The Forest (23 page)

If only Luke had turned up. Brother Adam, the clever monk, had been right. Luke had underestimated the good sense of the court. It was obvious that the justice was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But what could she do? Luke had gone and no one even knew where he was. She could have wept.

‘That’s it, I think.’ The justice was looking at the clerk. People were preparing to move. ‘Is there any other business?’

‘Yes.’

Mary started. Tom had left her at the beginning of the proceedings to stand with some of the other men and she had not been able to see him over the crowd of heads. Yet this was his voice and she could see him now, elbowing his way to the front. Whatever was he doing? At the same time, over on her left, she was conscious of a small movement by the door.

Now Tom was standing, squared off, in front of the justice, with his tousled hair and leather jerkin, as if he was ready to fight him.

‘We’ve had no notice. This hasn’t been forwarded from the Court of Attachments,’ said the clerk crossly.

‘Well, as we’re here, we may as well hear it,’ the justice replied. He fixed Tom sternly with his eye. ‘What’s your business?’

‘Theft, my lord,’ Tom bellowed in a voice that shook the rafters. ‘Damnable theft.’

The hall fell silent. The clerk, having almost jumped off his bench at the shout, took up his quill.

The justice, a little taken aback, gazed at Tom curiously. ‘Theft? Of what?’

‘My pony!’ Tom shouted again, as if to call the heavens themselves to witness.

It took a second or two for the titters around the court to begin. The justice frowned. ‘Your pony. Stolen from where?’

‘The Forest,’ Tom cried.

Chuckles were breaking out now. Even the foresters were starting to grin. The justice glanced across at the steward, who shook his head and smiled.

The justice liked the Forest. He enjoyed its peasants and secretly relished their modest crimes. After the business of Martell, which had truly annoyed him, he had no objection to ending the day with a little light relief. ‘You mean your pony was depastured on the Forest? Was it marked?’

‘No. It was born there.’

‘A foal, you mean? How do you know it was yours?’

‘I know.’

‘And where is it now?’

‘In John Pride’s cowshed,’ Tom cried in rage and despair. ‘That’s where.’

It was too much. The whole courtroom began to laugh. Even his Furzey kinsmen couldn’t help seeing the joke. Mary had to look down at the floor. The justice turned to the agisters for illumination and Alban, in whose bailiwick this lay, stepped over and whispered in his ear, while Tom scowled.

‘And where is John Pride?’ the justice demanded.

‘He’s here,’ Tom shouted, swinging round and pointing triumphantly to the back of the crowd.

Everybody turned. The justice stared. There was a brief silence.

And then, from beside the door, came a deep voice: ‘He’s gone.’

It was no good. The hall dissolved. The Forest people howled. They wept with laughter. The foresters, the solemn verderers, even the gentlemen of the jury couldn’t help themselves. The justice, watching, shook his head and bit his lip.

‘You may laugh,’ Tom yelled. And they did. But he wasn’t done. Looking right and left, red-faced, he turned back to the justice and, pointing at Alban, he shouted: ‘It’s him, and the likes of him, that lets Pride get away with it. And you know why? Because he pays them!’

The justice’s face changed. Several of the foresters stopped laughing. At the back, Mary groaned.

‘Silence!’ the justice roared and the laughter in the hall began to die. ‘You are not’ – he glared at Furzey – ‘to be impertinent.’

The trouble was, there was some truth in it. Young Alban probably was innocent, as yet. But there was inevitably a certain traffic between the Forest people and those in authority in the bailiwicks. A nice pie, a cheese, a fence mended without charge – it might be hard after such kindnesses for the steward not to overlook some minor infraction of the law. Everyone knew it. The king himself had once remarked to the justice, not wholly in jest, that one day he would have to set up a commission to investigate the whole Forest administration. If Furzey wanted to be a troublemaker this was neither the time nor the place to be watched.

‘You are to go through the proper channels,’ the justice told him curtly. ‘Your case will only be heard here after it comes through the Court of Attachments. Clerk,’ he ordered, ‘enter that in the record. The court’, he announced, ‘is closed.’

So while Tom stood there in his impotent rage and the crowd, chuckling again, started to make for the door, the clerk dipped his quill in the ink and wrote in the parchment the record that would be preserved, as the true voice of the Forest, down the long centuries:

Thomas Furzey complains of John Pride theft of a pony. John Pride did not come. Therefore to next court, etc.

Luke loved to walk through the Forest. He would stride for miles. When he was a child he had learned to move fast to keep up with John and Mary; so that now, anyone who tried to walk beside him would be astonished at his speed.

People thought him dreamy, yet his eyes were always sharper than theirs. There wasn’t a stream in the whole Forest he didn’t know. The most ancient oaks, every great ivy-covered hulk, were like his personal friends.

His appearance had altered since leaving the abbey. Dressed in a woodman’s smock and jerkin, with woollen leggings and a thick leather belt, his hair and beard now grown long and shaggy, he looked exactly like a score of other such fellows and no one seeing him trudging along a forest path would have given him a second thought.

But he was on the run – about to be outlawed. What did that mean? In theory, that every man’s hand was against you. And in practice? It depended on whether you had friends and whether the authorities really wanted to find you.

As things stood at present, if one of the foresters met him face to face and recognized him, they’d take him into custody. No question. But if young Alban, say, caught sight of a shaggy figure in the distance that just might be Luke, would he ride up to challenge him? Possibly. But he was far more likely to turn his horse’s head and ride another way.

What should he do, though? He couldn’t go on like this for ever. The court at Lyndhurst had made its feelings pretty clear. He might do well to turn himself in and hope for mercy.

The trouble was – perhaps it was in his blood – Luke had an instinctive distrust of authority.

That might seem strange for a man who had chosen to live under the monastic rule of Beaulieu. Yet in reality it was not. For Luke, the abbey was a sanctuary in the middle of a huge estate where he enjoyed working and which gave him the freedom of the Forest. He liked the services in the abbey church. He would listen, enraptured, to the singing. His natural curiosity had led him to learn many of the Latin psalms and their meaning even if he could not read. But he wouldn’t have wished to go to services all the time like the choir monks. He wanted to get back out in the fields, or to help the shepherds as they went from grange to grange. The abbey fed him and clothed him, and left him free of responsibilities, without a care in the world. What more could you ask?

Above all, in his mind the abbey worked because it was tied to the natural order. Nature was what he understood. The trees, the plants, the forest creatures: they had their own rhythm. You could never know it all, but it worked; and the abbey estate made sense only because it had made itself part of the process.

So if outsiders, men like Grockleton or the king’s justices who didn’t really understand the Forest, came along and tried to impose a lot of stupid rules, if they claimed to be authority, the only thing to do was to avoid them. In his heart, the only laws he respected were the laws of nature.

‘The rest don’t amount to anything, really,’ he would say. And the authorities who set such store by these laws were certainly not to be trusted. ‘They may speak you fair one day, but they’ll get you the next. The only thing they truly care about is their power.’

It was a simple peasant’s view of authority and entirely accurate.

So he didn’t intend to trust the justice and his court, especially with Grockleton still around. The best thing to do, he reckoned, was to stay out of sight and wait for something to turn up. You never knew what might.

He had friends. He’d be all right until the next winter. In the meantime he had found plenty to keep him busy. Every few days, although she had no idea of it, he had gone to keep an eye on his sister Mary. He liked to observe her going about her tasks by the cottage, or running after the children as they played outside, even if he never spoke to her. It was as if he were a guardian angel, secretly watching over her. ‘I’m closer than you think, girl,’ he would mutter with satisfaction. He found this exercise in invisibility so pleasing that he took to watching his brother John as well. The pony was allowed to run in the field now, but there was always one of John’s children guarding it.

And then, of course, he would walk the Forest.

His route that day had taken him from near Burley over to the north of Lyndhurst. The woods were quiet. Huge oaks spread all around. Here and there, a small clearing appeared where some ancient tree, brought down by a storm, lay across the forest floor, leaving a patch of open sky in the canopy above. As he walked, he would pause occasionally to inspect some lichen-covered trunk, or turn over a fallen branch to see what creatures were dwelling under it. And he had just passed above the village of Minstead and come to a section of the Forest that bordered a high open heath, when he paused and looked down at something with interest.

It was such a tiny object: just an acorn from last year’s fall, which had escaped the hungry pigs and, nestling in the damp brown leaf mould, had cracked open and struck roots into the ground.

Luke smiled. He liked to see things grow. The tiny white roots looked so vulnerable. A little green shoot was emerging. How astonishing to think that this was the beginning of a mighty oak. Then he gently shook his head. ‘You’ll never make it there,’ he said.

How many of the acorns that fall ever become oak trees? Who knows? One in a hundred thousand? Surely not. Less than one in a hundred times that number, perhaps. This is the vast strength, the massive, numberless oversupply of nature in the forest silence. The chances of an acorn living were almost infinitesimally small. The pigs turned out for the autumn mast, or any of the other forest animals might eat them. Ponies or cattle might crush them underfoot. If an acorn survived that first season and happened to be on ground where it could strike root, it could only grow into a tree if there was a break in the canopy above to give it light. But even for those few that grew to be saplings, there was still an ever present danger.

It is not only man who destroys. Other animals, too, left to themselves, will destroy grasslands, woods, whole habitats with a stupidity as great as, perhaps even greater than, that shown by humans. The deer loved to eat oak shoots. The only way for one to survive was to have a protector. Nature provided several. Holly, although the deer ate holly, might screen an oak. Butcher’s-broom, the little evergreen shrub with the razor-sharp spikes – the deer avoided that. For some reason they seldom cared to eat bracken either.

Very carefully, scooping out the soil around the seedling with his hands, Luke carried it in a cradle of earth, without disturbing its tiny life. A few yards away there was a small ring of holly surrounded by butcher’s-broom. Entering this, ignoring the scratches on his arms, he planted the seedling in the patch of earth in the centre. He glanced up. There was clear blue sky above. ‘Grow there,’ he said happily, and went on his way.

Brother Adam knew Beaulieu Abbey so well that sometimes he thought he could have walked around it blindfold.

Of all its pleasant places none, he thought, was more delightful than the series of arched recesses, known as the carrels, that lay along the north side of the great cloister, opposite the
frater
where the choir monks ate their meals. They were perfectly sheltered from the breeze; facing southwards, they caught and trapped the sun. Sitting, book in hand, on a bench in one of the carrels, gazing across the quiet green square of the cloister, smelling the sweet aroma of cut grass laced with the sharper scent of daisies – this, it seemed to Adam, was as close to heaven as anything knowable by man on earth.

His favourite carrel lay near the middle. Down the stone steps from the doorway to the church: that was five steps down. Turn right. Twelve paces. If it was a sunny afternoon you felt the warmth through the open arches by the seventh step. Turn right after the twelfth pace and you were there.

There had been few opportunities in the last weeks to enjoy this pleasure. His work in the granges had changed all that. But he had managed to do so one warm May afternoon and he was sitting quietly with his hood up – the monk’s sign that he does not want to be disturbed – rather idly reading a life of St Wilfrid, when his reverie was interrupted by a novice hurrying round the cloister and calling softly: ‘Brother Adam! Come quickly. Salvation is here. And everyone’s going to see.’

Naturally, therefore, Adam arose at once. ‘Salvation’, as the ignorant novice had rather sweetly called it, was
Salvata
, the abbey’s ship, a squat, square-rigged vessel in frequent use. After leaving the Beaulieu estuary her first port of call was nearby; at the head of the great inlet from the Solent water, which ran up the eastern side of the Forest, a flourishing little port had grown up in the last few centuries, known as Southampton. By its quay the Beaulieu monks had their own house to store the wool clip that was to be exported. Later, the returning
Salvata
would pick up all kinds of goods at Southampton, including the French wine the abbot’s guests enjoyed. From Southampton she might proceed along the coast to the county of Kent and thence across the English Channel. Or she might continue round, into the Thames estuary, to London or more likely up England’s eastern coast as far as the port of Yarmouth, where she would collect a large cargo of salted herrings for the abbey.
Salvata
’s return to the jetty below the abbey was always a source of excitement.