The Forest

  ‘What is it?’

  The forester looked excited. It was evident that Puckle must have brought him some piece of news as the two men were obviously about to go off together. In answer, his friend just put his finger to his lips and motioned Edgar to accompany them. ‘You’ll see.’

  Together the three men went quietly through the trees, saying nothing and taking care not to step on any twigs that might crack. Once the forester licked his finger and held it up to check the direction of the breeze. They went on in this manner for nearly half a mile. Then, Puckle and the forester began to move slowly, crouching and using the bushes for cover. Edgar did the same. They edged forward another hundred yards or so. Then Puckle nodded and pointed to a place not far ahead in the trees.

  It was a small clearing, only twenty paces across, with an ancient tree stump and a small holly bush in the middle. If it had not been for a dark ring of tracks in the fallen leaves, not even Puckle would have given the place a second glance. But today it was occupied.

  There were five of them, all bucks, ready to rut the next season, if they had not the last. They all still had their antlers. They looked very handsome. And they were dancing in a ring.

  There really was no other way to describe it. Round they processed, kicking their heels in the air. Every so often one, then another, would stand up on their hind legs, turn and spar with each other just like boxers. It was not in earnest, though, but in play. This was one of the rarest and most lovely of the Forest’s many ceremonies. Edgar smiled with pleasure. It was ten years since he had seen a dancing of the deer in a play ring.

  And why should the bucks dance in a circle? Why did humans do the same? The three men watched for a long time, experiencing the joy and reverence that is special to the Forest people, before creeping silently away.

  Edgar’s heart was singing as he rode down into the Avon valley. He was looking forward to telling his father all about it.

  On his arrival home, however, he found his father had other things on his mind. The old man looked grim. ‘We’ve received a messenger,’ Cola told his son as he led him into the hall. Edgar noticed a young fellow waiting with his horse by the barn. ‘From Winchester.’

  ‘Oh?’ This meant nothing to Edgar, although he realized that his father was watching him carefully.

  ‘That girl. Tyrrell’s kinswoman. She wants to come here. Some problem in Winchester. She doesn’t say what.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You know nothing about this?’

  ‘No, Father.’ He didn’t. But his mind was working fast.

  ‘I don’t like it.’ Cola paused, glanced at Edgar again.

  ‘She has powerful kin.’

  ‘Hmm … I’m not sure they care about her. But you’re right. I wouldn’t want to offend Tyrrell. And the Clares …’ He became silent, thoughtful. As so often happened, Edgar had the feeling that his father knew more than he was saying. ‘I think this girl’s trouble,’ he said finally. ‘I’m sure that’s why she’s leaving Winchester. She’s got into mischief of some sort. And I don’t need that here. Also …’ He looked glumly at Edgar.

  ‘Also?’

  ‘I seem to remember you took an interest in her.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Could that happen again?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘That’s what worries me.’ The old man shook his head. ‘She’d be no help to you, you know,’ he growled. ‘Or me,’ he added in a mutter.

  ‘Do you think she’s bad?’

  ‘No. Not exactly. But …’ Cola shrugged. ‘She’s not what we need.’

  Edgar nodded. He understood. They needed someone rich. Someone who would give no offence. But whether it was the sight of the dancing deer, the spring air, or the memory of his rides with her, he felt impelled to say: ‘We ought to give her shelter, Father.’

  Cola nodded. ‘I was afraid you’d say that.’ He sighed. ‘Well, she can stay here until I can get word to Tyrrell. I’ll ask him what he wants me to do with her. I just hope to God that as soon as he knows she’s here, he takes her away.’

  She was nearer to Martell. It was fated to happen. Her position, admittedly, might have been awkward, but luckily the widow in Winchester had at least relented enough to give her a cover story. Adela was being harassed, Cola was told, by an unwanted suitor and she needed to escape from Winchester for a time. She was not sure the old man believed it, but it was the best she could do. She thanked him for his kindness, murmured how grateful Tyrrell and her Norman relations would be, kept her head held high and did her best to make herself agreeable.

  It was clear to her after a day or two that Edgar, although he treated her with a polite caution, was still attracted to her; and since she liked the handsome young Saxon this made her life easier.

  When he asked her if she would like to ride out with him, she gladly accepted. She did not lead him on. She was sure she didn’t. But it was nice to be admired.

  And it was easy to get news of the Lady Maud. She told Cola how she met Martell in Winchester. It seemed natural that she should be concerned about the health of a lady with whom she had stayed. The huntsman heard about Martell from time to time and so it was that Adela knew that the Lady Maud continued to be very sickly and that some said she would never survive the birth. Adela therefore waited patiently.

  Tyrrell’s response did not come for nearly a month. When it did, it was a minor masterpiece.

  It arrived in the form of a letter, written in Norman French. Cola took it to one of the old monks at Christchurch to make sure he had the sense correctly. It ran:

  Walter Tyrrell, lord of Poix, sends greetings to Cola the Huntsman.

  I thank you, my friend, and so would her family, for your kindness to the Lady Adela. Your care for even such a distant kinswoman of mine will not be forgotten.

  I come into England again in the late summer and will collect her from you at that time, and settle any expenses you may have incurred.

  ‘The cunning devil,’ Cola grunted. ‘He makes sure I have to keep her for three months. And if she gives trouble, she’s only a “distant kinswoman”. He can’t be held responsible.’

  Meanwhile he watched Adela and his son with growing concern. It was not as if he hadn’t got other things on his mind to worry about.

  When King William II, called Rufus, had spent Easter in Winchester his mood had been notably good. As the weeks followed, it had only grown better.

  The conduct of his brother Robert had been everything that he could wish. Having married his heiress in Italy, the obvious move for the Duke of Normandy would have been to hasten back with his bride and her cash, and pay off the mortgage on Normandy. Not a bit of it. After a rather heroic spell on crusade, he was reverting to his usual lackadaisical form. The duke and his bride proceeded at a leisurely pace, stopping everywhere, spending freely as they went. They were not likely to reach Normandy until the end of summer.

  ‘Give him time,’ Rufus laughed to his court. ‘He’ll spend the whole dowry. You’ll see.’ Meanwhile he himself not only held Normandy, but never ceased his plans to steal any other bits of neighbouring France that he could.

  At the start of the summer, however, came an even more agreeable development. Inspired by the sight of so many other Christian rulers winning glory on crusade, the Duke of Aquitaine, the huge, sunlit, wine-growing region southwest of Normandy, decided that he must be a holy crusader too. And what should he do but ask Rufus for a massive loan, just as Robert of Normandy had done, to finance the campaign?

  ‘He’s offering to mortgage the whole of Aquitaine,’ his emissaries announced. Rufus, who probably held no religious beliefs at all, only laughed: ‘It’s enough to restore one’s faith in God!’ he commented.

  And soon the rumour was running round Europe: ‘Rufus means to have not only Normandy but Aquitaine as well.’ To those who disliked or feared him, it was not welcome news.

  Edgar loved to show her the Forest. It was, after all, the thing he knew be
st. And with his brother still in London, he had her all to himself.

  He showed her how to read the spoor of the fallow deer. ‘You see, the deer has a cleft foot. When the deer walk, the two cleaves of the foot are together and so the track looks like a little hoof print on the ground. When they trot, the foot opens out and you see a cleft. When they gallop, the foot opens right out and you see a V in the ground.’ He smiled happily. ‘Here’s something else. See these tracks, with the feet turned outwards? That’s the male deer. The footprints of a female deer point straight ahead.’

  On another occasion, after they had ridden right across from Burley to Lyndhurst in some of the deepest woods, he asked her: ‘Do you know how you can tell what direction you are headed in the Forest?’

  ‘By the sun?’

  ‘What if it’s cloudy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Find an exposed, upright tree,’ he told her. ‘The lichen, you see, always grows on the damp side of the tree. That’s where the prevailing wind carries the moisture to them from the sea. In this part of England it is from the southwest. Look for the lichen and that’s south-west.’ He grinned. ‘So if you get lost, the trees will be telling you where I live.’

  She knew he was falling in love with her and by June her conscience was beginning to trouble her. She was aware that she should hold herself a little distant from him, but this was difficult when she found him such pleasant company. They rode, they laughed, they walked together.

  Some days she would refuse to go out. She had begun a large and handsome piece of needlework as a present for his father. It seemed the least that she could do. It was like the hunting scene she had seen in the king’s hall at Winchester, but she hoped it would be even better. It depicted the forest trees, the deer, hounds, birds and hunters. One of the hunters was clearly Cola himself. She had wanted to place the handsome, golden-haired form of Edgar in one corner also, but had thought better of it. This great work was a good excuse for avoiding Edgar’s company some days, without giving offence. And quite often, on these occasions, Cola himself would come in and watch her at work with apparent approval. As the weeks went by, although his quiet manner never changed, it seemed to her that despite himself the old man was getting to like her too.

  It was on just such a day, in the second week of June, as she was busy at her needlework in the slanting light under the open window of the hall, that Cola came in to her, smiling. ‘I have news that will please you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Hugh de Martell has a son. A healthy boy. He was born yesterday.’

  She felt her heart beat wildly. ‘And the Lady Maud?’ She held her needle, watching it gleam in the falling sunlight.

  ‘She survived. Remarkably, it seems she is rather well.’

  There was another birth in the Forest that day.

  For some time now the pale doe, heavy with her fawn, had been searching the Forest alone. It is the habit of the fallow deer to give birth in solitude, almost always to a single fawn. She had searched with care, finally deciding on a small space in a thicket, screened from view by holly bushes. Here she made a bed in the long grass.

  It was necessary to be careful. In the first days of its life her fawn would be completely defenceless. If a dog or fox found it alone, the fawn would surely die. This was the handicap that nature, in her bleak wisdom, had placed upon the deer. The foxes tended to live at the edge of the Forest, however, near the farms. She sniffled about carefully but could detect no scent that would tell her a fox had passed that way.

  And there, in deep green shadow, in the great warm silence of June, she gave birth to her fawn – a little, sticky, bony mass in the grass – and licked it clean and lay beside it. The fawn was a male; it would be coloured like its father. They lay together and the pale doe hoped that the huge Forest would be kind to them.

  Towards the end of June two developments took place. Neither was unexpected.

  Cola announced the first. ‘Rufus is going to invade Normandy.’

  His brother Robert was now expected to reach his duchy in September. Rufus intended to be waiting for him.

  ‘Will it be a big invasion?’ Edgar asked.

  ‘Yes. Huge.’ Edgar’s brother had sent word from London of the preparations there. Large sums were being raised to pay mercenaries. Cartloads of bullion were being withdrawn from the treasury at Winchester. Knights were being summoned from all over the country. ‘And he’s demanding transport vessels from most of the harbours along the southern coasts,’ Cola explained. ‘Robert will arrive to pay off his mortgage and find himself locked out of his house. Rufus has all the resources. If Robert gives battle he’ll lose. It’s a bad business.’

  ‘But didn’t everyone expect it?’ Adela asked.

  ‘Yes. I think they did. But it’s one thing to foresee an event, to say it’s likely, and another when it actually starts to happen.’ He sighed. ‘In a way, of course, Rufus is right. Robert really isn’t fit to govern. But to act like this …’

  ‘I don’t think the Normans will all welcome this,’ said Adela.

  ‘No, my dear lady, they won’t. Robert’s friends, in particular, are …’ He paused before choosing the word, ‘perturbed’. The old man shook his head. ‘And if he does this to his own brother in Normandy, what do you imagine he’ll do to Aquitaine? It will be just the same. The Duke of Aquitaine goes on crusade. Rufus lends him the money and waves him God speed. Then steals his lands while he’s gone. How do you think people feel about that? How do you suppose the Church feels about it? I can tell you,’ he growled, ‘the tension in Christendom is rising.’

  ‘Thank heaven these things don’t affect us down in the Forest,’ Edgar remarked.

  His father only stared at him grimly. ‘This is a royal forest,’ he muttered. ‘Everything affects us.’ Then he left them.

  A week after this a man dressed in black, whom Adela had never seen before rode up and spent some time alone with Cola. After he had gone, the old man looked furious. She had never seen him like this before. Nor, in the days that followed, did he look any less angry. She could see that Edgar was concerned about him too, but when she asked him if he knew what the matter was he only shook his head.

  ‘He won’t say.’

  The second development came a few days later while they were out riding. Edgar asked her if she would marry him.

  On the western edge of the dark dell of Burley the ground rises to a substantial wooded ridge, which achieves its highest point about a mile northwards of the village on a promontory known as Castle Hill. Not that there was any Norman castle there, but only the outline, under the scattered ash and holly trees, and the clusters of bracken, of a modest earthwork inclosure – although whether these low earth walls and ditches were the remains of a stock pen, a lookout post or a small fort, and whether the folk who had used it were distant ancestors of the Forest people or some other dwellers from unrecorded time, nobody could say. But whatever spirits might be resting there, it was a pleasant, peaceful place from which, looking westwards, one was granted a panorama that began with the brownish heather sweep down the Forest’s edge to the Avon valley and, over that, to the blue-green ridges of Dorset in the distance.

  It was a charming spot to choose, on a sparkling summer morning. The sun was catching his golden hair. He asked her quietly, yet almost gaily and he looked so noble. What woman could have wanted to refuse? She wished she could have been transformed into someone else.

  And indeed, why should she refuse? Did it make any sense? It was not as if the conquering Normans never married members of the defeated Saxon noble class. They still did. She would lose a little face, but not too much. He was delightful. She was charmed.

  But in front of her, out in that western distance, lay the manor of Hugh de Martell. It was down in one of the valleys between the ridges over which she was looking. And behind her, only a mile or so away, she realized, was the narrow stream where Puckle’s wife had seen what was to come.

  She
would marry Martell. She still believed it. After the shock of hearing that the Lady Maud had safely given birth she had wondered for a while what it could mean. But the witch’s cautious words had come back to her: ‘Things are not always what they seem.’ She had been promised happiness and she had faith. Something would happen. She knew it would. It seemed clear to her that in some unforeseen way the Lady Maud would depart.

  If so, she would be a mother to his son. An excellent one. That would be her good deed, her justification for what must happen.

  So what should she say to Edgar? She certainly did not want to be unkind. ‘I am grateful,’ she said slowly. ‘I think I could be happy as your wife. But I am not sure. I cannot say yes at present.’

  ‘I shall ask you again at the end of summer,’ he said with a smile. ‘Shall we ride on?’

  Hugh de Martell gazed at his wife and child. They were in the sunny solar chamber. His son was sleeping peacefully in a wicker cradle on the floor. With his wisp of dark hair, everyone said he looked like his father already. Martell looked at the baby with satisfaction. Then he transferred his eyes to the Lady Maud.

  She was propped up, almost in sitting position, on a small bed they had set up for her. She liked to sit in there with her baby, which she did for hours each day. She was rather pale but now she managed a small wan smile for her husband. ‘How is the proud father today?’

  ‘Well, I think,’ he replied.

  The pause turned into a little silence in the sunlit room.

  ‘I think I shall be better soon.’

  ‘I’m sure you will.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It must be difficult for you that I have been sick so long. I’m not much of a wife for you.’

  ‘Nonsense. We must get you well again. That’s the main thing.’