The Forest (69 page)

In his desire for religious freedom, so that the Catholics might have their churches again, Charles II was entirely sincere. For the time being. That he had also, that very summer, signed a secret treaty with his cousin Louis XIV promising to adopt the Roman Catholic faith and enforce it in England as soon as possible was a fact of which neither Alice, nor Parliament, nor even the king’s close council had the slightest inkling. In return for this Charles was to receive from Louis a handsome yearly income. Whether the king was serious and really meant to betray his Protestant English subjects, or whether he was duping his French cousin to get some more money will never be known, except to God. Since, like so many of the Stuarts, the merry monarch was a habitual liar, he probably didn’t know himself.

So while the idea of trusting the king would have caused hilarity in any courtier, Alice had no reason to suppose that, for her dissenting friends, he might not be offering a genuine hope.

‘And now, Dame Alice,’ he said, ‘do not forget that you came here to ask me for a favour.’

Alice was very brief and straightforward. She explained the lawsuit with the Duke of York and assured the king: ‘I’m sure the duke believes I am hiding money and there is nothing I can say to persuade him otherwise. I come to you, Sire, with this little girl’ – she indicated Betty – ‘whose interests I am bound to protect, to ask for help. The matter is as simple and as plain as that.’

‘You ask me to believe my brother is mistaken?’

‘He is bound to hate me, Sire.’

‘As am I. And that you are honest?’ To this Alice could only bow her head. The king nodded. ‘I believe you
are
honest, Madam,’ he concluded. ‘Although whether I can help you remains to be seen.’

He was just turning back to the ladies when Alice caught sight of a solitary rider out on the heath. He was coming towards them at a trot. She supposed that it must be one of the forest keepers but as he drew closer she observed that it was a youngish man, in his middle twenties she guessed, whom she had never seen before. He was tall, with dark good looks. A very handsome young man indeed. Betty was staring at him open-mouthed. Alice observed the king turn to Howard enquiringly and saw Howard murmur something to him. She noticed that the king looked, just for a moment, a little awkward, but that he quickly recovered himself.

Who, she wondered, could the young man be?

Thomas Penruddock did not often come to the Forest. When his cousins at Hale, whom he was visiting the previous day, had told him that the king was to be at Bolderwood he had hesitated to go there. He was a proud young man and had no wish to risk further humiliation. It was only after his cousins had begged him to go that he had finally set out, with some misgivings, in the direction of the royal party.

Although the Penruddocks had managed to hold on to the house and part of the estate at Compton Chamberlayne, the years since his father’s death had been hard. There had been no fine clothes for young Thomas; the horses were mostly sold; nor were there any tutors. Side by side with his mother, the boy had worked to keep the family going. If there were lawyers to see in Sarum, which always particularly distressed her, he would accompany her. Often he would work in the fields; he became a tolerable carpenter. Sometimes his mother would cry fretfully. ‘You shouldn’t be working like a farmhand. You’re a gentleman! If only your father were here.’ To please her, as much as anything, he would sit down in the evenings, if he were not too tired, and make some attempt to study his books. And forever
before his mind he kept one promise: one day, things will get better and then I’ll be a gentleman, like my father; I shall be like him in every way. This was his talisman, the nearest he could do to get his father back, his hope of eternal life, his dream of love, his secret honour.

Always there had been the hope: one day the king will return. What joy there would be, then. The faithful would be rewarded; and who had been more faithful, who had suffered more for the king’s cause, than the family of Penruddock? When the Restoration came, therefore, seventeen-year-old Thomas Penruddock was beside himself with excitement. Even his mother said: ‘I’m sure the king must do something for us now.’

They heard of the festivities in London, of the loyal new Parliament and the bright new court. They waited for a message, a call to come and share the triumph of the king. And heard – nothing; not a word, not a whisper. The king had not remembered the widow and her son.

They sent word by friends. They even wrote a letter: which was answered with – silence. Friends explained: ‘The king hasn’t any money to give, but there are other things he can do.’ An application was prepared, asking the new king to grant this Penruddock a monopoly for making glasses. ‘In other words,’ a worldly friend explained, ‘anyone who wants to make glasses has to pay you for the licence to do it.’ This was a popular way of rewarding a subject, since no money had to come out of the crown coffers.

‘I’m sure I shan’t know how to do all this,’ Mrs Penruddock fretted, but she needn’t have worried. The monopoly wasn’t granted. ‘I can’t understand why he does nothing,’ she cried.

For young Thomas, despite all he had been through, this was his first and very important worldly lesson: he could trust no one, not even a king, to look after him if he did not look after himself. Those in power, even anointed kings, used people and then forgot them. It was the nature of their
calling. It could not be otherwise. He had gone back to work with a vengeance.

And in the last ten years he had succeeded very well. Slowly, bit by bit, the estate was reverting to its former condition. Lost acres were being recovered. At twenty-seven, Thomas Penruddock was a toughened and successful man.

Today he wanted something specific. Already a captain in his country’s local cavalry, he knew that his colonel, a pleasant old gentleman, meant to give the thing up shortly. He had let it be known that he wanted the colonelcy, but there were other older men who could quite reasonably expect to come before him. He was determined, though. It was not a question of profit: if anything, this colonelcy would cost him money. It was a question of family honour: the day he got the post, there would be a Colonel Penruddock at Compton Chamberlayne again.

‘The lord-lieutenant of the county makes the appointment,’ he told his cousins. ‘But, of course, if the king says he wants me to have it then I’ll get it.’ When he considered his family’s sufferings and the fact that this would cost the king nothing, it seemed to Thomas Penruddock that it was the least the king could do. Nonetheless, he had felt uncertain of his reception, as he prepared to meet his monarch for the first time.

There was no mistaking him: the big swarthy fellow surrounded by women. Thomas doffed his hat politely as he drew up and received a nod in return. He saw Howard, whom he knew, and therefore guessed that the king had already been told who he was; he scanned his face for a sign of recognition – a welcoming smile for a loyal family, perhaps. But he saw something else. There was no mistaking it. King Charles was looking embarrassed.

As indeed he was. It had been one of the humiliations of his royal Restoration that his Parliament had made it almost impossible for him to reward his friends. A number of the
rich and powerful men who had made his return possible, of course, had been sitting on estates confiscated from royalists, so he could hardly expect to ask for those back. But he had at least hoped that Parliament would give him enough funds to do something for his friends. Parliament didn’t. He had been helpless.

But even so … The truth was that Charles winced inwardly whenever the name Penruddock was mentioned. Penruddock’s Rising had been a bungled affair and that was partly his own fault. He’d been able to do nothing at first for the widow; but after that he’d felt so embarrassed that he’d tried to pretend they didn’t exist. He’d behaved shabbily and he knew it. And now, here was this handsome, saturnine young man, like an angel of conscience, arriving to ruin his sunny afternoon. Inwardly, he squirmed.

But that was not what young Penruddock saw. For as he glanced round the group, wondering what was in the royal mind to cause it such embarrassment, his eyes fell upon a quiet figure sitting at one side. And his mouth fell open.

He recognized her at once. The years had passed, her red hair was greying now, but how could he ever forget that face? It was graven on his memory. The face of the woman who, with her husband, had deliberately set out to kill his father. In a single sudden rush, the agony of those days came upon him like a searing wind. For a moment he was a boy again. He stared at her, unable to comprehend; and then, as he thought, understanding. She was the friend of the king. He, a Penruddock, was scorned; while she, a rich regicide, a murderess, was sitting at the king’s right hand.

He realized that he had started to shake. With a huge effort he controlled himself. In so doing, his saturnine face assumed a look of cold contempt.

Howard, seeing this, and ever the courtier, quickly called out: ‘His Majesty is hunting, Mr Penruddock. Have you come to request an audience?’

‘I, Sir?’ Penruddock collected himself. ‘Why, Sir, should
a Penruddock wish to speak to the king?’ He indicated Alice Lisle. ‘The king, I see, has other kinds of friends.’

This was too much.

‘Have a care, Penruddock,’ cried the king himself. ‘You must not be insolent.’

But Penruddock’s bitterness had overcome him. ‘I had come to ask a favour, it is true. But that was foolish, I plainly see. For after my father laid down his life for this king’ – he was addressing them all now – ‘we had neither favour nor even thanks.’ Turning to Alice Lisle, he directed his years of suffering and loathing straight towards her. ‘No doubt we should have done better to be traitors, thieves of other men’s lands and common murderers.’

Then, in a fit of anguish, he turned his horse’s head and a moment later was cantering away.

‘By God, Sire,’ cried Howard, ‘I’ll bring him back. I’ll horsewhip him!’

But Charles II raised his hand. ‘No. Let him go. Did you not see his pain?’ For a while he gazed silently after the retreating figure; not even Nellie attempted to interrupt his thoughts. Then he shook his head. ‘The fault is mine, Howard. He is right. I am ashamed.’ Then, turning to Alice, with a bitterness of his own, he exclaimed: ‘Ask no favours of me, Madam, who are still my enemy, when you see how I treat my friends.’ And the nod that followed told Alice plainly that it was time for her and her daughter to be gone.

So she was in some distress when she arrived back at Albion House to find Furzey sitting in a corner of the hall and John Hancock, with a large sheet of paper over which he was poring carefully, in the parlour. Anxious to get rid of the Oakley man so that she could discuss her meeting with the king, she demanded that Hancock deal with Furzey at once. Closing the parlour door, the lawyer explained Furzey’s predicament in a few words and then showed her the paper.
‘I found it all in the rental records. You see? This cottage, which is the one Furzey occupies, shows its first rent here, in the reign of James I, just a few years before you were born. It was clearly built recently and Furzey’s grandfather moved into it.’

‘So he had no right to Estovers?’

‘Technically no. I can make application, of course, but unless we mean to conceal this from the court …’

‘No. No.
No
!’ The final word was a shout. Her patience had suddenly given out. ‘The last thing in the world I need now is to be caught out in a lie, concealing evidence from the court. If he hasn’t the right of Estovers then he hasn’t and that’s that.’ She couldn’t take any more today. ‘John, please make him go away.’

Furzey listened carefully, as the lawyer explained, but he did not hear. The explanation about the building date of his dwelling meant nothing to him: he had never heard of it, didn’t believe it, thought it was a trick, refused to take it in. When the lawyer said, ‘It’s a pity you didn’t make the claim when you should have back in the last king’s reign – plenty of those claims are improper, but they’re all being allowed,’ Furzey looked down at the floor; but since that made it his fault, he managed within moments to screen this information from his mind. There was only one thing Furzey knew. Whatever this lawyer had said, he’d heard it for himself. That shout – ‘No!’ – from behind the door. It was that woman, the Lady of Albion House, who had denied him.

And so it was, in an excess of rage and bitterness, that he swore to his family that night: ‘She’s the one. She’s the one that’s taken away our rights. She’s the one that hates us.’

Two months later, Alice was greatly surprised when the Duke of York dropped his lawsuit against her.

People were often surprised that Betty Lisle was twenty-four and unmarried. With her fair hair and fine, grey-blue eyes she was pleasant to look at. Had she been rich, no doubt people would have said she was beautiful. She wasn’t poor: Albion House and much of the Albion land was to come to her.

‘The fault is mine,’ Alice would acknowledge. ‘I have kept her too much with me.’

This was certainly true. Betty’s older sisters were married and away. Margaret and Whitaker were frequent visitors, but Bridget and Leonard Hoar had gone to Massachusetts where, for a while, Hoar had been President of Harvard. Tryphena and Robert Lloyd were in London. Alice and Betty were often alone, therefore, in the country.

Mostly they were at Albion House. They both loved it. To Alice, no matter what hardships she had known, the house her father built her had remained a refuge where she felt secure and at peace. Once the Duke of York’s threat of litigation had been withdrawn she had known that it would pass intact to Betty and what might have been lonely years for her were filled with the joy of watching her youngest daughter relive the happy years of her own childhood. For Betty herself the gabled house in the woods seemed the happiest place on earth: her family home, hidden away from the world. In winter, when the frost left gleaming icicles on the trees and they went down the snowy lane to old Boldre church on its little knoll, it seemed intimate and magical. In summer, when she rode up on to the wide heath to watch the visiting birds floating over the heather, or cantered down to Oakley, to see old Stephen Pride, the Forest seemed magnificent and wild, yet full of friends.