The Forest (6 page)

The cheek of the man was breathtaking.

‘Nonsense,’ Edgar said sharply. ‘You know the law. It’s a
purpresture
. This can land you in court.’

Pride gazed at him as he might have looked at a fly before swatting it. ‘Those are Norman words. I wouldn’t know what they mean. I expect you would, though,’ he added.

The thrust went home. Edgar coloured. ‘It’s the law,’ he said sadly.

Godwin Pride continued to stare him down. He didn’t dislike Edgar personally, but the Saxon noble’s co-operation with the Normans seemed to him proof that Edgar was an outsider.

Not that Cola’s family were strangers. But when had they come to the Forest? Two hundred, three hundred years ago? The Forest folk could not remember. However long they had been there, anyway, it was not long enough. And Pride was reminding himself of this fact when, to his surprise, the Norman girl spoke.

‘But it wasn’t the Normans who started it. This land was under forest law back in the days of King Canute.’

Adela’s Anglo-Saxon had been good enough to follow most of the conversation. She had not liked the surly way in which this fellow had treated Edgar and, as she was a Norman noblewoman, she decided to put him in his place. Brutal though he could be, William the Conqueror had been clever enough always to show that he was following ancient customs in his troublesome new kingdom. So it was no use this peasant complaining. She started at him defiantly.

To her surprise, however, he only nodded grimly. ‘You believe that?’

‘There’s a charter, fellow.’ She spoke with some importance.

‘Oh. Written, is it?’

How dare the man use this tone of irony? ‘Yes, it is.’ She was rather proud that she could read quite well and had a little learning. If a clerk had taken her through a charter, she would have been able to follow.

‘Don’t read, myself,’ he replied with an impertinent smile. ‘No point.’ He was right, of course. A man could farm, operate a mill, run a great estate – why, even be a king – and have no need to read and write. There were always poor clerks to keep records. This intelligent smallholder had not the slightest reason to read. But Pride had not finished. ‘I believe there’s a lot of thieves who do, though,’ he calmly added.

By God the man was insulting. She looked to Edgar, expecting him to defend her, but he seemed embarrassed.

It was Pride who now addressed him. ‘I don’t remember hearing of any charter, do you, Edgar?’ He stared straight at his head.

‘Before my time,’ the Saxon answered quietly.

‘Yes. You’d better ask your father. He’d know about that, I should think.’

There was a pause.

Adela began to get the point. ‘Are you saying’, she asked slowly, ‘that King William lied about Canute’s forest law? That the charter’s a fake?’

Pride pretended surprise. ‘Really? They can do that, can they?’

She was silent herself, now. Then she nodded slowly. ‘I’m, sorry,’ she said simply. ‘I didn’t know.’ She looked away from him and her eyes rested upon the strip of ground he had just appropriated. She understood now. No wonder he was surly when they had caught him trying, legally or not, to claw back a few feet of the inheritance he considered had been stolen from him.

She turned to Edgar. Then she grinned. ‘I won’t tell if you don’t.’ She spoke in French, but she suspected that Pride, observing them, had guessed what she had said.

Edgar looked awkward. Pride was watching him. Then Edgar shook his head. ‘I can’t,’ he muttered in French. And to Pride, in his native tongue: ‘Put it back, Godwin. Today. I’ll be looking out for you.’ He motioned to her that they must leave.

She would have liked to say something to Pride, but realized she must not. A few minutes later, as the smallholder and his family were lost to sight, she spoke. ‘I can’t go back to Lyndhurst, Edgar. I can’t face all those huntsmen. Can we return to your father’s house?’

‘There’s a quiet track,’ he said with a nod. And after a couple of miles he led her down through a wood to a little ford, quite soon after which they came up to heathland over which they walked their horses, picking up a track that led westwards until, late in the afternoon, they descended from the Forest into the lush quiet of the Avon valley.

It was some time before they reached the forest edge that Puckle, on some errand of his own, had happened to pass by Pride’s hamlet and hear his tale.

‘Who’s the Norman girl?’ the smallholder asked. Puckle was able to tell him and to relate the incident of the pale deer.

‘Saved a deer?’ Pride grinned ruefully. ‘She could have brought it to me.’ He sighed to himself. ‘Are we going to see her again, do you think?’ he asked Puckle.

‘Maybe.’

Pride shrugged. ‘She’s not bad, I suppose,’ he said without much feeling, ‘for a Norman.’

Adela’s fate, however, was to be decided by a much harsher court than that of Pride and Puckle, as she discovered when dusk fell that day.

‘A disgrace. There’s no other word for you,’ Walter stormed. In the light from the evening sky there seemed to be purple shadows under his slightly bulging eyes. ‘You’ve made a fool of yourself in front of the whole hunt. You’ve ruined your reputation. You’ve embarrassed me! If you think I can find you a husband when you behave like this …’

For a moment words apparently failed him.

She felt herself go pale, both with shock and with anger. ‘Perhaps’, she said icily, ‘you do not feel you can find me a husband.’

‘Let’s just say that your presence will not help.’ His little moustache and his dark eyebrows seemed clenched, now, in quiet rage, menacing. ‘I think you’d better stay out of sight for a while,’ he went on, ‘until we’re ready to try again somewhere else. I feel that would be best, don’t you? In the meantime, might I suggest that you think rather carefully about how you conduct yourself.’

‘Out of sight?’ She felt alarmed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ll see,’ he promised. ‘Tomorrow.’

The great, sunbathed silence of a midsummer afternoon: it was the season known as the ‘fence’ month when, to ensure that the deer could give birth in peace, all the peasants’ grazing livestock were removed from the Forest; after which, more than ever, the area seemed to return to those ancient days when only scattered bands of hunters had roamed the wastes. It was a season of quiet, of huge light on the open heaths and of shade, deep green as river weed, under the oaks.

The buck moved stealthily, keeping to the dappled shadows, his head held carefully back. His summer coat, a creamy beige with white spots, made a perfect camouflage. It was also handsome. But he did not feel handsome. He felt awkward and ashamed.

The change in the psychology of the male deer in summer has been observed down the ages. In spring, first the red deer and then, about a month later, the fallow males cast their antlers. First one antler, then the other breaks off, leaving a raw and usually bleeding stump, or pedicel. In the days after this, the fallow buck is a sickly fellow and may even be bullied by other bucks, such is the nature of animals. Like new teeth, his next antlers are already growing, but it will be three months before they are complete again. And so, though his fine new summer coat is on him, he is robbed of his adornment, as the antlers are known, naked, defenceless, ashamed.

No wonder he wanders alone in the woods.

Not that he is inactive. The first thing nature silently instructs him to do is to find the chemicals he will need to manufacture his new antlers. That means calcium. And the obvious place to find that is in the old antlers he has cast. Using his corner incisor teeth, the buck gnaws at them, therefore. Then, feeding on the rich summer vegetation and living in seclusion, he has to wait patiently as new bone tissue, drawing nutrients up through blood vessels from the pedicels, slowly grows, branches out and spreads. The growing antlers, however, are delicate; to supply blood they also grow a covering of soft veined skin, which has a velvety texture, so that during these months the buck is said to be ‘in velvet’. Supremely conscious that he must not allow the precious antlers to get damaged, the reclusive deer will walk through the woods with his head raised and held back, the velvet antlers on his shoulders, lest they should get caught in branches – a magical attitude in which he has often been depicted, from cave paintings to medieval tapestries, down the centuries.

The buck paused. Though still shy of being seen, he knew that the worst of his yearly humiliation was over. His velvet antlers were already half grown and he was conscious of the first faint stirrings, the beginning of the chemical and hormonal changes that, in another two months, would transform him into the magnificent, swollen-necked hero of the rut.

He paused because he saw something. From the tree line where he was walking, a stretch of heath extended, about half a mile across to a gentle slope scattered with silver birch where the violet heather gave way to green lawn backed by a line of woodland. On the lawn he could see several does, resting in the sun. One of them was paler than the others.

He had noticed the pale doe at the last rutting season. He had caught sight of her again that spring when he had escaped from the hunters. He had supposed they might have killed her, then he had glimpsed her in the distance once more, not long afterwards, and the knowledge that she was alive had pleased him strangely. Now, therefore, he paused and watched.

She would come to him at the rut. He knew it as surely as he could feel the sun in the huge open sky; he knew it with the same instinct by which he knew that his antlers would grow and his body change in readiness. It was inevitable. For several long moments he watched the little pale shape on the distant green. Then he moved on.

He did not know that other eyes were watching her also.

When Godwin Pride had set off that morning his wife, seeing his face, had tried to stop him. She had used several excuses – the roof of the cow stall needed repairing, she thought she had seen a fox near the chicken coop – but it was no good. By mid-morning he was gone, without even taking his dog with him. Not that he had told her what he was up to. Had she known that, she would probably have called the neighbours to restrain him. Nor did she see that, a few moments after leaving, he took a bow from a hiding place in a tree.

He had been waiting two months for this. Ever since his encounter with Edgar he had been careful to be a model of good behaviour. He had retracted his fence to its proper place. His cows were brought in from the Forest two days before the fence month. When Cola only glanced suspiciously at his dog, he had turned up at the royal hunting lodge at Lyndhurst the very next day. This was where they kept the metal hoop known as the stirrup – if a dog was not small enough to crawl through it, then his front claws were ‘lawed’, cut off, so that he could not be a threat to the king’s deer. Pride had insisted they took his dog to the stirrup, ‘Just to make sure he’s all legal, like,’ he assured them with a charming smile as the dog wriggled safely through. He had been careful. He had also had to wait for the right weather conditions; and those had come today when the faint breeze had blown from an unusual quarter.

He might not be able to get his field, but he was going to get something back from those Norman thieves. He would strike a little personal blow for freedom: or for his own obstinacy, as his wife would have said. As secretly pleased with himself as a boy on some forbidden adventure, the tall man with the swinging gait had made his way through the woods. If he was caught the consequences would be terrible: the loss of a limb, even his life. But he wouldn’t be caught. He chuckled to himself. He had thought it all out.

It had been noon when he had taken up his position. This had been carefully chosen – a little vantage point by the edge of some trees with a hidden depression where he could easily lie concealed while watching out to see if anyone was approaching. He had studied the habits of his quarry carefully.

Soon after noon, as he had expected, they had appeared and, thanks to the change in the direction of the breeze, he was downwind of them.

He had made no move. For over an hour he had patiently watched. Then, as he had expected, he had seen one of Cola’s men walk his horse silently across the open ground about half a mile away. He had let another hour pass. No one had come.

He had already selected his target. He needed a small doe – one that he could carry swiftly on his broad back up to his place of concealment. He would return for it that night with a handcart. There would be just enough moon tonight to allow him to see his way through the dark forest tracks. There were several small does in this little herd. One was paler than the rest.

He took aim.

For the first few days Adela could not believe that Walter had done it to her.

If the villages of Fordingbridge and Ringwood, that lay on the River Avon as it flowed down the Forest’s western edge, were scarcely more than hamlets, the settlement at the river’s southern estuary was more substantial. Here the Avon, joined by another river from the west, ran into a large, sheltered harbour – an ancient place where men had fished and traded for more than a thousand years. Twyneham, the Saxons had first called the settlement and the great sweep of meadow, marsh, woodland and heath that extended for miles along the south-western edge of the Forest from there, had long been a royal manor. In the last two centuries, thanks to a series of modest religious foundations endowed there by the Saxon kings, the village was more often referred to as Christchurch. It had grown into a small town and been fortified with a rampart. Five years ago, Christchurch had been given a further boost when the king’s chancellor decided to rebuild the priory church there on a grander scale and work on the riverside site had already begun.

But that was all it was: a quiet little borough by the sea, with a building site for a church.

And he had left her there. Not with a knight – there was no castle nor even a manor house. Not even with a person of the slightest consequence – only four of the most decrepit priory canons had remained in residence while the building went on. He had left her with a common merchant whose son made flour at the priory mill.