The Forest

by Edward Rutherfurd

  The case to answer was straightforward. Her mother had taken in three men for the night. One, poor Dunne, was a comparative nonentity; Hicks the preacher was accused, but not yet convicted of treason; the third, Nelthorpe, had been outlawed.

  ‘The case is dangerous,’ Peter had explained, ‘because it’s treason. If you help a felon who’s running away you are an accessory after the fact; but you are not held to be guilty of the felon’s crime. With high treason, however, the case is different. If you give any aid to a known traitor you, too, are guilty of treason. That’s your mother’s danger. However,’ he had continued, ‘the prosecutor will have to show that she knew these men were part of Monmouth’s rebellion. Nelthorpe she’d never seen before and she knew nothing about him. Furthermore, he was brought by a man known to be a reputable minister, namely Hicks. So,’ he expounded, ‘she takes in a respectable dissenter and a friend for the night – the sort of thing she’s often done before. Does she know they’re traitors? No. Unless someone can prove she had knowledge, most juries would give her the benefit of the doubt.’ He smiled. ‘I say she has committed no crime.’

  ‘As soon as she is acquitted, Peter,’ Betty had said, ‘I think we should celebrate.’

  He had asked her to marry him that very first night he had arrived in the Forest and, had it not been for the arrest, they would have spoken to Dame Alice about it the next morning. Since then, while the family was turned upside down, she had asked him not to speak of it; but as soon as this terrible business was over and things returned to normal she intended to tell her mother and get married as quickly as possible. ‘By Christmas,’ she had indicated.

  For the next few hours she must put Peter out of her mind, though. She must see her mother safely acquitted.

  It was late afternoon when the trial began.

  The business started blandly enough. Witnesses said they had seen Hicks the minister with Monmouth’s troops. Dunne the baker was called, to describe how he had gone upon the Saturday and Tuesday to Moyles Court. But then something strange occurred. Instead of interrogating Dunne, the prosecutor suddenly said he wished Judge Jeffreys to question Dunne himself. Betty looked at Peter, who only shrugged with surprise.

  At first Judge Jeffreys seemed rather gentle. His broad, rather skull-like face bent forward, he called Dunne ‘Friend’ and reminded him that he must take great care to tell the truth. Dunne, his watery blue eyes looking hopeful, began his tale and got one sentence out.

  But then, at once, Judge Jeffreys interrupted. ‘Take care, Friend. Begin again. When do you say you first set out?’ Another sentence or two and another interruption. ‘Sayest thou so? I know more than you think. How did you find Moyles Court?’

  ‘With the help of a guide named Thomas.’

  ‘Where is he? Let him stand up.’

  To Betty’s astonishment, William Furzey stood up. So this was the mysterious Thomas. But what did it mean?

  Judge Jeffreys was in full flood, now, pausing for nothing. Dunne was asked a question, then immediately cross-questioned. Within minutes it was clear he was getting confused. Trying not to incriminate Furzey, whom he had not yet understood to be the one who gave him away, he foolishly said that Furzey had not brought them to Moyles Court the second time and was soon lost in a quagmire of contradictions.

  ‘Alack-a-day!’ cried Jeffreys with cruel sarcasm. ‘Come, refresh your memory a little.’ As the unhappy baker’s watery eyes grew desperate, it seemed to Betty that the judge was like a cat, playing with a mouse. Increasingly confused, Dunne contradicted a tiny detail of something he had said before.

  Jeffreys pounced. ‘Wretch!’ His voice thundered so that the whole courtroom seemed to shudder. ‘Dost thou think the God of heaven not to be a God of truth? ’Tis only His mercy that He does not immediately strike thee into hell! Jesus God!’ And for two entire minutes, glowering at the poor baker, the most powerful judge in the kingdom, with life and death in his hands, raved and bellowed at him until he was shaking so much it was obvious that nothing more could be got from him.

  Betty herself was white. She glanced at Peter.

  His mouth was open in astonishment. But he did lean down and whisper in her ear: ‘He still has no evidence that could convict.’

  Furzey was called, but only briefly, to relate what he saw. One thing he said seemed to interest Jeffreys.

  ‘You say Dunne told you that Dame Alice asked him if you knew what business he had come upon?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  It was poor Dunne’s turn to be questioned again – if that was what the process could be called. For the baker was now in a state of such fear and confusion that he was hardly coherent. What was the business, demanded Jeffreys. What business? The baker looked uncertain. Again and again the judge pounded, shouted, cursed. Dunne stuttered, finally fell silent. For long minutes he seemed to fall into a kind of trance.

  The light from the windows was dimmer now, the great hall shadowy. A clerk lit a candle.

  Then at last Dunne seemed to recover a little. ‘The business, my Lord?’

  ‘Blessed God! You villain. Yes. The business.’

  ‘It was that Mr Hicks was a dissenter.’

  ‘That is all?’

  ‘Yes, My Lord. There is nothing more.’

  Betty felt Peter touch her arm. ‘Our friend Dunne has beaten this judge,’ he whispered.

  But not, it seemed, without a fight.

  ‘Liar! You think you can banter me with such sham stuff as this?’ He turned to the clerk. ‘Bring that candle. Hold the candle to his brazen face.’

  And poor Dunne, quaking again, cried out: ‘My Lord, tell me what you would have me say, for I am cluttered out of my senses.’

  Betty watched in horror. This was not a court of law. It was an interrogation. What would they do next? Torture the baker in public? She looked across at her mother.

  And looked again, in astonishment.

  For in the midst of all this, Dame Alice had fallen asleep.

  Not asleep. Not really. But Alice had lived too long, seen too much. She remembered the Civil War, the trial of King Charles, so many other trials, her husband’s fate. She knew already which way this business must end.

  She would not show her fear. She was afraid. She wanted to tremble; she could have screamed at the terrible, cruel stupidity of it all. But there was no point. She already knew it and she would not give them the satisfaction of seeing her fear. So she closed her eyes.

  They brought Colonel Penruddock on next. He was brief and factual. He said how he’d found the men hiding. He also said that Furzey had told him Dunne had hinted that the men were probably rebels. So they hauled the baker on to the stand again and asked him what he meant. But he stuttered now so hopelessly that he didn’t even make sense. They had nothing.

  They called one of the troopers who had been in the house making the arrests and who declared that the men were obviously rebels; but this testimony was so useless that even the judge soon waved him away.

  But now, it seemed to Dame Alice, that she had a small opportunity. Pretending to wake, she stared at the trooper and then called out: ‘Why, My Lord, this is the man who stole my best linen.’

  But it did no good. Jeffreys passed rapidly on to other matters until at last he came to Alice: what, he demanded contemptuously, had she to say for herself?

  It was simple enough. She told him she’d stayed in London throughout Monmouth’s rebellion. He interrupted this statement twice. She had no quarrel with the king. He treated this with contempt. She had no idea that her visitors were involved in the rebellion. She even produced a witness who swore that Nelthorpe the outlaw had never said his name.

  But Judge Jeffreys knew how to deal with that. ‘We have heard enough,’ he cried. ‘Send this witness away.’ He turned savagely back to Alice. ‘Have you more witnesses to call?’

  ‘No, My Lord.’

  ‘Very well.’ He turned to the jury. ‘Gentlemen of the jury,’ he began.

 
‘There is, My Lord, one point of law,’ Alice now interrupted.

  ‘Silence!’ he cried. ‘Too late.’

  There was, quite clearly, no valid case against her. This did not slow Judge Jeffreys in his flow. He reminded the jury that the Lisles were regicides, that dissenters were natural criminals, that Monmouth’s rebellion was horrible and that Monmouth’s morals were unclean. That this was all both nonsense and irrelevant was not, to the judge, important.

  Only at the end of his tirade did one of the jurymen ask a question. ‘Pray, My Lord,’ he desired to know, ‘is it a crime to receive Hicks the preacher if he has not yet been convicted, but only accused of treason?’

  ‘A vital point of law,’ Peter whispered to Betty.

  Indeed, it was the only point of law raised in the entire trial. For under English law you could not be accused as an accessory when the person you helped had merely been accused, but not convicted, of treason. Clearly this was only right, since otherwise an accessory might be sentenced for helping a man who was afterwards judged to be innocent. As Hicks was still awaiting trial, he wasn’t yet a traitor. The case against Alice, feeble as it already was, would completely fall to the ground.

  The Lord Chief Justice saw the trap. ‘It is all the same,’ he blandly declared. And the court was silent.

  ‘That’s a lie,’ Peter whispered. ‘That’s not the law.’

  ‘Say something,’ Betty whispered back.

  But the four judges beside Jeffreys, and the lawyers and the clerks, were all silent.

  The jury returned in half an hour. They said she was not guilty.

  Judge Jeffreys refused to accept their verdict and sent them away again. They came back a second time and said she was not guilty. He sent them off again. A third time they came and said the same.

  And now Judge Jeffreys swore an oath. ‘Villains,’ he cried, ‘do you dare to mock this court? Do you not understand I can attaint every one of you for treason too?’

  They came back once more after that and found her guilty.

  Then Judge Jeffreys sentenced her to burn.

  The room was not large, but it was clean and light. The bars on the window were not too noticeable. It was still morning. They could be grateful for these small mercies at least.

  Dame Alice was not to be burned. The bishop and clergy of Winchester had appealed at once to the king. They did not want such a thing done in their cathedral city. Quite apart from anything, as news of the outrageous trial spread through the city and across the Forest, they were afraid of a riot. Today, then, in the afternoon, Dame Alice Lisle was to have her head struck off.

  There were only Betty and Tryphena with her now. The others had all gone: children and grandchildren, she had said goodbye to them all. The room was quiet.

  Peter was in London. Betty had not spoken of him to her mother and, strangely, she had not thought of him so much. Perhaps, if they had known each other longer, she might have wanted him there to support her. But instead, she had been so drawn into her own family and into the terrible business in hand that he had seemed to drift away in her mind, like a visitor after whose departure the door has been closed.

  ‘Peter Albion.’ It was her mother who said the words and Betty looked at her in surprise. Dame Alice smiled. ‘I did not want to speak of him with the others present.’ She looked at Betty thoughtfully. ‘Do you still want to marry him?’

  She had never actually confessed that she did, but there was no time for such prevarications now. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied honestly.

  Her mother nodded slowly. Tryphena, her narrow face looking up suddenly, seemed about to say something but Alice cut in ahead. ‘I think better of him than I did,’ she said firmly. ‘This trial has been very good for him.’

  ‘But it was a mockery. An outrage. It wasn’t justice at all,’ Tryphena interjected.

  ‘That’s why it was so good for him,’ said Alice evenly. ‘I thought him rather arrogant. Now he has seen that even the law may be bent to necessity. He is humbler.’

  ‘There is’ – Betty hesitated, glanced at her mother and her sister and gave a small shrug – ‘something else.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  So Betty explained about the moment during the trial when Jeffreys had so flagrantly misled the jury, and how Peter had told her the judge had lied. ‘It wasn’t the law. And I whispered that he should say something.’

  ‘You wanted him to stand up and contradict the judge?’

  ‘Well …’ It was hard to say quite, but she knew that she had thought about it afterwards and somehow his conduct had seemed … unsatisfactory.

  ‘The other judges said nothing. The lawyers said nothing. You said nothing,’ her mother reminded her wryly.

  ‘I know. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, child. What you mean is that the man who wants to marry you proved to be less than perfect. He decided not to be heroic.’ She shook her head and sighed. ‘Do not fall into the trap of looking for a perfect husband. Women of your age often do. You’ll never find him. Consider also, my child, if a husband were perfect, you’d have to be perfect too.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘You saw a moment of cowardice?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘Which I call discretion.’

  ‘I know. But …’ Betty was not sure how to explain it, the silence that had fallen upon Peter at that moment in the court. It was not so much what he had done as the insight she had suddenly gained, just then, for the first time, of his inner nature. There was a wariness there, a calculation, a readiness, behind all his talk, to make deep compromises. ‘It was something’, she said uncertainly, ‘in his nature …’

  ‘Thank God.’ Alice sighed. ‘Perhaps he will survive.’

  ‘But my father did not compromise. He did what was right.’

  ‘Against my wishes. To further his own ambition. And your father was on the winning side. That makes men bold. Until, of course, he lost and had to run away.’

  ‘Yet what of right and wrong, Mother? Are they not important?’

  ‘Oh, yes, child. Of course they are. It’s not in doubt. But there is something else equally important. As I get older, I wonder if it is not more so.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘God’s gift to Solomon, Betty. Wisdom.’

  ‘Ah. I see.’

  ‘Don’t marry Peter unless you both have a little wisdom.’ Her mother smiled at her very sweetly. ‘You’ll be surprised how easy it is to be good if you are wise.’

  ‘You must be very wise, Mother.’

  Alice laughed quietly. ‘How fortunate, when I’m to lose my head this afternoon.’

  None of them said anything after that for a little while, each sitting silently with her thoughts.

  Finally, it was neither Betty nor her mother, but Tryphena who spoke. ‘They say’, she said thoughtfully, ‘that after a head is severed, life does not instantly depart; but the head remains conscious for a moment or two. It may blink or even try to speak.’

  This was greeted with silence.

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ Alice said softly, after a pause. ‘You are a great comfort to me.’

  A further short silence ensued before Alice slowly got up. ‘I am ready to end my life now, my dear children, for I have nothing more to say. Let me embrace you, then you should go. I find I am a little tired.’

  They had set up the scaffold in Winchester’s old market place. Half the population of the city had gathered there and many from the Forest too. The Prides were there. So were the two Furzey brothers, although the Prides entirely ignored them.

  She looked pale and smaller than the crowd had imagined when they brought her out. Her hair, just a few sad strands of red remaining in the grey, had been scooped up on top of her head and tied, leaving her bare neck looking thin and rather scrawny. There was to be no address on this occasion for she had not wished to make one.

  The fact was that Alice was now in something of a daze. A few minutes before,
with a large trooper on each side towering above her, she had known great fear. But now, like an animal which, at the end of a long chase, knows that it can do no more, and that the desperate game is up, she had yielded finally to resignation. She felt limp and numb, and she wanted only to get it over.

  She scarcely saw the faces as they led her out. She didn’t see Betty, nor the Prides, nor the Furzeys. She didn’t see, some way off, Thomas Penruddock with a sad, grave face, sitting on his horse.

  She saw the block as they helped her kneel down beside it, but scarcely took note of the axe. She saw the wooden boards, clumsily nailed, just below the block as they stretched out her neck upon it. And she realized that there would be a mighty bite, a blow that would crunch through her neck bones as the axe fell.

  The axe fell and she was conscious of the huge thud.

  It must have been a summer day, as they walked along the lane and turned down the track into the wood. The sun was slanting through the light-green lattice of the canopy; the saplings spread their leaves like trails of vapour through the underwood; birds were singing. She was so pleased that she had started to skip; and her father was holding her hand.

  ALBION PARK

  1794

  There could be no doubt, no doubt of it at all: great things were afoot in Lymington nowadays – indeed, in the whole Forest.

  ‘And when you think,’ said Mrs Grockleton to her husband, ‘when you think of Mr Morant at Brockenhurst Park with I don’t know how many thousands a year and Mr Drummond now at Cadland, and Miss …’ For a moment her memory failed her.

  ‘Miss Albion?’

  ‘Why, yes, to be sure, Miss Albion, who must have a large inheritance …’

  It was no doubt part of the divine plan that, having been endowed with an insatiable desire to rise in society, Mrs Grockleton had also been created absent-minded. Only the week before, showing her children to a visiting clergyman, she had told him there were five, pointing them out by name, until her husband had gently reminded her that there were six, causing her to exclaim: ‘Why so there are, indeed! Here’s dear little Johnnie. I had quite forgot him.’