The Forest

by Edward Rutherfurd

  The estate records were kept at Albion House. Hancock knew where they were and, as he had nothing special to do until Alice returned from her mission, he thought he might as well see what he could find. It was the sort of burrowing the lawyer rather enjoyed. ‘When did your family first occupy your holding?’ he enquired.

  ‘My grandfather’s day,’ Furzey told him. ‘We was in another cottage before then. Always in Oakley, though,’ he added firmly, in case it mattered.

  ‘Quite. Sit and rest.’ The lawyer gave him a professional smile. ‘You don’t mind waiting, do you? I’ll see what I can find.’

  The hunt had lasted less than a quarter of an hour. Stephen Pride still couldn’t quite believe it.

  The thing had been beautifully managed, too. The king had been placed in a perfect spot in a glade. He was armed with the traditional bow. His ladies were grouped behind him. Pride and the Forest men, aided by the gentlemen keepers and two of the courtiers, drove some deer through and the king, in the most cheerful manner, loosed an arrow, which shot quite close over one of the deer before embedding itself in a tree.

  ‘Well shot, Sire,’ cried one of the courtiers, while Charles, without the slightest show of disappointment, turned to his ladies for approval.

  Stephen Pride, riding past an instant later, could have sworn he heard Nellie cry: ‘I hope you’re not going to hurt any of those poor little deer, Charles.’ And after a moment or two, just as they were about to begin another drive, there was a shout: ‘To Bolderwood!’ And to the utter astonishment of the Forest men, the whole party prepared to ride back to the lodge, where refreshments were awaiting them. Did all kings, Stephen wondered, get bored so quickly?

  But Charles II was not bored at all. He was doing what he liked best, which was to learn how things worked, with a shrewder eye than people supposed, and to flirt with pretty women. And an hour afterwards he was quite happily doing the latter when he observed, with no great pleasure, two figures, cut, it seemed, from the same brown cloth, riding towards him. Who the devil, he murmured to the Master Keeper, were they? Alice Lisle, he was informed. The child was her daughter.

  ‘Shall I send them away, Sire?’ Howard enquired, as he turned to meet them.

  ‘No,’ came the answer, with a sigh, ‘although I wish you could make them vanish.’

  She had done her best, Charles saw at once, to make herself agreeable. Her reddish hair, streaked with grey was parted in the middle: she had curled and combed it to try to give it more body. Her plain dress was long out of fashion, but the cloth was good. She had made a little concession to him by wearing a lacy cravat. She looked what she was: a Puritan gentlewoman, a widow secretly sad that she had grown a little hard – not the king’s type at all. But he felt slightly sorry for her. The small girl looked much more promising, though: fairer than her mother; eyes more blue than grey; a twinkle there, perhaps.

  So when Howard returned and murmured that the widow Lisle had come to beg a favour, Charles gave her a long, cool look and then remarked: ‘You and your daughter shall join our party, Madam.’

  Bolderwood was a charming spot. Situated nearly four miles west of Lyndhurst, by the edge of open heath, it consisted of a paddock, a little inclosure of trees, including an ancient yew tree, and the usual outbuildings. The main house was quite modest, a simple lodge, really, where a gentleman keeper lived. Nearby, beside a pair of fine oak trees, was the small but pleasant cottage that went with Jim Pride’s job as underkeeper. As the day was fine, the refreshments had been set out in the open under the shade of the trees.

  Dishes of sweetmeats, venison pie, light Bordeaux wine: all were offered Alice and her daughter as they sat on the folding stools provided. The king and some of the ladies lounged on rolled blankets draped with heavy damasks. It was a scene typical of the Restoration, as Charles II’s reign was often called: courtly, amusing, easygoing, louche. Alice understood at once that the king meant to punish her a little by making her take part in it and she shrewdly guessed that he might deliberately steer the conversation into areas designed to shock her. For the time being, nobody took any notice of the visitors at all, however, and so she was free to listen and observe.

  They represented, of course, everything that she and John Lisle had fought against. Their cavalier clothes, their immoral ways said it all. She might, she suspected, have been at the court of the Catholic King of France. The stern, moral rule that the Cromwellians at least aimed at was wholly foreign to these pleasure seekers. Yet, if she didn’t approve, she quite enjoyed their wit.

  At one point the conversation turned to witchcraft. One of the ladies had heard there were witches in the Forest and asked Howard if it was true. He didn’t know.

  The king shook his head. ‘Every disagreeable woman is accused of magic in our age,’ he remarked. ‘And I’m sure a great many harmless creatures are burned. Most magic is nonsense anyway.’ He turned to one of the gentlemen keepers. ‘Do you know this spring my cousin Louis of France sent me his court astrologer? Said he was infallible. Pompous little man, I thought. So I took him to the races.’ Alice had heard of the king’s latest passion for racing horses. At Newmarket Races he’d mingle with the crowds just like a common man. ‘I had him there all afternoon and, do you know, he couldn’t predict a single winner! So I sent him straight back to France the next morning.’

  Despite herself, Alice burst out laughing. The king gave her a sidelong look and seemed about to say something, but then apparently changed his mind and ignored her again. The conversation turned to his oak plantation. Admiration was expressed.

  Then Nellie Gwynn turned her large, cheeky eyes on the monarch. ‘When are you going to give me some oak trees, Charles?’ It was well known that the king had given an entire felling of timber to one young lady of the court a few years back, presumably as a gift for favours received.

  The king returned his mistress’s gaze sagely. ‘You have the royal oak, Miss, always at your service,’ he replied. ‘Be content with that.’

  There was laughter, although not this time from Alice, who now felt a nudge from Betty at her side.

  ‘What does he mean, Mother?’ she whispered.

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘The trouble with the royal oak, Charles,’ Nellie rejoined, with a tart look towards the elegant young Frenchwoman who was sitting composedly on a small chair, ‘is that it seems to be spreading.’ From this Alice concluded that the king had also been turning his eye in the French lady’s direction, but he seemed not in the least abashed about it.

  Looking bleakly at the proud lady in question he replied with a slight crossness: ‘There has been no planting. Yet.’

  ‘I don’t think much of her, anyway,’ said Nellie.

  In the middle of this unseemly exchange King Charles suddenly turned to Alice. ‘You have a pretty daughter, Madam,’ he said.

  Alice felt herself tense. She realized instantly that Charles had deliberately chosen this moment and this remark to vex her: the idea, insolently floating in the air, that her God-fearing little daughter might be viewed as a future royal conquest was as offensive as anything he could have said. Not, of course, that he had even implied it. If such a horror arose in her mind, he would say, it only proved her own antagonism towards him. He’d simply said the child was pretty. His game was plain: if she thanked him, she made a fool of herself; if she was insulted she gave him an excuse to send her packing. But always consider, she reminded herself, that my husband killed this man’s father. ‘She is a good child, Your Majesty,’ she replied as easily as she could, ‘and I love her for her kindness.’

  ‘You rebuke me, Madam,’ the king said quietly and looked down for a moment, before turning back to her again. She noticed as he did so that his nose, at a certain angle, looked strikingly large and that, with his soft brown eyes, this made him appear surprisingly solemn.

  ‘I will deal plainly with you, Madam,’ he said seriously. ‘I cannot like you. It is said’, he continued with a trace of real anger, ‘that
you cried out with joy at my father’s death.’

  ‘I am sorry if you heard that, Sire,’ she said, ‘for I promise you it is not true.’

  ‘Why not? It was surely what you desired.’

  ‘For the simple reason, Sire, that I foresaw that, one day, it would lead to my husband’s destruction – which it did.’

  At this blunt failure to express sorrow for the death of the king’s father, Howard began to rise as though he meant to throw her out; but King Charles gently raised his hand. ‘No, Howard,’ he said sadly, ‘she is only honest and we should be grateful for that. I know, Madam that you have suffered too. They say’, he continued to Alice, ‘that you harbour dissenting preachers.’

  ‘I do not break the law, Your Majesty.’ Since the law now required that meetings of religious dissenters must be five miles outside any chartered borough, and Albion House was only four from Lymington, this wasn’t quite true.

  But to her surprise the king now addressed her earnestly. ‘I’d have you know’, he said, ‘that you will have no cause to fear trouble from me on that account. It is Parliament that makes these rules, not I. Indeed, within a year or two I hope, Madam, to give you and your good friends liberty to worship as you please, so long as all Christians may have equal dispensation.’ He smiled. ‘You may have meeting houses at Lymington, Ringwood, Fordingbridge and I shall be glad of it.’

  ‘The Catholics, too, might worship?’

  ‘Yes. But if all faiths are free, is that so bad?’

  ‘Truly, Sire’ – she hesitated – ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Think on it, Dame Alice,’ he said and gave her a look which, at another time and place, might almost have charmed even her. ‘You may trust me.’

  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’l
l 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.