From the Forest

by Sara Maitland

  And still, on his best days, that is what he wants. He does not want to separate them. He still feels a tender pride in his wife and her sisters and their faithful if high-handed love for each other. He is delighted by their easy loyalty and their deep laughter. He loves their conviction that they are special and may ignore all the reasonable demands of other people if those should inconvenience them in any way. And because they give freely when they give, they give graciously – laughingly, they call it noblesse oblige and the people call it royalty and mostly love it when they do not hate it.

  Tonight is not one of his best days. He wakes alone in the huge canopied bed and feels a huge sad emptiness. He is lonely and he can never say so; if he tells her how much he has given up for her she will look at him with a haughty blankness – she will never be able to believe that it is more fun in the inn than in the castle, that the burdens of kingship are heavy and that he deserves some of her attention. Her eyes will narrow coldly and he will know she is remembering that he tricked her and betrayed her and got riches and kingship out of it. Briefly he thinks he will go down to the village and visit his witch woman, but that is less fun now he is a king and she gives herself to him with fear and self-interest instead of casual pleasure and laughter.

  But the bed is too wide for a man alone and he cannot get back to sleep. He decides he will go, again, and look at the princesses in their private place. He gets up, quietly, anxious not to rouse his servants who need their dreams to make him endurable to them; he lights a candle and goes to the chest he never opens, at the very bottom of which he has hidden his little cloak. He betrayed their secrets but kept his own – none of them to this day know how he tricked them, and although it is a long time since he used it, the cloak remains safely concealed. He feels a dark comfort in his stratagem: they keep themselves hidden from him, and now he will do the same by them.

  In the chest there is a heavy velvet and ermine gown of state which he never wears, and underneath it are the jacket and breeches from his soldiering days which he never wears. He lifts them all aside. He reaches in for the cloak which is wrapped in an old rag at the bottom and feels instead something different, something harder and smaller. He knows what it is before he sees it. Slowly, knowing and refusing to know, he brings his hand into the light of the candle and, as he knows he will, he sees that he is holding a little dancing slipper. It is made of soft cream-coloured silk and is embroidered with gold and silver leaves and tiny chips of diamond, but the sole is ragged, worn through and threadbare; it has been danced to pieces.

  She has been dancing again.

  There is a horror on him and his anger makes him briefly, hotly brave. He looks into the chest more directly, the candle held high, and he sees there are lots of pairs of shoes, all frayed and ruined, all danced to pieces. She has hidden them where she thinks he will not find them.

  In his rage he grabs the little cloak and flings it over his shoulders. Now he is invisible even to himself. He snatches up one of the dancing slippers, as evidence; he has always liked evidence, has gathered and used it to persuade himself as much as others. It vanishes into the aura of invisibility which wraps itself around him and, invisible, he storms through the castle, the old wound in his left leg aching at his pace.

  He flings open the door of their dormitory, hot with a wrath he believes at this moment to be righteous. She is a wife. She is a mother. She is a queen. She is pregnant, carrying his child – if it is his child. He will cry shame upon her and upon her sisters. He will summon all their husbands and expose their wanton ways. Their hoity-toity attitude and haughty indifference will do them no good. He will burn them on a pyre in the castle courtyard and smile inwardly while the people cheer. His witch woman had called them trollops and he should have listened to her.

  But the dormitory is silent, empty. Moonlight streams in the windows, bathing the room in its cold clear light. There is a chaos of cast-off clothing and tossed-about bedding, but it is all held in a silvery stillness. He is arrested at the doorway and stands leaning on its frame, his heart hushed by the beauty and peace of the long room. He is defeated.

  After a few moments he sees that where the fourth bed on the left-hand side, her bed, ought to be, there is a blank space. The bed has sunk down, folded away, to allow them access to the secret passage. He comes limping up the long room, slowly, and sits on the third bed and looks into the black pit. He can just see the top two or three steps, but he knows the narrow flight goes on down and down and down, dusty and cold.

  He will follow them, he thinks, he will catch them red handed and there will be no excuses, but he just sits there looking into the blackness.

  He knows that at the very bottom the stairwell will open out and there will be the forest of silver trees and golden trees and the stands of trees with diamond leaves, all lit by a different moon; and there will be the straight smooth road that leads to the lake and over the lake will be the palace on the island.

  He knows they will be all dressed up in silver and gold and diamonds, dancing with their dream princes; laughing and drinking and dancing, doing standing up what is better done lying down, and it will be so beautiful and they will be so beautiful that his heart will melt, as it melted before, and he will lose his anger in a silent enchantment and afterwards they will mock him for his weakness. So he just sits on the bed, sullen, wounded, and looks into the darkness of the pit.

  He takes off the little cloak and waits, turning her ruined slipper between his hands. He will, he thinks, wait until they come back. They can see him sitting here as they come up the staircase, footsore and weary, their dresses in rags, their slippers danced to pieces. They will come up the stairs exhausted but satisfied and then they can see him here sitting like a king on his throne and be, however briefly, afraid.

  He is the King, he thinks. He is her husband. It is both his right and his duty to bring them into line, to break their haughty spirit, to scatter their pride in the imagination of their hearts. He has earned this right and he has a duty to exercise it. For their own good. For the good of their children. For the good of the State. He practises a fine speech. He thinks it should begin, ‘Ho, Madam,’ which has a royal ring to it. ‘Ho, Madam Wife,’ would be even better, but he knows himself too well. He was never born to that kind of speech. He wants to say something quite different.

  ‘Trollops. Sluts. Grow up. You aren’t little girls any more – you don’t live in fairy land. What do you know of the real forest, you pampered bitches, of the real world? The trees aren’t made of silver and gold for most of us; the paths aren’t straight and paved. Men aren’t handsome princes free to dance all night; real men go out and they work; they get sweaty and tired and cross because that way they can just about hope to feed their children. Women don’t have fancy frocks to ruin, and hundreds of pairs of dainty silk slippers to dance to pieces; real women stay home and stay faithful because that way they can just about hope to feed their children. It does not always work: rain at haymaking, no rain at sowing-time, a wound in someone else’s war – and the wolf of hunger prowls at the door and the rats of destitution gnaw at the foundations. When real men and women turn to each other for sex and consolation, they don’t dance elegantly; they roll on their backs and get leaf mould in their hair.’

  That is the easy bit. He rolls the phrases around his head and is pleased with some of them. He eliminates several cruder and more vulgar insults that spring to mind, feeling that a certain kingly hauteur is called for. The next part is more difficult to gauge. How will he punish them? He will strip off their silken knickers and put each one of them over his knee and whip their naked bottoms. He will sit on his throne to do it. He will invite the whole court, yes, and the village too, to watch him. It gives him a strange dark pleasure to think of their humiliation. He will send them out as kitchen wenches to neighbouring castles – no, to merchants and millers and doctors and priests who will enjoy making royalty suffer. He will lock them up, each in a separate dungeon. He will have them
drowned like kittens for the adultery of their hearts. He will have them burned for witches. He . . .

  ‘Don’t,’ says a voice, ‘don’t do it. Go back to bed now and pretend you never knew.’

  He cries out in sudden terror and looks up and sees in the pale light of the moon that what he had taken to be a bundle of bedding on the last bed on the right-hand side is, in fact, the littlest princess. The one who had been once been the most beautiful of all, the one who had always known him and seen through him, whose shy heart was open to his. The one who has never married, the one whose beauty faded first, who is raddled now, whose hair is thin and dull and whose shoulder bones and ribs show through her too-pale skin. The one he loves.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Don’t hate her.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ he asks. ‘Why aren’t you with the others?’

  ‘I don’t go any more; it hurts too much. Joy hurts too much when it isn’t real. It isn’t real, you know, that forest, that dancing. It can’t harm you. Go back to bed now and let it be.’

  Her eyes are huge in her bony ruined face and they catch a corner of the moonlight. He knows that she is terribly sad and he knows why. He stands up and takes a step towards her.

  ‘Go back to bed,’ she says and he walks obediently to the door, then stops. He turns again to look at her, crouched in her corner, and suddenly she says, ‘Yes, you should have married me.’

  ‘I was afraid,’ he says slowly. ‘I was afraid of you. You knew who I was, you always knew. You were afraid of me. You were right to be afraid. I wasn’t good enough; I was just an old soldier with no right to marry the real princess. I was afraid of loving you and betraying you and hurting you.’

  ‘Well,’ she says without bitterness, ‘we got that wrong, didn’t we?’

  She does not say, ‘I love you.’ She does not need to.

  He leaves the dormitory and walks a short way up the stone-flagged corridor. Then realises he has left his little cloak behind. He stands still for a moment, turning the pretty, ruined dancing slipper in his hand. He goes back. She is still sitting up on her bed. He crosses the room and picks up the cloak. He puts it on, vanishes, takes it off, reappears and grins at her.

  Suddenly she laughs, a sweet birdlike sound; like a robin in the winter forest.

  Slowly he says, ‘If it isn’t real . . . that forest, that palace, those princes . . . if it isn’t real, then perhaps we could go dancing with the others. Just sometimes. Just for fun. I could wear this cloak and no one would ever know. If it isn’t real, if it’s just a fairy story.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘yes, that would be fun.’ She laughs again and he laughs too.

  12

  February

  Knockman Wood

  February is the bottom of the year, the dead time. The winter has scoured the land; it looks naked and clean. The dark still comes early and the nights are long and cold.

  Although, for once, it is not raining, there is a sharp wet wind carrying mist and mizzle, raw on my face; there was a frost last night and there is still a skim of ice on the edges of puddles and ruts; I am glad of gloves, woolly hat and gaiters. I am stomping across a small bleak plain which was once wood pasture; there are still some fine old oaks, a few ashes with their hard black buds like spearheads, and some scrubby hawthorn; away to the east there are even some cows pasturing. But there are more tree stumps, more dead bracken and more reedy bog than there should be and the trees are now far too widely spaced. In summer this is a gloriously rich habitat full of wild flowers and butterflies, but now it is grey and depressing. The track is waterlogged, and to compensate, other walkers have, in places, diverged from it and cut new waterlogged little paths, a wider and wider smear of mud alongside the main track. It is all pretty bleak.

  One reason it feels bleak is that this is a woodland habitat lost more to neglect, to underuse, than to aggressive deforestation or enclosure. In that sense it perfectly illustrates the symbiotic relationship between forests and people. If you overgraze open woodland the bracken gets in; once that has established itself you no longer have useable wood pasture because neither sheep nor cows eat bracken, unless desperate. Bracken, that perfectly natural ‘wild’ plant, is the enemy of woodland: once established, bracken takes over aggressively, reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth and preventing flowers and seedling trees from germinating and developing, reducing biodiversity and renewal – and it is extremely difficult to get out. Bracken, in this sense, is like deer; without management, they will both destroy woodland and prevent its regeneration. Our relationship with the woodlands is so ancient and so complex that we cannot go back to the beginning again – the conditions of ‘the beginning’ no longer exist.

  Of course, one of the advantages of walking in February is that there are no nettles, and not much visible bracken either. Gently the plain begins to rise, and so does my mood. Along the slope ahead of me there is the loveliest high, undulating dry stone wall. Even at first sight there is something strange about this wall; it curves graciously like a wave, not following any natural line or geological feature. It is too beautiful, too well made and far too tall to be an ordinary farm dyke. And it is not – it was constructed in 1824 as the boundary to a deer park. In a moment of sublime romanticism the then owner not only made a brand new deer park, he stocked it with fallow deer, not native to these parts. Not ordinary fallow deer either, for some of them were white. Some of them still are. I have seen white deer in the woods beyond the wall. Each time I see one, despite knowing they are ‘artificial’, I am re-enchanted – they seem so much the creatures of dreams, of medieval romance and of fairy stories. In several stories deer, often magical, lead princes to their true loves. In ‘Brother and Sister’ the children run away from their cruel stepmother and get lost in the forest, where the boy is transformed into a deer – although he can still speak. Later they find a little house and live there, with the sister taking tender care of her deer-brother. A royal hunt comes to the forest and the deer-boy cannot resist his impulse to join in the sport.1 He is hunted and wounded by the King, who then follows him to the cottage and falls in love with the sister. They go to the King’s palace and eventually, despite further machinations from the stepmother, the spell is broken and the boy restored. I love this story, partly because there is an unusual gentleness in the bond between the siblings. The girl cares for him very tenderly:Every morning she went out and gathered roots, berries and nuts for herself, and for the fawn she brought back tender grass, which he ate out of her hand. This made him content and he would romp around her in a playful fashion. At night when the sister was tired and had said her prayers, she would lay her head on the back of the fawn. That was her pillow, and she would fall into a sweet sleep.

  It is as though the bossy busy big sister needs the little brother in an animal form before she can express her true affection – no other pair of siblings in the tales, and there are lots of them, demonstrate this intimate physical affection.2

  I am not looking for deer today.

  I am going in search of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

  As it happens, I know where it is, unlike the first time, when I found it entirely by chance. On the Ordnance Survey map it is called Garlies Castle; it was built in 1500 on the site of an even older castle and abandoned in the early nineteenth century. But on a raw February day, in the quiet of the winter forest, it is Sleeping Beauty’s palace. It is deep in the woods above me, and they are perfect woods for the story. They are ancient oak wood inter-planted in the early nineteenth century with beeches. The same owner who built the wall inserted these grander trees around his ruined castle and all along the southern boundary of his deer park, where they could be viewed from the new house he built to replace the castle. Now their fine-fingered winter twigs and massive grey trunks are just passing maturity and make a wonderful visual contrast to the oaks.3

  Garlies Castle is at the northern end of the Knockman Wood, a stretch of ancient woodland which demonstrates a surpris
ing number of the features of forest history that I have been exploring and at the same time is also part of a project which offers some vision of a way forward for our ancient forests.

  The Knockman Wood is in the Cree Valley, a small river system that drains off the high Galloway Hills. Either side of the river, and particularly on its eastern bank, the land rises sharply into open moor and high hills Although the area was inhabited from the prehistoric period, it was never sufficiently fertile to justify the effort of clearing the valley sides of trees above the water meadows. A wet climate, little agricultural disturbance, steep slopes and an acidic soil is the perfect terrain for oak forest, and the Cree Valley maintained a significant amount of semi-natural forest for an unusually long time.

  But in the twentieth century Galloway, as I have already mentioned, became one of the areas of the country most heavily affected by the development of plantation forestry. Nonetheless, for an assortment of reasons – the terrain was too rough, steep or wet; the woods were particularly remarkable or historic; just on the whim of individual landowners – small patches of ancient wood escaped the ‘locust years’. These smaller woods were often adjacent to or even within the plantation forest, awkward little parcels of loveliness. Inevitably such a patchwork has a range of owners and contains some oddities,4 but presently all of them are managed by the Cree Valley Community Woodlands Trust (CVCWT), whose aim is to ‘develop a Forest Habitat Network that has at its core the River Cree, with riparian corridors . . . from source to sea’.5 The jewel in its crown is the glorious Buchan Wood higher up at Loch Trool, a fragment that, like Staverton and Ballochbuie, is as near as we have to untouched natural woodland.6 The CVCWT owns none of these woods, it just manages them. In the fairy stories we have seen that it is the people who work in the forests, not the distant kings who own them, who turn out to be the ‘good’ characters; so this feels like a promising omen.