad blood. She had bad blood, low connections: she was tainted. Her gentility, her claims to consideration were, in a sense, a fraud. At least the peasants like Puckle are honestly what they are, whereas I lack even that excuse for my existence, she thought. Even if Mr Martell were not an impossible Penruddock, he could scarcely wish to touch me if he knew the truth.

Although hardly aware of the process, she found that by Christmas she had less and less energy. Sometimes she would sit all morning in the parlour, apparently reading a book yet in reality not even doing that. If a visitor like Mr Gilpin called, she could rouse herself into a liveliness, so that she seemed her normal self. But the instant he was gone she would relapse into lethargy, staring out of the window. If Gilpin invited her to tea she would agree to go; she would mean to go; but for some reason she did not understand herself she would sit, hardly able to move until Mrs Pride, standing there with her coat, would induce one of those little bursts of energy that would carry her through the visit.

She got through her days. She did all that was required. One might have accepted, if one did not know her, that the weather was making her listless. No one could know, since she could not tell them, that, hour after hour, she felt not sadness as much as a great, grey sense that everything was pointless.

By mid-January Mrs Pride and Mr Gilpin were seriously worried about her.

Fanny Albion was not the only worry upon the vicar’s mind
that month. Of no less concern was the fate of another even younger life.

Nathaniel Furzey had been found out.

It was inevitable that sooner or later someone was going to talk. Over the Christmas season one of the boys told his sister; she told her mother. Within a week it was all over the Forest. Some people laughed, others were scandalized. With the exception of the Prides, who were embarrassed, the parents of the other boys involved were up in arms. To induce the boys to slip out of their cottages at night; to run around naked; to play at witchcraft. They came to see the vicar.

So did the master of the school. ‘This cannot go on,’ he told Gilpin frankly. ‘The boy is a bad influence. I do not think I can continue if he is there. Perhaps’, he added with a viciousness he had been storing for months, ‘you have been teaching him too much.’

It was useless to argue with so much opposition and Gilpin was far too wise to do so. Nathaniel was sent home to his parents in Minstead. His career at Gilpin’s school was over.

But what to do next? It was normal enough for the boys at the school, by the time they were eleven or twelve, either to return home to work for their parents or to be apprenticed to some shopkeeper or craftsman. Yet as Gilpin reflected about the boy, he found it hard to see him settling down into a humdrum life with any craftsman. He could foresee some unfortunate shopkeeper being plagued with practical jokes and, no doubt, throwing Nathaniel out long before his apprenticeship was completed. He could imagine the boy wandering about Southampton looking for work, getting picked up by some Navy press gang and thrown on board a ship. The press gangs were out in force these days. And then? The Navy was England’s greatest glory, her oak-walled defence. But what was life like for the press-ganged men who worked the noble ships? ‘Rum, sodomy and the
lash,’ an old mariner had once told him. He hoped it wasn’t quite as bad as that. But whatever the truth, it wasn’t what he wanted for Nathaniel Furzey.

Given the boy’s lively intellect and enterprise, Gilpin found he could see two possible destinies. One, that he receive a proper education, perhaps go as a poor scholar to Oxford and, quite possibly, end up in the Church. The other that he would remain in the Forest, Gilpin thought, and develop into a first-rate smuggler, in which case he might as well go and apprentice to Isaac Seagull right away. After all, since somebody was going to run the smuggling it might as well be someone intelligent. The irony of these two choices was not lost upon the vicar; when he discussed the case with Mr Drummond and Sir Harry Burrard, each of those worthy gentlemen seemed to consider both alternatives with interest.

The solution finally came, however, from a slightly unexpected quarter: Mr Totton the merchant. He had been at dinner with the Burrards and heard about the case. ‘With no more children to educate,’ he told Gilpin in his easy way, ‘I’d be glad to help this boy if you recommend it. He sounds a little wild, though.’

‘He’s bored, I think. But you’ll be taking a chance.’

‘That’, said Totton cheerfully, ‘is what merchants do. So tell me, where shall we send him to school?’

‘There’s a first-rate school in Winchester,’ said Gilpin.

And since one good deed almost always begets another, it was only days after young Nathaniel was packed off to Winchester that Mr Gilpin set about doing something definite for Fanny Albion.

‘Bath!’ cried Mrs Grockleton. ‘Bath! And with Fanny Albion as our charge. We should be as good as her parents, Mr Grockleton –
in loco parentis
.’ She pronounced the Latin phrase as though it were a state secret. ‘Think of that. It’s not as if’, she added with a certain want of tact, ‘you had anything to do here.’

‘And are the Albions in agreement with this?’

‘Well, old Mr Albion, you may be sure, is against it as he is against most things. And Fanny is reluctant to leave him. But Mr Gilpin has persuaded her to consider it and Mrs Pride, the housekeeper, who’s really like an old nanny to her, you know, has been helpful too, I understand. And then Mr Gilpin has quite persuaded old Miss Adelaide. So I think the matter is decided.’

‘Although Mr Albion is against it?’

‘Well, my dear, it’s the women who take the decisions in that house, you know.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Grockleton. ‘Then I suppose’, he continued after a pause while he reflected that this was the best chance he was likely to get of quitting Lymington for a while, ‘that we had better go to Bath.’

‘Thank you, Mr Grockleton.’ His wife beamed. ‘I told them you always see things my way.’

They left two weeks later.

‘Oh, Fanny, we are well up the hill,’ cried Mrs Grockleton as they arrived, ‘which is quite the fashionable place to be,’ she added, in case Fanny had not understood. They were to stay six weeks. After such a period it was fashionable to be bored of Bath although there were those who, for reasons of health or inclination, lived there all year round.

The house Mr Grockleton had found was certainly a fine one. Like most of Bath’s houses, it formed part of a handsome Georgian terrace and was built of a creamy stone.

The houses rose up the steep hills in rows and tiers, in elegant terraces and crescents, staring out at the sky and down into the city’s valleys through which the local river snaked between cliffs of stone. If God had asked Mrs Grockleton how she thought He should create heaven, she would probably have told Him: ‘Make it like Bath.’ She might, however, have added, considering her own plans: ‘You can put it by the sea.’

Fanny, although she did not say so, liked the look of it less. The house, while certainly well-proportioned and elegant, had no garden. Few houses in Bath did. Nor, except in one or two parks, which were anyway given over mainly to lawns and flower beds, did there seem to be any trees. But when she gently remarked upon this to Mrs Grockleton, that lady was able to put her right at once. ‘Trees, Fanny? But have you not considered, in a place like Bath, all those leaves would make such a mess. And besides,’ she added with perfect truth, ‘there are woods in profusion on the hills all around where, I dare say, they look very elegant.’

The house was quite big. The Grockletons had brought their children, but there was a nursery for them on the upper floor. The main reception rooms were on the level above the street and had splendid views down over the city. Fanny quite enjoyed sitting and looking over this prospect. She even tried to sketch it. But there was seldom time for sitting long when Mrs Grockleton was in charge.

She certainly gave Fanny a change of air. They went down to the Pump Room where, by the old Roman baths, one took the medicinal waters. In the big yard, with an old Gothic abbey church making a charming contrast, men in blue coats and gold buttons waited to convey people in sedan chairs. Mrs Grockleton insisted that she and Fanny use these upon the first occasion.

The next day they attended a concert at the Assembly Rooms. These were large and very handsome. They learned that there was to be a subscription ball two evenings later, which Mrs Grockleton insisted they must attend.

The next day was taken up chiefly with shopping – which was not to say that they bought anything, but they inspected the fashionable shops and observed all the people in them.

‘For Bath sets the tone, Fanny,’ Mrs Grockleton obligingly explained. ‘Bath is where polite society is born. Bath is’ – she was delighted by the sudden thought – ‘like
our academy. Even the most charming young ladies, those of the highest birth who have lived all their lives in the country, can benefit from being exposed in Bath.’

The ball turned out to be a slight disappointment. If the fashionable world was at Bath, it had not descended on the Assembly Rooms that night. Instead, a large collection of the spa’s widows, invalids, half-pay officers and eager tradesmen danced the night away very cheerfully and with a certain decorous noise. They encountered the family of a Bristol merchant whose two sons asked Fanny to dance. So did a very pleasant army major, whose coat collar had taken on that slightly greasy look, which cloth has just before it starts to fray. ‘You need have no fear of me,’ he genially remarked to her. ‘I’m here to find a rich widow.’

The major, in fact, turned out to be an amusing man, who told her much that was useful about the town. ‘For people like yourself in the higher part, there are the upper rooms to go to in the evening. Better company up there. But the best sort, the gentry, don’t come to the Assembly Rooms often. Not unless there’s something worth seeing. They have private parties. That’s where you belong.’

In her different way, Mrs Grockleton had come to a similar conclusion. ‘I’m afraid’, she remarked to her husband when they were alone that night, ‘the Rooms were full of people like us.’

‘You don’t care to meet people like ourselves?’ her husband mildly enquired.

‘If we wanted to meet people like us,’ Mrs Grockleton very reasonably pointed out, ‘we could save our money and stay at home.’

The succeeding days went off well enough, though. When it was sufficiently warm, in the mornings, they took the children to see the sights, or to walk round by the river to view the splendid wooded slopes of Beechen Cliff. Another day they went out of the city to wonder the splendour of Prior Park, past which much of the stone for
the building of the city had been brought on a specially constructed railway track which, being on a long incline, operated by the force of gravity. Mr Grockleton was much taken with this.

Mrs Grockleton was thorough. Soon Fanny felt she knew the city as well as most visitors: handsome Queen Square, the Circus, the elegant Pulteney Bridge designed by Adams, the Assembly Rooms, upper and lower, and the Royal Crescent, where one walked on a Sunday, to be seen. There was no defined social season at Bath, for with people going there all year round it was always a season of a kind. The place was very agreeable, on the whole, even if they didn’t know many people. At the end of the first week it rained, almost continually, for three days and Fanny might have felt a little depressed if she had not received a most loving letter from Louisa saying that she and her brother were planning to make a short visit to Bath themselves, to enjoy her company.

It was halfway through the second week when the strange little incident occurred. Having spent an hour or two playing rather listlessly with the Grockleton children in the house, Fanny had gone down to the centre of the town alone. There were shops in the arcaded streets selling every kind of luxury, but her attention had been especially taken by one window in which there was a fine display of Worcester china. The set, which was decorated with depictions of English landscapes in the classical style, had seemed so appropriate in this English Roman spa that she had decided to come back and peruse it at her leisure. And, for quite half an hour, the listlessness she had felt almost disappeared as she inspected one charming scene after another. At last, however, she emerged and started to walk up the hill.

She had only gone a little way and come to an intersection, when, a couple of hundred yards away down the street on her right, she saw Mr Martell. He was stepping out
of a carriage. He turned, with his back to her, and handed down a very handsomely dressed young lady. A moment later they entered a large house together.

Mr Martell. Her heart missed a beat. With a lady. Why not with a lady? Was it Mr Martell, though? She hadn’t actually seen his face. A tallish, saturnine man, dark-haired. The carriage, drawn by four beautifully turned-out horses, certainly belonged to someone rich and aristocratic. The way he moved, the general look of him were so exceedingly like Mr Martell that she had assumed it must be he. But then, she reflected, Mr Martell had a double in an old picture; there could be other visitors to Bath who resembled him.

Was it Mr Martell? She felt her pulse quicken sharply. She wanted so much to know. She hesitated. What would she do if she encountered him? Would they speak? Would she speak? What could she say to Mr Martell and a handsome young lady? If he was staying in Bath, would they meet, or would he move across the upper horizon of the city, from one private house to another, hidden from her view?