‘How can this be? I do not know. It is true, as Mr Gilpin said, that I was at that time in some distress. I remember, that afternoon, that my mind had been much upon my dear father, who had been unwell. I had been considering whether to return from Bath to be with him, because I had a strong intimation that he might be close to his end – an intimation, alas, which proved to be correct. It was with a mind full of such thoughts that I wandered, somewhat abstracted, around that shop. I do not even remember looking at the lace, but I suppose that, with my mind entirely elsewhere, as I passed by the table, I must have placed it in my bag. Perhaps, in my abstraction I imagined I was somewhere else, at home perhaps. For gentlemen.’ Her voice now rose. ‘How, under what influence, for what possible motive should I steal a piece of lace for which I had no need? Why should I, heiress to a great estate, devoted to my family and to preserving their good name, suddenly risk all for a crime I had no possible reason to commit?’
She took a deep breath before continuing. ‘Gentlemen, I have been offered the best lawyers to represent me, and I considered using them. They would, I have no doubt, have tried to throw doubt upon the motives, the veracity, the reliability of the good people who are my accusers. During the time before this trial I have been kept in the common gaol. I have lost my good name, my father, my aunt, even my family house. God has seen fit to take everything from me.’ She spoke with such feeling, now, that just for a moment she was unable to go on. ‘But this terrible passage of time has convinced me of one thing. I must come before you and speak nothing but the most simple truth. I throw myself entirely upon your wisdom and your mercy.’ She turned. ‘My Lord, I have nothing more to say.’
It did not take the jury long. Even the shopkeeper was ready to believe her. How did the jury find her?
‘Not guilty, My Lord.’
She was free. As she left the courtroom with her dear friends, however, Fanny felt no elation. Just outside the door, standing with a beadle, she saw the poor girl who was to be transported and paused a moment. ‘I’m sorry about what they did to you.’
‘I’m alive,’ the girl replied with a shrug. ‘Can’t be worse for me there than here.’
‘But your family …’
‘Glad to see the back of them. They never did nothing for me.’
‘I might have been joining you,’ Fanny said quietly.
‘You? A lady? Don’t make me laugh. They’d have let you off anyway.’
‘Don’t be impertinent,’ said Mr Gilpin, not unkindly.
But even so, Fanny still looked back to give the girl a pitying glance.
The marriage of Miss Fanny Albion and Mr Wyndham Martell took place later that spring. There had been some uncertainty about where the celebrations should be held, but the matter was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction when Mr Gilpin offered his vicarage, where Fanny had in any case been staying. Mr Totton, as her nearest relative, gave her away, Edward was best man and Louisa the senior bridesmaid. If the Tottons had sensed a faint coolness towards them on behalf of the bride and bridegroom, there was no sign of it upon the day, when everyone congratulated Louisa on how pretty she looked and gave it as their opinion that it could not be long before she, too, found a husband.
Three days before the wedding Fanny received one unexpected guest. He came to the door of the vicarage, bearing a gift and, although a little nervous, Fanny felt she could hardly refuse to receive him, which she did in the drawing room.
Mr Isaac Seagull was looking very spruce that day, in a smart blue coat, silk stockings and a perfectly starched cravat. With a slight bow and a curious smile, he handed her the present, which was a very fine silver salver. Fanny took it and thanked him, but could not help blushing a little, for she had not seen fit to invite him to the wedding.
Guessing her thoughts, the landlord of the Angel with his cynical, chinless face gave her a smile. ‘I shouldn’t have come to the wedding if you’d asked me,’ he said very easily.
‘Oh.’
She looked out of the window at the lawn, which was still somewhat untidy after the spring rains. ‘Mr Martell knows about our relationship.’
‘Maybe. But no need to speak of it, all the same. Nothing wrong with secrets,’ remarked the man who lived by them.
‘Mr Martell is not here at present. I’m sure he would be glad to shake your hand.’
‘Well,’ said the lander with a humour that Fanny missed, ‘I dare say I shall have the pleasure of shaking his hand one of these days.’
Then he left. And it was half an hour later that Mr Gilpin, with a wry smile, found a bottle of the very best brandy outside his back door.
‘They were all there, Mr Grockleton, did you see? The Morants and the Burrards and I don’t know who else out of Dorset.’ After her own wedding day – she had enough sense to say that – Mrs Grockleton declared it had been quite the happiest day she could remember. And nothing, nothing could compare with the moment when Fanny and Wyndham Martell, standing with her, had called to Sir Harry Burrard, who had come over smiling, and Fanny had said with such simple warmth: ‘Mrs Grockleton, I’m sure you know Sir Harry Burrard. Mrs Grockleton,’ she smiled, ‘is is our true friend.’ Which, although she scarcely knew it herself, was all that Mrs Grockleton had been waiting for someone to say all her life.
For everyone else, however, the most notable event of the day came when Mr Martell made his speech.
‘I know that many of you may be wondering,’ he declared, ‘if it is my intention to take the last Albion out of the Forest. I can assure you it is not. For while our interests must, of course, take us to Dorset and Kent, and London too, it is our intention to build a new house here, to replace Albion House.’ It was not to be on the old house’s wooded site, however, but upon a large open area just south of Oakley where he intended to lay out a park with views towards the sea. Plans for a fine classical mansion were already being drawn up. ‘And to make it clear that in our new order we have not forgotten the old,’ he cheerfully declared, ‘we have decided to call it Albion Park.’
1804
Everything was ready at Buckler’s Hard, that warm evening in July.
The last three days had been especially exciting. Over two hundred extra men had arrived from the naval dockyards at Portsmouth to help with the launching. Riggers, they were called. They were camped all around the shipyard.
The launching tomorrow would be one of the most impressive that the shipyard had ever undertaken. Two or three thousand people were coming to watch. The gentry would be there, and all sorts of great folk from London. For tomorrow they were going to launch Swiftsure.
It was only the third time in the yard’s history that they had built a great seventy-four-gun ship. Even Agamemnon had been only a sixty-four. At seventeen hundred and twenty-four tons, the ship towered over the dock. The Adamses were to be paid over thirty-five thousand pounds for building her.
Business had been brisk at Buckler’s Hard. At the age of ninety-one, old Henry Adams was still seen about the yard, but his two sons ran everything nowadays. In the last three years they had built three merchant coasters and a ketch; three sixteen-gun brigs, two thirty-six-gun frigates of which the second, Euryalus, had been built alongside Swiftsure, and the mighty seventy-four-gun herself. Another three brigs, twelve guns each, were already in production. Indeed, the yard was so loaded with work that the Adamses were often behind schedule and their profits were not all they should have been. But the completion of mighty Swiftsure was still a cause for celebration.
Puckle certainly meant to celebrate. He had been working on Swiftsure ever since the keel was laid.
They had been long years, the years of exile before that. He’d been busy enough. Isaac Seagull had dropped a discreet hint to old Mr Adams; Mr Adams had spoken to a friend at the shipbuilding yards at Deptford, on the Thames outside London. And a month or so after he had slipped away out to sea, Puckle the smuggler had been patriotically employed building ships for His Majesty’s Navy again.
Th
e Navy had needed ships, as never before. Ever since his arrival in London, England had been at war, or close to it, with France. Out of the Revolution there had now emerged a formidable military man, Napoleon Bonaparte, a second Julius Caesar, who had made himself master of France and who, quite likely, meant to be master of the world as well. His revolutionary armies were sweeping all before them. In England, only the unbending minister, William Pitt, and the great oak ships of the British Navy stood, implacably, in his path.
They had been hard years. The war, bad harvests, French blockades had all hit Britain’s economy. The price of bread had risen sharply. There had been sporadic riots. Puckle, working hard in Deptford, had been well enough provided for; but although he could go upstream to the busy port of London, or wander up on to the high ridges and bosky woods of Kent, he missed the soft, peaty soil, the gravelly tracks, the oaks and heather of the Forest. He had longed to return. He had waited six years.
Not Mr Grockleton’s fictitious cousin, but an aunt of his wife’s, from a rich Bristol tradesman’s family, left the modest legacy that allowed the Grockletons to retire. It was with some surprise, however, that her many friends, who even included – more or less – the Burrards, learned that Mrs Grockleton did not intend, after all, to stay in Lymington. Her academy was thriving. No less than four girls from prominent landed gentry attended some of its classes. The yearly ball she now gave for the girls had become a very pleasant fixture at which only the very best of the merchant families like the Tottons and the St Barbes were to be seen with the gentry. Mr Grockleton, who had never intercepted a single cask of brandy, had even been known, rather wryly, to drink the occasional bottle left at his door by order of Isaac Seagull, who had grown quite fond of him. Why, then, should they want to move?
The fact was, although she was too polite and kind to say it, Lymington had failed Mrs Grockleton. Indeed, so had the Forest. ‘It’s those salt pans,’ she would say sadly. For the salt pans, the little windpumps and the boiling houses were still there. True, there were one or two very agreeable houses built recently at Lymington with views of the sea. A captain and two admirals graced the place, with the promise of more to come: and admirals, though they might be fierce, were very respectable.
Yet something was missing from the town even so. Perhaps it was the French. In 1795 most of them had departed on a campaign against the revolutionaries in France. They had landed there in force, fought bravely, but in vain. The expedition had not been very well supported by the British government. Few of the brave Frenchmen returned. All that was left to remind Lymington of their sojourn there were one or two aristocratic widows, a larger number of local girls who had either fallen in love with, or married, French troops and, inevitably, a number of illegitimate children, all of whom were likely to be a charge to the parish.
No, it was not enough. With its salt pans and its smugglers, Lymington, while well enough, was never going to become a place of fashion.
But what of her own position? Wasn’t she a friend of Fanny and Wyndham Martell? And of Louisa, dear Louisa, who had married Mr Arthur West? Wasn’t she, if not a regular guest at dinner, at least on terms of friendly acquaintance with the Burrards, the Morants, even Mr Drummond of Cadland? She was and that was just the trouble. She had achieved her objective. The enemy had been vanquished. She had met them and they were mortal. It might have surprised these good people to know it, but in her own capacious mind, at least, Mrs Grockleton had moved past them. The Forest was no longer large enough to contain her.
So the Grockletons went to Bath.
And with Mr Grockleton’s retirement and departure, the coast had been clear for Puckle to return.
It was all done very quietly. Isaac Seagull saw to that. His old cottage was ready for him. So was his job. And, by some Forest magic, when he walked back into the shipyard you really might have thought that no one even knew he had been gone.
And indeed, he discovered one other, pleasant continuity upon his arrival. For the great tree he had escorted across the Forest from the Rufus stone was also there, as it were, waiting to greet him. So large and fine were its timbers that Mr Adams had been holding it at the yard until he had a ship that was worthy of it. That ship had been the mighty Swiftsure. In this way, the acorn from the magical, midwinter-leafing tree had entered and become a part of one of Nelson’s finest ships.
That had been four years ago, as work had just started on Swiftsure, and he had been working on her ever since. Her launching tomorrow, therefore, in some strange way seemed a kind of affirmation to him. He had returned home, and brought a great ship into the world. At least, he would have, after tomorrow when she was launched.
The launching of a great ship was a complex and tricky business. Essentially it was necessary to transfer the vast weight of the vessel from the keel blocks on which it had been built to a slipway down which it must safely enter the water.
For days, now, Puckle had been helping the men building the wooden slideways. These were railtracks made of elm and, since they had to run down well into the water, most of the work on them had to be done at low tide. It was a muddy affair.
The business of transferring the huge weight of the ship had to be done with the utmost care. While it was being built, the ship had rested upon keel blocks made of elm wood, about five feet high and placed five feet apart. Around the outside of the hull, tall wooden poles, thirty or forty feet high, like ship’s masts, acted as scaffolding. Starting from the end nearest the water, the riggers had swiftly moved, driving in huge wooden wedges to lift the ship off the blocks and then putting in the timber props that would guide her on her path down the rails. It was a long operation requiring great skill. For everything had to go right. If the ship lurched, it could crash on its side. If the angle of the slideways were too shallow she might not launch. Too steep and she might rush down into the water and go careering off, to get stuck on the mud banks across the river. Such things had happened. If all went well, however, the rising tide coming up under the stern would just ease the ship off the blocks, the wedges holding her would be knocked away and, slowed by drag ropes, she would slide gently down into the Beaulieu River, stern first, to be towed away downstream and out into the Solent.
Puckle walked round the ship. He loved the line of the huge keel and the workmanship that had gone into it. The inner keel was made of sections of elm. Outside this was another outer keel of oak. When the ships ran down the sliderails, or if ever, later, they ran aground, it was this outer keel that would endure the scraping, protecting the inner keel from harm.
He would be staying at the yard that night, for before the ship could be launched there was still one vital job to do.
The normal time to launch a ship at Buckler’s Hard was an hour before high tide. At lowest tide, therefore, which, that night, would come shortly before dawn, gangs of men would go down to grease the slideways with melted tallow and soap. Puckle had asked to be one of them. He wouldn’t have missed this last pre-dawn preparation for anything.
*
There was a quarter-moon that night and the sky was full of stars. At Albion Park the pale, classical façade of the house stared across the faintly glimmering sweep of its lawns to the gently shelving belt of small fields and woods that sank down, as though in a contented dream, to the Solent water. Beyond that, clearly visible in the moonlight, the long line of the Isle of Wight lay like a gentle guardian.
In that handsome, ordered house, everyone was asleep. The five children of Fanny and Wyndham Martell slept happily in their nursery wing. Mrs Pride, a little elderly, now, but still very much in control – not a fly stirred in that house without her permission – slept peacefully. The entire household would be driving across to join the more than a hundred carriages, which would arrive to watch the launching of Swiftsure in the morning.
Everyone slept. Or almost everyone.
Mr Wyndham Martell was not asleep. He had been awakened an hour before by a sound from his wife and now he sat watching her t
houghtfully.
It was just in the last few weeks that she had taken to talking in her sleep. He did not know why. She had done so before, usually in little bursts that lasted for a week or two and then subsided, as though there were complex hidden tides in her mind about which he scarcely knew. Sometimes he could make something out. She had murmured about her aunt, about Mrs Pride, about Alice Lisle. There had also been conversations with what appeared to be Isaac Seagull. Mr Gilpin was the recipient of some of her confidences, too. But there was one dream she had which seemed to cause her particular distress; she would toss and turn, and even cry out. She had just had it again tonight.
Wyndham Martell loved his wife very much. He wanted to help her, yet was not sure what to do. Most of the conversations she had made no particular sense. Even when she was in distress, it was not always possible to understand the moans and cries she emitted. And by morning, when she awoke, she would smile at him lovingly and be well enough.
Tonight, however, he thought he had understood something more.
Wyndham Martell got up and walked to the window. The night was warm. Across the park he could see to the coast, out past the distant spit of Hurst Castle and the open sea beyond. He smiled to himself: that was the province of Isaac Seagull the smuggler. His wife’s cousin. He remembered well the night Louisa had told him that and how her malice had made him feel so sorry for Fanny. Perhaps, he thought wryly, it was the very unfolding of that dark secret that had led him to the wife he loved.
Maybe everyone, he reflected, had dark secrets within them of which they might or might not even be aware.
And then, because he loved his wife and all her secrets, he quietly left the room, went down to his private library and, sitting down at his desk, took out a piece of paper. He was going to write his wife a letter.