The Forest

  Her ambition, like her absent-mindedness, was quite without malice. It was, for her, a little ladder to a humble heaven. It brought with it, however, certain small peculiarities. Whether it was because she thought it a kind of wit, or whether she supposed it indicated her own roots in some gentle antiquity, she liked to use expressions or exclamations that hearkened from a former time. She would pick these up from time to time and use them for several years before moving on to others. At present, if she wished to convey something of particular significance, she would say: ‘Methinks …’ Or if she broke a cup, or told a funny story of a vicar getting drunk, she would conclude: ‘Alack-a-day.’ Expressions so dated that you might really suppose she had been present at the court of the merry monarch himself.

  She was also the mistress, or at least the devotee, of the meaningful gaze. She would fix you with her dark-brown eyes and give you a look of such arch significance that, even if you had no notion what it meant, you felt privileged. When the look was accompanied by ‘Methinks …’ you really knew you were in for something, quite possibly a state secret.

  And when you considered that she was the daughter of a Bristol haberdasher and her husband a Customs officer, these social marvels could only be described as a triumph of the human spirit.

  Mrs Grockleton was of medium height, but with a fine display of powdered hair. Her husband was tall and lean with hands curiously like claws. Mrs Grockleton’s intention, which she planned to achieve as soon as she could, was to raise Lymington to the status of a social centre to rival Bath. And then to preside over it.

  Samuel Grockleton inwardly groaned. It is not easy for a man to know that his wife is careering unstoppably towards her social doom, especially when he himself, through no fault of his own, must be the cause of the disaster. ‘You must not forget our own position in society, Mrs Grockleton,’ he observed. ‘And given my office, we can never raise our hopes too high.’

  ‘Your position is very respectable, Mr Grockleton. Quite gentlemanly.’

  ‘Respectable, yes.’

  ‘Why, Mr Grockleton, I declare you are held in great esteem and affection. Everyone has told me so.’

  ‘Neighbours are not always truthful.’

  ‘Oh, fie, Mr Grockleton,’ said his wife cheerfully. And a moment later she was off again, explaining her plans for the future.

  You could say what you liked about Mrs Grockleton, but she was never idle. She had not been a month in Lymington when she saw that it had need of an academy for young ladies; and since it happened that a lease was available on the big brick house next to their own, which lay a little way past the church at the top of the High Street, she had persuaded her husband to take it and here she had set up her establishment.

  She had been skilful. First she had secured the mayor’s daughter and her best friend whose father, an attorney, belonged to a landed family in the next county. Next she had gone to the Tottons. They lived nowadays in a handsome house just apart from the town. Although Mr Totton was certainly involved in the town’s trade, his sister had married old Mr Albion of Albion House, so the young Tottons and Miss Albion were cousins. Edward Totton was up at Oxford. When Louisa Totton was snared, therefore, Mrs Grockleton could reasonably feel that this advanced the academy into the sphere of the local gentry. At the apex of the merchant families was another, more recently arrived in the area: Mr St Barbe gave his business as grocer, salt and coal merchant, but he was a most gentlemanly and philanthropic man, a pillar of the community. One of the St Barbe girls was duly obtained. Within a few months, by allowing some girls to come for only certain lessons and others, from further off, to board there, Mrs Grockleton had drifted almost twenty young ladies into her academic corral.

  The academy had two features of which she was particularly proud. It taught French, which was done by herself. She had acquired this fashionable accomplishment quite humbly as a girl from a French dressmaker in Bristol, but her fluency certainly reinforced her claims to social authority in Lymington. And while a command of French would undoubtedly be an asset to any of the daughters of Lymington merchants who wanted to shine in the great London houses or the courts of Europe, it was surely an inducement that they could also practise upon the charming young French officers who had recently been stationed in the town.

  The second was the art class. The Reverend William Gilpin had not only been the loved and respected vicar of Boldre for two decades; he was also a notable artist, selling his drawings and paintings from time to time for charitable causes. Mrs Grockleton had purchased two and, soon afterwards, when Mr Gilpin arrived to award prizes in the academy, he was astonished to discover it was his own work that the young ladies were instructed to emulate or even copy. The vicar was no fool, but it was hard, after that, to refuse the invitation to deliver a lecture and take a class at the academy once a month; and in fact he rather enjoyed it.

  So Mrs Grockleton’s academy grew. Its growth, so far as Mrs Grockleton could manage, was spiral in form – starting with the better families in the town, then sweeping round those whose gentility had taken them to the environs and finally, circling ever wider, like a great, revolving seashell, she hoped to suck young ladies even from the distant manor houses of the gentry into the pleasant vortex of her establishment. Thus Miss Fanny Albion had already come to join her cousin Louisa Totton for the French classes – a triumph that had brought the academic huntress a deep joy – and no doubt there would be others. The one family she had hoped for, and which had so far eluded her, was that of Burrard.

  The Burrards were very big in Lymington now. While the Tottons had remained, as it were, at the top of the town, the bolder and now much richer Burrards had long ago acquired a country estate called Walhampton, which lay on the other side of the river from Lymington. Their generations of marriages into gentry families like the Buttons had entirely established them in that class. But Lymington town was their base of operations and they ran the politics of the place. She had not yet managed to get past the Burrards’ park gates. But one day, she felt sure, she would. Indeed, if all her hopes succeeded, it was inevitable that she must.

  For the school was only the beginning. Her plans for Lymington were far larger. ‘I can see it, Mr Grockleton,’ she declared. And indeed she could. On the ridge overlooking Pennington Marshes and the sea, there would be rows of handsome Georgian houses and villas: with its ample supply of clay, the New Forest nowadays boasted a number of thriving brickfields; but in her mind’s eye she saw stone, like that at Bath. Perhaps, she considered, stucco painted white would do. The old medieval houses along the High Street, although still structurally intact, had mostly received squared-off Georgian façades by now. Any lingering medieval gables, she considered, could be quickly covered. The modest bathhouse down by the beach would be converted into something more like the Roman baths at the great spa in the west. The present Assembly Rooms, adjoining the Angel Inn, would of course be quite inadequate for the new resort. Something new, classical and splendid would be needed, up at the top of the hill, she supposed, very near her own house. Well, perhaps she’d be in something grander by then.

  Then there was the theatre. It wasn’t bad. Similar playhouses had been set up at Sarum and other western towns. It had a modest pit with wooden benches for the poorer sort, a tier of boxes for the gentry and a gallery of cheaper seats above. During the season, from July to October, you could hear Shakespeare, or one of Mr Sheridan’s comedies, and a varied repertoire of melodramas and tragedies. Lymington theatre usually contrived one or two offerings with a nautical flavour. No doubt, once the town was fashionable, the theatre could be redecorated. Mrs Grockleton’s only regret was that it should have been near the Baptist chapel which, as far as she was concerned, should be moved well away from the fashionable public’s sight.

  No, the only complaint she had about the town lay down by the beach itself. Those salterns, with their grubby little furnaces and windpumps, and the dock where ships from northern Newcastle brought coal – coal o
f all things! – to fuel the furnaces: something would have to be done about them. The salt pans might still bring profit to the Tottons, but if the fashionable world was to take the waters there, the salterns would have to go.

  Was her vision just a fantasy all of her own? Not entirely. The New Forest, after all, was a place with royal connections. For over twenty years the king’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, had been Warden of the Forest; and since his wife wasn’t welcome at court, he had often chosen to stay at Lyndhurst. The Prince of Wales came to stay in the Forest too. But Mrs Grockleton’s hopes grew out of larger considerations.

  In the great political calm that had graced Georgian England for several generations now, society itself was changing. A burgeoning commercial empire was bringing the island kingdom huge new wealth. Although land inclosures and new production methods had taken the traditional livelihood from some peasant farmers, the landowners had prospered. In London and the handful of big cities that dotted the vast stretches of rural England, speculators were building handsome Georgian squares. People were moving about. Even the open wastes of the Forest were now crossed by a turnpike road – the first return to such a civilized transport system since Roman times. Like the latter-day Romans they were, the fashionable English classes were going in search of health and leisure. In the West Country the ancient Roman spa of Bath had been revived and a gracious resort built around its mineral springs. More recently the royal court of King George III, in the belief that it might help cure the king’s bouts of madness, had become interested in the benefits not only of mineral waters but of those of the sea. Several times in recent years King George III had come to the New Forest on his way to the little seaside resort of Weymouth, some forty miles further west along the coast. He had stayed with the Drummonds and the Burrards, and visited the Isle of Wight.

  ‘Why go all the way to Weymouth, when Lymington is so much closer and surely just as healthy?’ Mrs Grockleton declared. People came to bathe at Lymington, some of them very respectable. If the king and his court made regular stays there the fashionable world would surely follow. ‘And then,’ she explained to her silent husband, ‘our own position, what with the academy and my other plans, is assured. For we shall, you see, be there already. They will come to us.’ She gave him a delighted smile. ‘I have not told you, Mr Grockleton, of my latest idea.’

  ‘And what is that?’ he enquired, as he knew he must.

  ‘Why, we are going to give a ball!’

  ‘A ball? Dancing?’

  ‘Indeed. At the Assembly Rooms. You see, Mr Grockleton, with our girls at the academy, their families and friends – don’t you understand? Everyone will come!’ She did not say so, but she had already secretly included the Burrards in this number.

  ‘Perhaps’, Mr Grockleton said sagely, ‘nobody will come.’

  ‘Oh, fie, Mr Grockleton,’ said Mrs Grockleton again, but this time with some asperity.

  Yet Mr Grockleton had a reason for these fears – something he knew, which she did not. Unfortunately, he could not tell her what it was.

  It might have been supposed that in Georgian England the age of miracles was passed. Yet at the very moment when Mrs Grockleton was chiding her husband for his lack of faith in Lymington – that is to say, at eleven o’clock that spring morning – a few miles away on the Beaulieu estate a miracle of sorts was in progress. It was happening at the busy place on the Beaulieu River known as Buckler’s Hard.

  There, in the bright morning sunlight, a man had become invisible.

  The Hard – the name meant a sloping shore road where boats could be drawn up – had a lovely setting. As the river made a westward loop, broad banks created gentle slopes, almost two hundred yards long, down to the water. Situated some two miles downstream from the old abbey and the same distance upstream from the Solent water, it was a peaceful place, sheltered from the prevailing sea breezes. Once, long ago in the days of the monks, a furious prior with hands like claws had nearly come to blows with some fishermen at the river bend above. But his shouts had been one of the few to disturb the habitual silence of the sheltered curve and the reedy marshes opposite. The abbey had been dissolved, the monks departed; Armada, Civil War, Cromwell, the merry monarch, all had come and gone; but nobody had troubled about the quiet place. Until about seventy years earlier.

  The reason was sugar.

  Of all the opportunities for amassing wealth in the eighteenth century, nothing could approach the fortunes to be made in sugar. The sugar merchants’ lobby in Parliament was powerful. The richest man in England, who had purchased a noble estate west of Sarum, was heir to a sugar fortune. The Morants who had bought Brockenhurst and other New Forest estates were a sugar dynasty, too.

  The old Beaulieu Abbey lands had passed by marriage from the Wriothesley into the Montagu family and the Duke of Montagu, like many of England’s great eighteenth-century aristocrats, was an entrepreneur. Although the ruined abbey was not a place where he spent much time, he knew that the Solent’s double high tide, extending up Beaulieu river, made it apt for navigation and that he still possessed all the old abbey’s river rights. ‘If the crown will grant me a charter to found a settlement in the West Indies,’ he decided, ‘I could not only start a sugar plantation, but I could bring the sugar back to my own port at Beaulieu.’ While the river banks were mostly mud, at the sheltered curve they were gravel, perfect for building upon. Soon a plan for a small but elegant harbour town had been prepared. ‘We shall call it Montagu Town,’ the duke declared.

  That, alas, was as far as it got. A private flotilla was sent to the West Indies with settlers, livestock, even prefabricated houses. It cost the duke ten thousand pounds. The settlement was planted. But the French kicked them out. Nothing more could be done. At Montagu Town the banks had been cleared and smoothed, and the outline of the main street down to the river had been laid down; but that was all. The site reverted, for twenty more years, to silence.

  But it was ready for commercial use and, just before mid-century, with the duke’s active encouragement, a use was found.

  The British Empire was growing. Conflicts with the rival powers of France and Spain could not be avoided. Britain’s army was negligible but its navy ruled the seas; whenever a conflict threatened, therefore, more ships had to be built and quite often nowadays the building of the hull was farmed out to private contractors. The cleared site on the Beaulieu River was a perfect location. For naval ships there was the timber of the king’s New Forest close by; for merchant shipping there were oak trees in the private estates all around. An ironworks, established at the old monastic fishery of Sowley Pond, supplied any necessary iron. Buckler’s Hard became a shipbuilding yard.

  It was never large but often busy. Merchant ships were needed all the time. The naval building came in bursts, each time there was a conflict somewhere: a European dynastic dispute affecting the colonies; the American War of Independence; and now, after the dangerous business of the French Revolution, a threat to every established monarchy in Europe, Britain found itself at war again with France.

  On each side of the broad, grassy street that led down to the water, a row of red-brick cottages stood. Behind them lay garden allotments, and further scattered cottages and barns. At the water’s edge, set at an angle to the bank, were five slipways where the ships were built. Down the centre street and on sites all around were huge stacks of timber of various shapes and sizes. The men who worked on the ships were mostly quartered a mile or two away, either in lodgings up at Beaulieu village itself, or over at the western edge of the Montagu estate, at a new, straggling settlement of cottages known as Beaulieu Rails. At Buckler’s Hard itself there was the master builder’s house, a blacksmith’s shop, a store, two little inns, a cobbler’s and cottages for the most senior shipwrights.

  Work had started early that bright spring morning. A cheerful column of smoke was rising from the blacksmith’s forge. Mr Henry Adams, the owner of the business, eighty years old but still supervising, had
just come out of his master builder’s house; his two sons were at his side; shipwrights were busy at the waterside; men were carrying timber; a cart was standing in front of the Ship Inn.

  Yet as Puckle arrived, hours late for work, from Beaulieu Rails, and walked down the street, nobody saw him. The men at the sawpit looked, but they didn’t see him. The women by the village pump didn’t see him. The cobbler, the innkeepers, the timber carriers, the shipwrights – why, even old Mr Adams with eyes like gimlets and his two sharp sons – not one of these good and worthy people saw Puckle as he walked past them. He was completely invisible.

  The miracle was made greater yet by the fact that, by the time he stepped on to the vessel under construction at the water’s edge, there wasn’t a single person in the yard who couldn’t have sworn, had you asked them, that Abraham Puckle had been there all morning.

  ‘That’s the best one, Fanny,’ said the Reverend William Gilpin with approval; and the heiress to the Albion estate smiled with pleasure, as she put the drawing back into her sketching book, because she thought so too.

  They were sitting by the window of the library in the vicarage – a big Georgian house with a large beech tree just opposite its front door.

  The vicar of Boldre was a handsome old man. A little corpulent, but powerfully built, he and the heiress of Albion House were very fond of each other. The reasons for loving the distinguished clergyman were too obvious to need explanation. His for loving Fanny, whom he had christened himself, were numerous: she was kind and thoughtful for others; she was also lively, intelligent and really drew quite well. He enjoyed her company. Her fair hair had a reddish tint; her eyes were strikingly blue; her complexion was excellent. Had he been, say, thirty years younger and not already happily married – he admitted it frankly, at least to himself – he’d have tried to marry Fanny Albion.