The Forest (19 page)

‘But what happened?’ She had never seen Walter at a loss before.

He gazed at her almost as if she were not there. ‘It was an accident.’

‘But who? How?’

‘An accident.’ He stared straight ahead.

She looked at him carefully. Was he just in a state of shock? Was he describing what he saw, or what someone had told him? They were trotting briskly, now, on to the heath.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘West. I have to go west. Away from Winchester. I have to find a boat. Further along the coast.’

‘A boat?’

‘Don’t you understand? I have to get away. Flee the realm. I wish to God I knew the way through this cursed forest.’

‘I do,’ she said. ‘I’ll guide you.’

It was astonishing how quickly the time seemed to pass. But then she was no longer searching and wandering; she was going straight for a point in the terrain whose position she knew: the little deserted ford north of Pride’s hamlet. The heath was empty. They saw no one. They did not speak. Avoiding the tiny hamlet, they found the long path that led down to the ford, crossed below Brockenhurst and came out on to the rolling heathland of the western Forest.

‘Do you want to try to get a boat at Christchurch?’ she asked.

‘No. It’s too near. I might have to wait a day or two and by then’ – he sighed – ‘they could arrest me. I have to go much further west.’

‘You’ll have to cross the River Avon. I know the Avon valley.’ Thank God for her rides with Edgar. ‘There’s a cattle ford about halfway between Christchurch and Ringwood. After that you cross the meadows and it’s open heathland for miles and miles.’

‘Good. I’ll go that way, then,’ Tyrrell said.

The sun was sinking in the west, a huge deep red; here and there a solitary tree stood out like a strange indigo flower against the red sky, casting a long shadow towards them like a cautionary finger. They had to walk their horses, but apart from the Forest ponies and the occasional cattle they had the place to themselves.

Tyrrell seemed to have recovered a bit now. ‘You said you were looking for me, that you sent a message,’ he said quietly. ‘What was that?’

She told him the whole story, the behaviour of Cola, what
she had heard and how she had searched, with Pride’s help.

He listened carefully, then was silent for a few moments. ‘Did you realize that you might have been risking your life for me, my dear cousin?’ he said at last. He had never called her his dear cousin before.

‘I didn’t really think of it,’ she replied honestly.

‘This Pride – he knows nothing except the message you gave him, from the Lady Maud?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Let’s hope he is discreet, then.’ He stayed lost in thought for a while. Then, gazing ahead he said quietly: ‘You must forget everything you heard, everything you saw. If anyone asks, if Cola asks, you went for a ride in the Forest. Is there any reason why you should have done so?’

‘Actually,’ she confessed, ‘I had an assignation with Hugh de Martell. But I missed it.’

‘Aha!’ Despite everything, he laughed out loud. ‘He’s incorrigible, you know. Be warned. But it couldn’t be better. Stick to that if you must. Say you panicked and fled to find me if further pressed. But’, he became very serious, ‘if you value your life, Adela, forget everything else.’

‘What really happened?’ she asked.

He paused for some time before he spoke and, when he did, he chose his words carefully. ‘I don’t know. We’d split up. One of my Clare kinsmen came racing up to me and said there’d been an accident. “And as you were alone with the king,” he said, “you’ll take the blame.” I told him I hadn’t been with the king, but I got the message, if you see what I mean. He promised me they’d keep the hue and cry off my trail for a day or two if I made myself scarce and got across the sea. No point in arguing.’

‘Was it an accident?’

‘Who knows? Accidents happen.’

She wondered if he were telling the truth, and realized she could not know. She also realized that it was irrelevant. What mattered most – a hidden truth or a series of fleeting
appearances? Or what men chose to say, or chose to believe?

‘I’m afraid, my poor little cousin, there’s nothing much I can do for you at present. I did have a possible suitor for you, but nobody will be wanting an alliance with a poor cousin of mine for a while. And you certainly can’t come with me to Normandy now. What’s to be done?’

‘I’ll go back to Cola’s first,’ she replied. ‘Then we’ll see. They tell me’ – she smiled – ‘that I’m going to be very happy.’

‘You are slightly mad,’ he replied, ‘but I begin to love you.’

Just then they came to the top of a low ridge. The sunset was in all its glory now, ahead of them, a vast red glow on the horizon over the Avon valley. And then Adela turned round to look back and saw all the purple heather of the heath suddenly transformed into a vast, magnificent, crimson fire, so that it seemed as if the whole Forest floor were molten, like the mouth of a secret volcano.

Then she and Tyrrell continued on their way, and when they could see the darkening river and the broad meadows by the cattle ford, she turned northwards and left him to take his flight towards the west.

A single arrow from a bow had killed Rufus. The red-headed monarch had died instantly. His companions had gathered and taken counsel quickly. It was his silent, thoughtful younger brother Henry who, after only moments of persuading, had announced: ‘We must go to Winchester at once.’ The treasury was there.

It was fortunate indeed that, no doubt thanks to the efficiency of Cola, Puckle and his cart should have been near at hand. They wrapped the body of the king, put it in Puckle’s cart and all set out for the ancient capital. All, that is, save Cola who, his work done, returned slowly home.

He reached his manor some time after dark, at just the same time as, in another, larger manor further west, they
woke the Lady Maud, sleeping after her ride, to tell her that her husband, out riding in the Forest, had fallen from his horse, broken his neck on a pile of wood and was dead. She slept no more that night.

Another mother and child, deep in the Forest, did rest quietly that warm summer night: the pale doe and her fawn were at peace with the world, as they had been during most of the day. For, having briefly heard riders nearby and thought they were hunters, the pale deer had heard no more and settled down with her fawn once again. She lived in a part of the forest far distant from that in which King Rufus fatally hunted that day. So that whether Adela had seen another pale deer as she came across the heath, or whether the deer’s colour was only a trick of the light, or whether there was some other cause of her mistake, it was impossible to say.

Nor have men ever been able to say with certainty what really passed in the Forest that strange and magical day. The hunting companions of the king were known. Tyrrell, it was said, had taken aim at a stag, missed and struck the king. No one, or very few, asserted that he had done it deliberately, nor was there any clear reason why he should.

Who benefited from his death? Not his brother Robert, as it happened, nor the Clare family, as far as is known. But his younger brother – loyal, silent Henry with his fringe of black hair – took over the Winchester treasury by dawn and was crowned in London within two days. In time he took Normandy from Robert, just as Rufus had planned to do. But if he had any hand in the death of Rufus – and many have whispered that he must have done – not a trace of evidence remains.

Indeed, so completely did the Forest hold its secret, that even the place where it happened became forgotten until, centuries later, a stone was put up to mark the spot – in the wrong part of the Forest entirely.

There was, however, one other beneficiary of the mystery. A few days after it, Cola happened to come across Godwin Pride, who politely approached to have a private word with him. It seemed, he assured the surprised huntsman, that he had reason to believe that he had, in all honesty, a right to a large pen, far bigger than the one he had illegally made, next to his smallholding.

‘What possible proof have you, man?’ Cola enquired.

‘I think you could be satisfied,’ Pride replied carefully. ‘And if you’d be satisfied, I’d be satisfied.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I happened to be down Througham way the other day.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. Funny what you see sometimes.’

‘Funny?’ Cola was watchful now. Very. ‘Care to tell me what you saw?’

‘Shouldn’t care to tell anyone.’

‘Dangerous.’

‘Shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Well, I’ve no idea what you think you saw.’ Cola looked at him thoughtfully. ‘And I don’t think I want to know either.’

‘No. I shouldn’t say you did.’

‘Talk can be dangerous.’

‘See what I mean about that pen?’

‘See? I don’t suppose I see any better than you do, Godwin Pride.’

‘All right, then,’ said Pride cheerfully and walked off.

And when, the next summer, a splendid new pen, almost an extra acre, with a small bank and a ditch and a fence appeared by Pride’s homestead at the heath’s edge, neither Cola, nor his elder son, nor his younger son Edgar, nor Edgar’s wife Adela – who had received a nice little dowry upon her marriage from Tyrrell in Normandy – nor any of the royal foresters, ever seemed to see it or take any notice of it at all.

For in such ways life is arranged in the Forest.

He ran along the edge of the field, bending low, hugging the hedgerow. He was red in the face, panting. He could still hear the shouts of rage from the grange behind him.

The mud-splattered habit he wore marked him as belonging to the monastery; but his thick hair was not shaved in the choir monk’s tonsure. A lay brother, then.

He reached the corner of the field and looked back. There was no one behind him. Not yet.
Laudate Dominum
. Praise the Lord.

The field he was in was full of sheep. But there was a bull in the next field. He didn’t care. Hoisting his habit, he swung his long legs over the stile.

The bull was not far off. It was brown and shaggy, and like a small haystack. Its two red eyes looked at him from under the thatch between its long, curling horns. He almost raised his hand to make the sign of the cross in benediction, but thought better of it.

Tauri Basan cingunt me …
The bulls of Bashan have beset me round: the Latin words of the twenty-second psalm. He had sung them only last week. A kindly monk had told him what they meant.
Domine, ad juvandum me festina
. O Lord, make haste to help me.

He started off as fast as he dared along the side of the field, keeping one eye on the bull.

There were just three questions in his mind. Was he being followed? Would the bull charge? And the man he had left bleeding on the ground at the grange: had he killed him?

*

The abbey of Beaulieu was at peace in the warm autumn afternoon. The shouts at the grange were far out of hearing. Only the occasional beating of swans’ wings on the neighbouring water broke the pleasant silence by the grey riverside inclosure.

In his private office, secure behind a bolted door, the abbot stared thoughtfully at the book he had been inspecting.

Every abbey had its secrets. Usually they were written down and kept in a safe place, handed down from abbot to abbot, for his eyes only. Sometimes they were of historical importance, concerning matters of royal statecraft or even the secret burial place of a saint. More often they were scandals, hidden or forgotten, in which the monastery was involved. Some, in retrospect, seemed trivial; others rose from the page like shrieks over which history had clapped a stifling hand. And lastly came the recent entries, concerning those still in the monastery – things which, in the view of the previous abbot, his successor needed to know.

Not that the entire Beaulieu record was so long. For the abbey was still a newcomer to the Forest.

Since the killing of Rufus the Forest had seen little drama. When, after a long reign, Henry had died, his daughter and his nephew had disputed the throne for years. But they did not fight in the Forest. When the daughter’s son, ruthless Henry Plantagenet, had come to the throne, he had quarrelled with his Archbishop, Thomas Becket, and some said he had had him murdered. All Christendom had been shocked. There had been another flurry of excitement when Henry’s heroic son, Richard the Lionheart, had gathered up his knights at Sarum to go on crusade.

But the truth was that the Forest folk cared little about any of these great events. The hunting of deer went on. Despite the numerous attempts of the barons and the Church to reduce the vast areas of the royal forests, the
rapacious Plantagenet kings had actually enlarged them so that the boundaries of the New Forest were now even wider than they had been in the Conqueror’s time; though the forest laws, mercifully, had grown less harsh. The king no longer made Brockenhurst his main hunting base but usually stayed at the royal manor of Lyndhurst, where the old deer park pale had been greatly enlarged.

One national event had got their attention, though. When Lionheart’s brother, bad King John, had been forced by his barons to grant the humiliating Magna Carta, that great charter of English liberties had set out the limits to his oppressions in the Forest. And the matter had been even more clearly stated in a separate Charter of the Forest two years later. This was not a parochial business, either, given that almost a third of England had become royal forest by that date.