BEAULIEU

1294

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.

And then there had been Beaulieu.

If King John was called bad, it was not only because he lost all his wars and quarrelled with his barons. Worse still, he had insulted the Pope and caused England to be placed under a Papal Interdict. For years there were no church services in the land. No wonder the churchmen and monks hated him – and the monks wrote all the history. As far as they were concerned he had only done one good deed in his life: he had founded Beaulieu.

It was his sole religious foundation. Why did he do it? A good act by a bad man? In monkish chronicles such complexity was usually frowned upon. You were either good or bad. It was generally agreed that he must have done it to pay for some particularly awful deed. One legend even had it that he had ordered some monks to be trampled under his horses’ feet and had been haunted afterwards by a dream.

Whatever the reason, in the Year of Our Lord 1204, King John founded Beaulieu, a monastery of the order of Cistercians, or white monks as they were known, endowing it first with a rich manor in Oxfordshire and then with a great tract of land down in the eastern half of the New Forest – which included, by chance, the very place where his great-great-uncle Rufus had been slain a century before. In the ninety years since its foundation, the abbey had received further grants both from John’s pious son, Henry III, and the present king, mighty King Edward I, who had also been a loyal friend. Thanks to all this beneficence, the abbey was not only rich: small groups of its expanding body of monks had even gone out to start up little daughter houses in other places; one, Newenham, even lay seventy miles away, down the south-west coast in Devon. The abbey was both blessed and successful.

The abbot sighed, closed the book, carried it over to a large strong box in which he placed it and carefully locked the box.

He had made a mistake. The last abbot’s judgement, which he had so foolishly ignored, was right. The man’s character was clear: he was flawed and possibly dangerous.

‘So why did I appoint him?’ he murmured. Had he done it as a sort of penance? Perhaps. He had told himself that the man deserved a chance, that he had earned the position, that it was up to him as abbot – with prayer and the grace of God, of course – to make it work. As for his crime? It was in the book. It was long ago. God is merciful.

He glanced out through the open window. It was a beautiful day. Then his eyes fell on a pair of figures, walking quietly together in conversation. At the sight of these his face relaxed.

Brother Adam. There was a very different type. One of the best. He smiled. It was time to go outside. He unbolted the door.

Brother Adam was in a playful mood. As he sometimes did when he was pacing, he had pulled out the little wooden crucifix that hung on a cord round his neck, under his hair shirt, and was thoughtfully fingering it. His mother had given it to him when he first entered the order. She said she had got it from a man who had been to the Holy Land. It was carved from the wood of a cedar of Lebanon. He was enjoying the fact that the afternoon sun was gently warming his bald head. He had gone bald, and grey, by the time he was thirty. But this had not made him look old. Thirty-five, now, his finely cut, even features gave him a look of almost youthful intelligence, while one could sense that, under the monk’s habit, his thick, muscular body exuded a sense of physical power.

He was also quietly enjoying the business in hand, which was, as they paced up and down between two beds of vegetables, to inculcate, in the kindest way, some much-needed common sense into the young novice who walked respectfully beside him.

People often came to Brother Adam for advice, because he was calm and clever, yet always approachable. He never offered advice unless asked – he was far too shrewd to do that – but it might have been noticed that whatever the problem, after a troubled person had discussed it with Brother Adam for a while, that person nearly always started to laugh, and usually went away smiling.

‘Don’t you ever rebuke people?’ the abbot had once asked him.

‘Oh, no,’ he had replied with a twinkle. ‘That’s what abbots are for.’

The present talk, however, was not entirely comforting. Nor was it meant to be. Brother Adam had given it before. He called it his ‘Truth about Monks’ catechism.

‘Why’, he had asked the novice, ‘do men come to live in a monastery?’

‘To serve God, Brother Adam.’

‘But why in a monastery?’

‘To escape from the sinful world.’

‘Ah.’ Brother Adam gazed around the abbey precincts. ‘A safe haven. Like the Garden of Eden?’

In a way it was. The site the monks had chosen was delightful. Parallel to the great inlet from the Solent water that lay to the east of the Forest a small river ran down, forming a small coastal inlet, about three miles long, of its own. At the head of this inlet, where King John had kept a modest hunting lodge, the monks had laid out their great walled inclosure. It was modelled on the order’s parent house in Burgundy. Dominating everything was the abbey church – a large, early Gothic structure with a squat, square tower over the central crossing. Though simple, the building was handsome, and made of stone. There was no stone in the Forest; some of it had been brought across the Solent water from the Isle of Wight; some, like the best stone in the Tower of London, from Normandy; and the pillars were made of the same dark Purbeck marble, from along the south coast, as had been used in the huge new cathedral up at Sarum. The monks were particularly proud of their church’s floor, paved with decorative tiles they had painstakingly made themselves. Beside the church was the cloister; on its southern side the various quarters of the choir monks; along the whole of its western side the huge, barn-like domus conversorum – the house where the lay brothers ate and slept.

The walled inclosure also contained the abbot’s house, numerous workshops, a pair of fish ponds and an outer gatehouse where the poor were fed. A new and grander inner gatehouse had also just been begun.

Outside the wall lay the inlet and a small mill. Above the mill-race was a large pond surrounded by banks of silvery rushes. Beyond that, on the western side, some fields sloped up a small rise, from which there opened out a magnificent panorama: to the north mostly wood and heath; and to the south the rich, marshy land, which the monks had already partly drained to produce several fine farms, and which stretched down to the Solent water, with the long hump of the Isle of Wight lying like a friendly guardian just beyond. The entire estate, woodland, open heath and farmland, extended to some eight thousand acres; and since the boundary was marked by an earthwork ditch and fence, the monks referred not to the walled abbey inclosure, but to the eight-thousand-acre estate itself as the ‘Great Close’.

Bellus Locus, the abbey was called in Latin – the Beautiful Place; in Norman French: Beau Lieu. But the forest people did not speak French, so they pronounced it Boolee, or Bewley. And before long the monks were doing so, too. Rich, tranquil haven that it was, the Great Close of Beaulieu might well have been mistaken for the Garden of Eden.

‘One is secure here, of course,’ Brother Adam remarked pleasantly. ‘We are clothed and fed. We have few cares. So tell me’ – he suddenly rounded on the novice – ‘now that you have had the chance to observe us for several months, what do you think is the most important quality for a monk to possess?’

‘A desire to serve God. I think,’ the boy said. ‘A great religious passion.’

‘Really? Oh, dear. I don’t agree at all.’

‘You don’t?’ The boy looked confused.

‘Let me tell you something,’ Brother Adam cheerfully explained. ‘The first day you pass from your novitiate and become a monk, you will take your place as the most junior among us, next to the monk who was the last to arrive before you. After a time there will be another new monk, who will be placed below you. For every meal and every service you will always sit in the same position between those two monks – every day, every night, year in, year out; and unless one of you leaves for another monastery, or becomes abbot or prior, you will stay together, like that, for the rest of your lives.

‘Think about it. One of your companions has an irritating habit of scratching himself or sings out of tune, always; the other dribbles when he eats; he also has bad breath. And there they are, one each side of you. For ever.’ He paused and beamed at the novice. ‘That’s monastic life,’ he said amiably.

‘But monks live for God,’ the novice protested.

‘And they are also ordinary human beings – no more, no less. That,’ Brother Adam added gently, ‘is why we need God’s grace.’

‘I thought’, the novice said honestly, ‘you were going to be more inspiring.’

‘I know.’

The novice was silent. He was twenty.

‘The most important qualities a monk needs,’ Brother Adam went on, ‘are tolerance and a sense of humour.’ He watched the young man. ‘But these are both gifts of God,’ he added, to comfort him.

The last part of this conversation had been quietly observed. The abbot had actually intended to join them, since he always enjoyed Brother Adam’s company; and he had been secretly irritated when, just as he got outside, the prior had appeared at his elbow. Courtesies must be observed, though. As the prior murmured at his side, the abbot eyed him from time to time, bleakly.

John of Grockleton had been prior for a year now. Like most of his ilk, he was going nowhere.

The position of prior in a monastery is not without honour. This is, after all, the monk whom the abbot has chosen to be his deputy. But that is all. If the abbot is away he is in charge – but only on a day-to-day basis. All major decisions, even the assignment of the monks’ tasks, must await the abbot’s return. The prior is the workhorse, the abbot is the leader. Abbots have charisma; their deputies do not. Abbots solve problems; priors report them. Priors seldom become abbots.

John of Grockleton: properly speaking, he was just Brother John, but somehow his original name, Grockleton, had always been appended. Where the devil was Grockleton anyway? The abbot couldn’t remember. In the north, perhaps. He didn’t really care. Prior John of Grockleton was nothing much to look at. He must have been quite tall once, before the curving of his spine caused him to stoop. His thin black hair had once been thick. But despite these infirmities, the prior still had plenty of life left in him. He’ll outlive me I’m sure, the abbot thought.

If only it weren’t for those hands. It always seemed to the abbot that they were like claws. He tried to correct himself. They were just hands. A bit bony, perhaps, a bit curved. But no worse than any other pair of hands belonging to one of God’s creatures. Except they were like claws.

‘I’m glad to see that our young novice is seeking instruction from Brother Adam,’ he remarked to the prior. ‘Beatus vir, qui non sequitur …’ Psalm One: Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly … Verse One.

‘Sed in lege Domine …’ the prior quietly murmured. But his delight is in the law of the Lord. Verse Two.

It was quite natural, this reference to the psalms in ordinary conversation. Even the lay brothers, who attended fewer services, did it. For in the constant monastic offices in the church that punctuated the daily life of every monk, from matins to vespers and compline, and even the night office for which you were wakened long after midnight, it was the psalms, in Latin of course, that the brothers chanted. They could get through all hundred and fifty in a week.

And all human life was in the Psalms. There was a phrase apposite to every occasion. Just as simple village folk would often converse in local sayings and proverbs, so it was natural for the monks to speak the psalms. These were the words they heard all the time.

‘Yes. The law of the Lord.’ The abbot nodded. ‘He has studied, of course, hasn’t he? At Oxford.’ Their order was not an intellectual one, but a dozen years ago there had been a move to send a few of the brightest monks to Oxford. Brother Adam had gone from Beaulieu.

‘Oxford.’ John of Grockleton said it with distaste. The abbot might approve of Oxford, but he didn’t. He knew the psalms by rote: that was enough. People like Brother Adam might think themselves superior. But although the monks at Oxford had been quartered well away from the university city itself, they were still sharing the worldly corruption of the place. They weren’t better than he was, they were worse.

‘One of these days, when I have gone,’ the abbot remarked, ‘Brother Adam would make a good abbot – don’t you think?’ And he looked at the prior as though he expected him to agree.

‘That will be after my time,’ Grockleton answered sourly.

‘Nonsense, my dear Brother John,’ the abbot said happily. ‘You’ll outlive us all.’

Why did he taunt the prior like this? With an inward sigh, the abbot awarded himself a penance. It’s the man’s stubborn refusal to recognize his own limitations that brings out the worst in me, he thought, and now it’s made me guilty of cruelty.

These reflections were abruptly cut short, however, by a series of cries from the outer gate. A moment later a figure came running towards them, followed by several anxious monks.

‘Father Abbot. Come quickly,’ cried the man, half out of breath.

‘Where, my son?’

‘To Sowley grange. There has been a murder.’

No one had followed him. Luke rested by a gorse brake, wondering what to do next. A mile away one of the abbey shepherds was tending his flock of sheep on the open heath, but the shepherd had not seen him.

Why had he done it? God knows he hadn’t meant to. It would never have happened if Brother Matthew hadn’t come. But that was no excuse. Especially when it was Brother Matthew – he winced to think of it, poor Brother Matthew lying in a pool of blood – who had put him, a humble lay brother, in charge of the grange in his absence.

The Cistercians were different from other monks. Nearly all monastic orders were based on the ancient Rule of St Benedict. And St Benedict’s model was clear: monks were to lead a communal life of constant prayer balanced by physical labour; and they must take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Obedience and even chastity, more or less, had usually been achieved. But poverty was always a problem. No matter how simply they began, monasteries always finished up rich. Their churches became grand, their life easy. Time and again there had been reformers. The most notable was the huge French order centred upon Cluny; but even the Cluniacs, eventually, had gone the same way and their place had been taken by a new order, spreading out from their parent house of Citeaux in Burgundy: the Cistercians.

There was no mistaking them. Known as the white monks, because they wore habits of simple, undyed wool, the Cistercians avoided the sinful world by choosing wild and lonely places for their monasteries. Operating through farmsteads, called granges, often miles out from the monastery, they were especially known for raising sheep. The Beaulieu monks raised thousands, grazing them not only over the Great Close but the open Forest too, where they were given grazing rights. And to ensure that they could devote the majority of their time to prayer they had a subsidiary category of lesser monks – the lay brothers – who took monastic vows and attended some of the services, but whose main occupation was to tend the sheep and work in the fields. Usually these were quite rustic, local fellows who, for one reason or another, were drawn to the religious atmosphere of the monastery or its security. Men such as Luke.

They had come the night before. Eight of them. With bows and hounds. There had been Roger Martell, a wild young aristocrat, and four of his friends; but the other three had been local men, ordinary fellows like himself. One of these had been his kinsman, Will atte Wood. He sighed. The trouble was, everyone was your cousin in the Forest.

If only he hadn’t been put in charge. Brother Matthew had been doing him a favour, of course. Sowley grange was an important place. As well as the usual livestock and arable farming, the monks there had charge of a huge pond stocked with fish. There was a deer park belonging to the abbey, too, at nearby Througham.

Brother Matthew had known the prior didn’t like Luke. By putting him in charge of the grange he had been giving Luke a chance to prove to the prior that he was reliable. But when young Martell and his friends arrived, demanding shelter for the night, it hadn’t been so easy for a simple man like Luke to refuse.

He knew they’d been poaching, of course. They even had a deer with them. It was a serious offence. The king no longer demanded your life or limb for killing his precious deer, but the fines could be heavy. By giving them shelter he was guilty of a crime too. So why had he done it? Had they threatened him? Martell had certainly cursed him and given him a look that frightened him. But the real reason, he knew in his heart, was when Will had nudged him and whispered: ‘Come on, Luke. I told them you were my cousin. Are you going to embarrass me?’

They’d eaten all the bread and a whole cheese. They didn’t think much of the beer. The best beer and the wine for guests was all at the abbey, not out there at a humble grange. In the morning they had gone.

There were only half a dozen lay brothers at the grange besides himself and as many hired labourers. But there was no need to say anything. They had all understood. The illegal visit would never be mentioned to anyone.

‘What shall we do about the missing cheese and beer?’ one of the lay brothers had ventured.

‘We’ll open the tap a fraction, spill some beer on the floor under it and say nothing. When someone notices they’ll think it leaked away. As for the cheese, I’ll say it must have been stolen.’

Perhaps it might have worked if Brother Matthew had not been so sharp-eyed and if he hadn’t decided to call at the grange only two days after his last visit. Bustling in shortly after midday, he quickly inspected the premises, noticed the leaking barrel of beer at once and summoned Luke.

‘It must have leaked since yesterday,’ Luke had begun, but got no further.

‘Nonsense. It was full. The tap was only just dripping. Anyway, it was sealed tight when I left. Someone’s been drinking it.’ He looked about. ‘There’s a whole cheese missing.’

‘It must have been stolen.’ It was no good. Luke needed to prepare himself for a lie and Brother Matthew had caught him off balance. The monk looked at him severely. And who knew what stupid story he might have started next if there had not begun, just then, a furious knocking at the door.

It was Martell. He nodded to the lay brethren. ‘We’re back, Luke. Need your help again.’ Then, glancing at Brother Matthew whom he had not yet deigned to notice, he casually asked: ‘And who the devil are you?’

Luke buried his face in his hands as he remembered the rest: the fury of Brother Matthew; his own humiliation; the terse order to the poachers to leave and their arrogant refusal. And then …

If only Brother Matthew had not lost his temper. First he had cursed him for being in league with the criminals. God knows, it was only natural that he should have thought so. He had threatened to tell the prior and have him thrown out of the monastery. In front of the other lay brothers. Witnesses. The two of them had been outside by then, confronting the poachers. Then Brother Matthew had told the others to bar the entrance. Martell had insolently put his foot in the door and the monk had lost his temper. Seeing a staff leaning against the wall, he had rushed to it, seized it and turned.

He had not meant to hurt Brother Matthew. Quite the reverse. There had been only one thought in his mind. If the monk struck Martell the young blood might kill him. There had been no time to think of more than that. Beside the staff there was a spade – a heavy wooden implement with a metal rim. Grabbing the spade he had swung it to break the blow just as Brother Matthew’s staff came down.

He had swung too hard. With a crash, the staff snapped back, the blade of the spade smashed through and bit into the monk’s head with an awful jarring thud. Then all hell seemed to break loose. The other lay brothers hurled themselves forward to tackle him, Martell and Will had gone for the lay brothers, and in the mêlée he had dropped the spade and run for his life.

One thing was certain. However the matter was explained, he would be blamed. He had let the poachers in; he had struck Brother Matthew; the prior hated him. If he wanted to keep his life he would have to run, or at least hide. It couldn’t be long before they came after him.

He wondered where to go.

Mary paused from scrubbing the pot for long enough to shake her head.

The problem, in essence, was simple enough. Or so she told herself. The problem was the pony.

John Pride reckoned it was his. And Tom Furzey said it wasn’t. That was it, really. You could say other things about it. By the time a week had passed, a lot of people had said a lot of things. But that didn’t alter the fact: Pride reckoned it was his and Furzey said it wasn’t.

To an impartial observer there was room for honest doubt. A pony would foal out on the Forest. As long as the foal was with its mother, you knew where you were; but if the mare died or the foal strayed – and such things happened – then you might find a spare foal wandering about and not know its owner. That was what had happened in this case. The foal had been found by Pride. At least, that was what he said. There was room for doubt.

It was a pretty thing, too. That was half the trouble. Though it was a typical New Forest pony – short and sturdy with a thick neck – there was something finely drawn, almost delicate in its face and it moved so daintily on its feet. The pony’s coat was an even chestnut brown all over, with a darker mane and tail.

‘Prettiest little pony I ever saw,’ her brother had told her and she didn’t disagree.

Mary and John Pride were born only a year apart. They had played together all their childhood. Dark, well-made, slim, free and independent spirits, no one could keep up with them when they went racing through the Forest. They would only slow down for their dreamy little brother. John had been a bit contemptuous when she had married Tom Furzey. Chubby Tom, with his round face and curly brown hair, had always seemed a bit dull. But they had known him all their lives; they all lived in Oakley. They didn’t mind him. Her marriage was just an extension of the family, really.

And she had been happy enough. Five pregnancies later, with three healthy young children living, she had grown plumper herself; but her dark-blue eyes were as striking as ever. If her thickset husband was sometimes surly and always unexciting, what did that matter when you were living with all your family in the Forest?

Until the pony. It was three weeks, now, since John Pride and Tom Furzey had stopped speaking. And it wasn’t only them. A thing like that couldn’t just be left. Things had been said and repeated. None of the Prides – and there were many – was speaking to any of the Furzeys – and there were no less – anywhere in the Forest. God knows how long it might go on. The pony was kept in John Pride’s cowshed. He couldn’t put it out on the Forest, of course, because one of the Furzeys would have captured it. So the little creature was kept there, like a knight awaiting ransom, and all the Forest watched to see what would happen next.

But for Mary the real trouble lay at home.

She wasn’t allowed to see her brother. John only lived a quarter of a mile away in the same hamlet, but it was now forbidden territory. A few days after the dispute began she had gone over, hardly thinking about it. By the time her surly husband came home, though, he had already been told. And he hadn’t liked it. Oh, he had made that very clear. From that day on, she wasn’t to speak to John: not as long as he had that pony.

What could she do? Tom Furzey was her husband. Even if she ignored his wishes and sneaked round to see John, Tom’s sister lived between them and she’d be sure to spot her and tell. Then there’d be another violent row and the children would see. It wasn’t worth the trouble. She had stayed away and John, of course, could not come to their house.

She went outside. The autumn afternoon was still warm. She glanced up, bleakly, at the blue sky. It looked metallic, threatening. She had never lived alone with her husband before.

She was still staring up at the woods nearby when she heard a whistle from the trees. She frowned. It was repeated. She went towards the sound and was greatly surprised, a few moments later, to see a familiar figure emerge from behind a tree.

It was her little brother Luke, from Beaulieu Abbey. And he looked frightened.

In the early morning mist Brother Adam did not notice the woman at first. Besides, his mind was elsewhere.

The events of the previous day had shaken the whole community. By the evening office of vespers everyone knew what had happened. It was not often that the monks wanted to talk. The Cistercians, although not a silent order, restrict the hours when conversation is permitted, but time expands in the long silences of a monastery and there is seldom any sense of urgency: one day is as good as another to exchange a piece of news. By the evening, however, everyone was dying to talk.

Brother Adam knew it must be discouraged. Excitement of this kind was not just a distraction: it was like a screen between oneself and God, filtering out the Holy Spirit. God was best heard in silence, seen in darkness. So he was glad when, after the night office of compline, the summum silencium, the rule of total silence, interposed itself until breakfast.

The night was a special time for Brother Adam. It always brought him solace. Occasionally he regretted what he had missed by entering the religious life, or yearned for the more bracing intellects he had known at Oxford. And, of course, there were times when he cursed the bell that tolled in the middle of the night, when one pulled on felt slippers and went down the cold stone steps into the shadowy abbey church. Yet even then, singing the psalms in the candlelight, knowing that outside the huge starry universe hung watchfully over the monastery, it seemed to Adam that he could feel the palpable presence of God. And the life of continuous prayer, he would reflect, built up a protective wall as solid as that of any cloister, making a quiet, empty space within oneself in which to receive the silent voice of the universe. So, for many years, Brother Adam had lived within his prayer walls and felt the presence of God in the night.

The mornings had been especially pleasant for him recently. A few months ago, feeling the need for a period of contemplation, he had asked the abbot to assign him light duties for a while and his request had been granted. After the dawn service of prime, and breakfast, which the choir monks ate in their frater and the lay brothers in their separate domus, he usually went for a solitary walk.

This morning had been delightful. An autumn mist shrouded the river. On the opposite bank the oak leaves in the trees looked golden. The swans seemed to liquify out of the mist, as though miraculously engendered by the surface of the water. And he had still, on his return, been so entranced by this image of God’s creation that he scarcely noticed the woman until he had almost reached the collection of poor folk waiting to receive their daily alms at the abbey gate.

She was a rather pleasant-looking woman: broad-faced, blue-eyed, Celtic, intelligent he guessed – obviously one of the Forest people. Perhaps he’d seen her before? She seemed to be hoping to talk to someone, although her eyes watched him cautiously. Fine eyes.

‘Yes, my child?’

‘Oh, Brother. They say Brother Matthew has been killed. My husband works for the abbey at harvest. Brother Matthew was always so kind. We wondered …’ She trailed off, looking anxious.

Brother Adam frowned. Probably the whole Forest would have heard something about yesterday by now. Besides the lay brothers, the abbey gave casual employment to many Forest people. No doubt kindly Brother Matthew was well liked. His frown was caused only by the memory of the incident impinging on his peace. How selfish of him. He smiled instead. ‘Brother Matthew lives, my child.’ The first reports of the incident, as usual, had been garbled. Brother Matthew had taken a very nasty knock and lost much blood, but thank God he was alive, in the abbey’s infirmary and had already taken a little broth.

Her relief was so palpable that he was touched. How blessed that this peasant woman should care so deeply about the monk.

‘And those who did this?’

Ah. He understood. The religious houses had a name for protecting their own people from justice and it was resented. Well, he could reassure her on that score.

The abbot had been furious. There had been an incident like this before, about fifteen years ago: a huge party of poachers; a strong suspicion that the lay brothers in one of the granges had been party to the business. That, together with the prior’s bad report of Luke, had done it. ‘The lay brother who struck him will get no protection from the abbey,’ he assured her. ‘The Forest courts will deal with him.’

She nodded quietly, then looked thoughtful. ‘Yet might it have been an accident?’ she asked. ‘If the lay brother repents, wouldn’t they show mercy?’

‘You are right to be cautious in judging,’ he said. ‘And mercy is God’s grace.’ What a good woman she was. She feared for the monk, yet thought with compassion of his assailant. ‘But we must all accept righteous punishment for our transgressions.’ He looked stern. ‘You know the fellow has run away?’ She seemed to shake her head. ‘He will be caught.’ The steward of the Forest had been informed by the abbot that morning. ‘I believe they are taking out the hounds.’

With a kindly nod he left her. And poor Mary, her heart pounding, ran all the way back across the heath to the place where, last night, she had hidden her brother Luke.

Tom Furzey clenched his fists. They’d get what was coming to them now. Already he could hear the hounds in the distance. He was not a bad man. But bad things had been happening to him recently. Sometimes he hardly knew what to think.

The Prides had always thought he was a bit slow. He knew that. But everything had been so friendly and easy before. They were all part of the Forest: all family, so to speak. That pony, though – that had been a shock. If John Pride could just casually take a pony foaled by his, Tom Furzey’s, own mare, with not so much as a by-your-leave: what sort of brother-in-law was that? He despises me, Tom thought, and now I know it.

It was strange. The first day he couldn’t quite believe it had happened, even with the foal in Pride’s pen, before his very eyes. Then, when challenged, Pride had just laughed at him.

And then Tom had called him a thief. In front of the others. Well, he was, wasn’t he? Things had snowballed after that.

But Mary: that was another matter. That first day, after she knew what had passed between him and her brother, she had gone round to Pride’s house as friendly as you like. ‘Didn’t you tell him to give the pony back?’ he had stormed. But she had just looked blank. Never even thought of it. ‘So whose side are you on, then?’ he had cried. The fact was, after years of marriage, she hadn’t really given him a thought. That was the hurtful truth of it. Poor old Tom, a useful husband for Mary: that’s all I am to the Prides, he reckoned.

But whatever she thought of him, she owed him respect as head of their family. What sort of example did it set the children if she let all the Forest see how little regard she had for him? He wasn’t going to be made to look a fool. He had put his foot down; forbidden her to go to John Pride’s. Wasn’t that right? His sister said it was. So did a lot of others. Not everyone in the Forest thought so well of the Prides and their high and mighty ways.

It hadn’t been easy, though, watching his wife, day by day, growing colder towards him.

Well, the Prides were going to be put in their place today. And after that … He wasn’t sure what. But something, anyhow.

His mind was full of these thoughts when he caught sight, nearly a mile away, of Puckle riding a Forest pony. He seemed to be dragging something behind him.

There were ten riders. The hounds were in full cry. The prior had given them a scent of Brother Luke’s bedding and they had been following it all the way from the grange. The steward of the Forest himself was leading them. Two of the other riders were gentlemen foresters, two more were under-foresters, the rest servants.

Since its inception, the New Forest had always been divided into administrative areas, known as bailiwicks, each in the charge of a forester, usually from a gentry family. Down the western side ran the bailiwicks of Godshill, Linwood and Burley. A big tract just west of the centre was known as Battramsley bailiwick. Recently, however, the largest bailiwick of all, the central royal bailiwick of Lyndhurst, which ran right across the heath to Beaulieu, had been subdivided, the hamlet of Oakley where Pride and Furzey lived falling within the southern section. Over all these presided the warden of the forest, a friend of the king, whose steward supervized the Forest for him day-to-day.

They were surprised, as they came to the hamlet, to see Tom Furzey in front of them, waving his arms and crying out: ‘I know where he is.’

The party pulled up. The steward looked stern. ‘You’ve seen him?’

‘Don’t need to. I know where he is.’

The steward frowned, then glanced at the fair, handsome young man riding beside him. ‘Alban?’

Philip le Alban was a lucky young gentleman. Two centuries before, his ancestor Alban, born to Norman Adela and her Saxon husband Edgar, had not quite maintained his position in the increasingly French society of Plantagenet England; but his descendants, who had taken his name for several generations, had continued as under-foresters for various bailiwicks and, as a reward for this long service and because he had married well, young Philip le Alban had been promoted to forester of the new Southern bailiwick. No one knew the Forest or its inhabitants better. ‘Where is he, then, Tom?’ he asked pleasantly enough.

‘At John Pride’s house, of course,’ Tom cried and, without another word, turned and started leading them in that direction.

‘The runaway and John Pride are brothers,’ Alban explained. And since the hounds, it was true, were going in that general direction, the steward nodded brusquely as they followed Tom.

Pride was out, but his family were there. They stood silently while two of the men searched their cottage without result. The rest of the little farmstead yielded nothing.

But it was the cowshed at which Furzey was gesticulating wildly. ‘In there,’ he cried. ‘Look in there.’

He was so excited that this time the entire party, even the steward, crowded into the shed. But it took only moments to see that nobody was lurking there.

Tom looked crestfallen. But he wasn’t prepared to let it go at that. ‘He was here,’ he insisted; then, seeing their disbelieving faces, he burst out: ‘Where do you think John Pride is now? Making fools of you! Hiding his brother somewhere.’ They were starting to move out. This wouldn’t do. ‘And look at this pony,’ he cried. ‘What are you going to do about that?’ The foal was tethered in one corner, blinking its frightened eyes at him. ‘This pony’s stolen. From me!’

They were already outside again. His plan was dissolving. He had quite persuaded himself that they were going to find Luke, lead John Pride away in chains and restore his pony to him. He rushed after them. ‘You don’t understand,’ he shouted. ‘They’re all the same, these Prides. They’re all criminals.’

Two of the men started to chuckle.

‘That include your wife, then, Tom?’ one of them asked. Even Alban had to repress a smile. To the steward, who had looked up sharply, he explained that Tom’s wife also had the runaway for a brother.

‘God save us!’ the steward exclaimed irritably. ‘Isn’t that just like the Forest?’ Turning to Tom, he exploded: ‘How the devil do I know you aren’t hiding him? You’re probably the biggest criminal of the lot. Where does this man live?’ They told him. ‘Search his cottage at once.’

‘But …’ Tom could hardly believe this turn of events. ‘What about my pony?’ he wailed.

‘Damn your pony,’ cursed the steward, as he started to ride towards Tom’s cottage.

They found nothing there either. Mary had seen to that. But a short while later the hounds picked up Luke’s scent in the trees nearby and followed it for many a mile.

Indeed, as time went by, the route they took became quite curious, winding about until at last it went in a huge circle round Lyndhurst where, so to speak, it continued for ever.

There had been no one to see, a couple of hours before, the lone figure of Puckle on his pony, dragging the bundle of Luke’s clothing Mary had provided.

‘Damn waste of time,’ the steward remarked to Alban. ‘I suppose that idiot was right this morning. The Prides are hiding him.’

‘Perhaps.’ Alban smiled. ‘But no one can hide in the Forest for ever.’

When the summons to the abbot came, one November morning, Brother Adam was well prepared. He had done what the abbot had asked a month before and reached his conclusions. Strangely enough, given the worldly and political nature of the business, he had found that his continuing period of meditation and private study had given him strength and certainty. His mind was at peace.

So, he was glad to say, was the abbey. October had passed quietly. The migratory birds had wheeled and headed southwards across the sea. Then November’s greying clouds, like the sails of an ageing ship, had drawn eastwards across the sky; the yellowed oak leaves had fallen by the river bank and nothing had disturbed the abbey’s silence. At Martinmass in November, at the Forest’s minor court, the Court of Attachments, the verderers had sent the incident at the grange forward to the senior court, which would be held at the good pleasure of the king’s justices, when they visited the Forest the following spring. Young Martell and his friends had wisely turned themselves in to the sheriffs of their counties, who would produce them at the spring court. Luke, the lay brother, had not yet been found. Kindly Brother Matthew had wanted to forgive him, but the abbot had been firm.

‘Justice must be seen to be done, for our good name.’

As he walked towards the abbot’s quarters Brother Adam looked with pleasure at the scene around him. Punctuated by the clanging bell that, every three hours or so, summoned the monks to prayer, the monastery was always a hive of quiet activity. There were the weaving and cloth-making workshops, and the fulling mill by the river at which the estate’s huge clip of wool was cleaned. The skins of the sheep and cattle provided numerous departments: a tannery – smelly, so outside the gate; a skinner’s shop for making hoods and leather blankets; a shoemaker’s – very busy since every monk and lay brother needed two pairs of boots or shoes every year. By the cloisters was the parchment and bookbinding department. There was a flour mill, a bakery, a brewery, two stable ranges, a piggery and a slaughterhouse. With its forge, carpenter’s, candlemaker’s, two infirmaries and a hospice providing accommodation for visitors – the abbey was like a little walled town. Or perhaps, with its Latin books and services, and the monks’ habits resembling the Roman dress of a thousand years before, it was more like a huge Roman villa.

Nothing, Adam reflected, was wasted; everything was used. Between the various buildings, for instance, the ground was carefully arranged in beds for vegetables and herbs. Fruits grew on trellises by sheltered walls, grapes on vines. There was honeysuckle for the bees whose hives, scattered about the inclosure, yielded honey and wax.

‘We are worker bees ourselves,’ he had once joked to a visiting knight. ‘But the queen we serve is the Queen of Heaven.’ He had been rather pleased with this conceit, although chiding himself afterwards for falling so easily into the sin of vanity.

Above all, the abbey was self-sufficient. ‘All nature’, he delighted to point out, ‘flows through the abbey. Everything is in balance, everything complete. The monastery can endure, like nature itself, to the end of days.’ It was a perfect machine for contemplating God’s wondrous creation.

And it was precisely this truth that was in his mind when he entered the abbot’s office, sat down beside the prior and gazed steadily forward, as the abbot turned to him and bluntly demanded: ‘Well, Adam, what are we to do about these wretched churches?’

It was a curious fact, born out of the experience of centuries, that if one thing brought trouble and strife to any monastery, it was, above all others, the possession of a parish church.

Why should this be? Wasn’t a church by its very nature a place of peace? In theory, yes. But in practice, churches had vicars, parishioners and local squires; and they all had one thing to argue about: money.

The church tithes – about a tenth of the parish’s production, usually – were paid by the parish to support the church and its priest. But if the church came into a monastery’s possession then the monastery took the tithe and paid the vicar. That frequently meant a dispute with the vicar. Even worse, if a Cistercian house had land in a parish it would normally refuse to pay any tithes itself – an ancient exemption granted the order when it was mostly clearing wasteland for its sheep, but hardly fair when it took over existing productive land. This would infuriate the vicar, squire and parishioners, and often led to litigation.

It was the threat of just such a dispute that had caused the abbot to ask Brother Adam to go through the abbey’s entire cartulary record and make a recommendation. The church in question lay a hundred miles away, beyond even the abbey’s little daughter house of Newenham, in still more westerly Cornwall and had been given to the abbey by a royal prince several decades earlier.

The abbot was particularly anxious to have everything settled because he had soon to depart, as abbots often did, to attend the king’s council and Parliament – a duty which might keep him away for some time.

‘I have two recommendations to make, Abbot,’ Brother Adam replied. ‘The first is very simple. This Cornish vicar hasn’t got a case. The yearly income he is to receive was agreed with his predecessor and there’s no reason to change it. Tell him we’ll see him in court.’

‘Quite right.’ John of Grockleton might be jealous of Adam, but he approved of this kind of talk.

‘You’re sure of your legal ground?’ the abbot asked.

‘Certain.’

‘Very well. Let it be done.’ The abbot sighed. ‘Send him a pair of shoes.’ The abbot had a rather touching faith that anyone who needed placating could be rendered happy by a gift of a pair of the abbey’s well-made shoes. He gave away over a hundred pairs a year. ‘You said you had a second recommendation?’

Brother Adam paused a moment. He had no illusions about the reception he was about to get. ‘You asked me to go over the entire record of our dealings with churches,’ he began carefully, ‘and I did. Outside Beaulieu itself, we have holdings in Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Cornwall – where we also receive a large income from the tin mines. All these have parish churches. We also own a chapel elsewhere.

‘And in every single case we have been involved in disputes. In the nine decades since Beaulieu’s founding I can’t find one free from legal disputes over churches. Some have dragged on for twenty years. They’ll still be fighting us down in Cornwall, I can promise you, long after we’re all underground.’

‘But the abbey has always managed to deal with these problems, hasn’t it?’ the abbot asked.

‘Yes. Our order has become highly skilful at it. A compromise is found. Our interests are always protected.’

‘There we are, then,’ Grockleton interjected. ‘We always win.’

‘But’, Brother Adam gently went on, ‘at what cost? In Cornwall, for instance, do we do any good works? No. Are we respected? I doubt it. Hated? Certainly. Are we legally in the right in these matters? Probably. But morally?’ He spread out his hands. ‘We are amply endowed with Beaulieu alone. We don’t actually need these churches and their income.’ He paused. ‘I dare to say, Abbot, in this respect, that we are scarcely different from the Cluniacs.’

‘Cluniacs?’ Grockleton almost jumped out of his seat. ‘We are not in the least like the Cluniacs.’

‘Our order was set up precisely to avoid their mistakes,’ Adam agreed. ‘And after performing the task you set me, Abbot, I read the founding charter of our order again. The Carta Caritatis.’

The Carta Caritatis – the Charter of Love – of the Cistercians was a remarkable document. Written by the first effective head of the new order, an Englishman as it happened, it was a code of rules designed to ensure that the white monks would stick, without deviating, to the original intent of the ancient rule of St Benedict. His point was, exactly, that the Cistercian houses should be modest, plain and self-sufficient, so as to avoid the distractions of worldly entanglements. And one of his sternest injunctions was that on no account were Cistercian houses to own parish churches.

‘No parish churches,’ the abbot nodded sadly.

‘Would it not be possible’, Adam asked gently, ‘for Beaulieu to exchange these churches for other properties?’

‘They were royal gifts, Adam,’ the abbot pointed out.

‘Given long ago. Perhaps the king would not mind.’

King Edward I, that mighty legislator and warrior, had spent much of his reign subduing the Welsh and was planning to do the same to the Scots. He might not be interested in what the abbey did with its royal endowments. But you never knew.

‘I’d hate to ask him,’ the abbot confessed.

‘Well,’ said Brother Adam with a smile, ‘I have satisfied my conscience by bringing the matter before you. I can do no more.’

‘Quite. Thank you, Adam.’ The abbot indicated that he could retire.

For some time after he had gone, the abbot remained gazing silently into space, while John of Grockleton, his claw-like hand resting on the edge of the table, sat watching him. At last the abbot sighed.

‘He’s right, of course.’

Grockleton’s claw clenched just a little, but he did not interrupt.

‘The trouble is,’ the abbot went on, ‘many of the other Cistercian houses own churches too. If we make a fuss, the other abbots might not take it very kindly.’

Grockleton continued to watch. Privately he couldn’t have cared less if the abbey owned a dozen churches and hammered half the vicars in Christendom.

‘As abbot,’ the abbot mused on, ‘one has to be careful.’

‘Very.’ Grockleton nodded.

‘His first recommendation is clearly right. This Cornish vicar must be squashed.’ He sat up briskly. ‘What else have we to deal with?’

‘The assignment of duties, Abbot, while you are away. There were two appointments you mentioned: the novice master and the new supervisor of the granges.’

After the recent violent episode involving Luke at the grange the abbot had decided that, for a year at least, a trusted monk ought to act as a permanent supervisor, visiting the granges continuously. ‘I want them to feel’, he had said, ‘an iron hand.’ It was not a pleasant task for any monk; he would miss many of the daily offices in church. ‘But it must be done,’ the abbot had decreed.

‘Novice master,’ the abbot began. ‘Brother Stephen needs a rest, we all agree. I was thinking, therefore, of Brother Adam. He’s awfully good with the novices.’ He nodded contentedly.

Grockleton’s claw remained at rest upon the table. When he spoke, it was quietly. ‘I have a request, Abbot. While you are away and I am in charge, I should like you not to put Brother Adam in charge of the novices.’

‘Oh?’ The abbot frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Because this matter of the churches is in his mind. I do not doubt his loyalty to the order …’

‘Certainly not.’

‘But if, for instance, a young novice should ask, while reading the Carta Caritatis …’ He paused conscientiously. ‘Brother Adam might find it hard not to criticize us …’ He stopped, then added meaningfully: ‘That would leave me in a very difficult position. I don’t think I’d be adequate …’

The abbot gazed at him. He wasn’t deceived. He could just imagine the care with which Grockleton would ensure that Brother Adam was embarrassed. On the other hand he couldn’t deny that there was an element of truth in what the prior said. ‘What do you propose?’ he asked coldly.

‘Brother Matthew is still shaken. But he would make a perfectly adequate novice master. Why not let Brother Adam supervize the granges? His period of meditation, I believe, will have strengthened him for the task.’

The sly dog, the abbot thought. That last was a dig at him for favouring Adam with light assignments. The message was clear: I’m your deputy, making a reasonable request. If you don’t give your favourite an unpleasant task I’ll make trouble for him.

And then an unworthy thought occurred to him: if I can put up with the prior, then Adam can put up with the granges for a while. He smiled at Grockleton sweetly. ‘You are right, John. And if, as I suspect, Adam may one day be abbot, a reforming abbot, perhaps’ – he enjoyed watching Grockleton wince when he said that – ‘then this experience will be very useful to him.’

So, before the abbot left the monastery at the ending of the year, Brother Adam was assigned to the granges.

On a wintry December afternoon Mary walked hurriedly towards Beaulieu.

A cold wind was blowing into her back, pushing her along the tiny track as the heather scraped her legs. To the north the distant tree line had sunk beneath the slow swell of the ground so that the landscape resembled the bare tundra it must have been thousands of years before. Behind her, over the expanse of brownish heather and dark-green gorse, banks of cloud with a faint orange glow were moving steadily along the coastline, threatening to overtake and smother her as she went eastwards, across the great waste between the Forest centre and the abbey, which was now called Beaulieu Heath.

She had no wish to be there; she was only doing it to please her husband.

Tom did not work for the abbey in winter, but this year the monks had called him in for a special task. They wanted a cart.

Tom was not usually a carpenter. It was difficult to persuade him to make anything in the house. But for some reason, all his life his imagination had been fired by the idea of making carts. A cart made by Tom Furzey was a formidable affair, with a framework base and four framework sides, each of which could be removed. Every beam was neatly jointed into its fellow. Tom’s carts were always the same and they would last until doomsday. But he would never make the wheels. ‘That’s wheelwright’s work,’ he would say. ‘I make the cart and he makes it go. That’s the way I look at it.’ He seemed to like to dwell upon this thought.

Once, when they were still on speaking terms, John Pride had got him to confess that he disliked the thought of making wheels because they were curved. ‘You’d make wheels if they could be square, wouldn’t you Tom?’ he had genially asked.

And Tom, to Pride’s delight had answered, thoughtfully: ‘Reckon I might.’

So Tom had gone to work on the cart for the monks. That had been ten days ago. It would take him at least six weeks to complete and while he did so he was staying at St Leonards Grange. Every few days Mary would visit him there. Today, she had promised to bring him some cakes. She was especially anxious to do so because she felt guilty for the fact that she was glad he was away – firstly because of Tom’s moods; secondly because of Luke.

In his strange, dreamy way, Luke had seemed almost happy living out in the Forest. Even as the weather grew cold he had always managed to make himself a snug lair somehow. ‘I’m just a forest animal,’ he had told her contentedly. He always claimed he could feed himself. But as she pointed out: ‘Even the deer get fed in midwinter.’ So as soon as Tom had departed for St Leonards she had brought Luke into their little barn. No one, neither her brother nor her children, knew he was being fed and sleeping there. She didn’t know how long it could last; it frightened her. But what else was she to do?

By the time she reached the edge of the farmlands that lay around the grange the wind had strengthened. There was a cold dampness around the back of her neck. Looking behind her, she saw that the yellowish clouds were barrelling on to Beaulieu Heath, bringing flurries of snow to the western edge. For a moment she wondered if she should turn back, but decided to continue, having come so far.

Brother Adam looked gratefully at the door of the grange. The flurries of snow, although they seemed so soft, had started to sting his face.

There were five granges south-west of the abbey: Beufre, the main centre for the plough oxen; Bergerie, where all the sheep were sheared; Sowley, down by the coast, where the monks had built the huge fish pond; Beck and, nearest to the mouth of the river estuary, St Leonards. He had been to Bergerie that day and intended to walk back from St Leonards to the abbey that evening.

The last two weeks had been exhausting. Within the Great Close, apart from the five in the south-west, there were ten more granges north of the abbey and another three on the eastern side of the Beaulieu estuary. Then there were the string of little holdings over in the Avon valley west of the Forest, which supplied the abbey with hay from their rich meadows. And there were other outliers he’d hardly considered yet. He had had no rest. The prior had seen to that. The period of contemplation he had been enjoying was completely shattered.

He pushed open the door of the grange. The half-dozen lay brothers looked startled to see him. Good. He had already learned to turn up suddenly, like a schoolmaster. He hardly paused to shake off the snow. ‘First,’ he said sternly, ‘I will inspect the food stores.’

The grange at St Leonards was a typical Cistercian affair. The dwelling house was a long, single-storey structure with an oak door in the middle. Here the lay brothers lived in spartan conditions, returning to the abbey domus for the main saints days and festivals, and being relieved from the centre from time to time. About thirty of the roughly seventy lay brothers were to be found out at the granges, usually.

‘So far, so good,’ Adam told them, as soon as he had checked for signs of pilfering or illicit drinking. ‘Now I will see the barn.’

It was strange, he reflected, that although, for years, he had seen the lay brothers every day, he had never really known them. The huge domus conversorum of the lay brothers might take up the whole western side of the cloister, but it was also completely separated even from the cloister wall by a narrow lane. One had to go right round the outside to reach the domus. In church the monks sang in the choir, the lay brothers in the nave. They ate apart.

Until now, he had never realized that he looked down upon them. It was true that he had found it necessary to treat them a little like children, to ensure discipline in the granges. Yet they were also men. Their commitment to the abbey was no less than his. They think less intensely than I do, he considered: each day I measure my life by what I have thought, about God, or my fellow men, or the world around the abbey. Yet their way is to feel these things and they remember the days by how they felt upon them. It may even be that, by thinking less, and feeling more, they remember more than I do.

If the dwelling house was modest, the rest of the farm buildings were not. There were cattle yards and cowsheds – even St Leonards often had a hundred oxen and seventy cows to take care of. There were sheepcotes and piggeries. But towering over everything was the huge barn. It was the size of a church, built of stone, with massive oak rafters. The wheat and oats they harvested were stored there in huge piles of sacks; so was all the farm equipment. On one side was a mountain of bracken, used for bedding. There was even a threshing floor. And at the moment, in the middle of its cavernous space, lit dimly by some lamps, stood Tom Furzey’s recently started cart.

Peering across the shadows, however, it was something else that caught Adam’s eye: a figure beside the peasant in the half-light. Unless he was mistaken, it was a woman.

Women were not allowed in the abbey. A great lady might visit, of course, but she was not supposed to stay the night even in the quarters reserved for royal guests. The womenfolk of the hired hands might visit them at the granges but, as the abbot had particularly stressed to him, ‘They’re not to hang about. And never, on any account, to stay the night.’

He went over to them at once, therefore.

She was sitting beside Furzey on the floor. As he approached, they both got up respectfully. The woman had a shawl of some kind over her head and as she was looking down modestly he could not see her face very well.

‘This is my wife,’ the peasant said. ‘She brought me some cakes.’

‘I see.’ He did not want to offend Furzey, but he thought it best to be firm. ‘I’m afraid she must leave before dusk, you know, and it’s already getting dark.’ The fellow looked sulky, but although she did not look up, it seemed to him that the woman did not mind. ‘Your husband’s cart will be magnificent,’ he said in a friendly tone, before turning back to the others.

He spent some time in conversation while he went round the barn, so he was not surprised to see, when he finished, that the woman had left. Intending to trudge back to the abbey himself, now, he went to the small door in the huge barn entrance and opened it.

The blizzard hit him like a blow. He could scarcely believe it. The thick walls of the barn had completely muffled the sound of the wind as it had grown: in the little while that he had been inside the flurries had turned into gusts and the gusts into a howling storm. Even by the shelter of the barn the snowflakes lashed his face. Turning into the wind, he had to blink to see. To go even the three miles to the abbey seemed a foolish idea. He’d better remain at the grange.

Then he remembered the woman. Dear heaven, he’d sent her out in this. And how far did she have to go? Five miles? Nearer six. Across the open heath into the mouth of the blizzard. It was outrageous; he felt a sense of shame. What would her husband think of him and of the abbey? Ducking back into the barn, he summoned Tom and two of the lay brothers. ‘Wrap yourselves quickly. Bring a leather blanket.’ Only pausing long enough to find out which path she would have taken, he dashed out into the snow, leaving them to catch up with him.

According to the hour, it was still afternoon. Somewhere above, the darkness had not fallen. But here below the light had been expunged. Before him, as he plunged forward, there was nothing but a blinding whitish fury, attacking his face as though God had summoned up some new plague of locusts for the northern lands. The snow came almost horizontally, enveloping everything so that, only yards ahead, the world seemed to vanish into a grey opacity.

Dear Lord, how was he to find her? Would she die? Would she join the deer and ponies who, several dozen to be sure, would be found, stiff on the ground, after a night like this?

He was quite astonished, therefore, having left the last hedgerow behind, to see just in front of him a dark shape, like a bundle of clothing, struggling forward into the blizzard. He cried out, taking a dozen snowflakes into his mouth; but she did not hear him. Only when he came up with her and put his arm protectively round her shoulders did she realize his presence as, feeling her start with fright, he turned her away from the driving fury of the storm.

‘Come.’

‘I can’t. I must go home.’ She was even trying to push him gently away and resume her impossible journey.

Almost surprised at himself, however, he held her firmly. ‘Your husband is here,’ he said, although they could not see him. And guiding her path, he led her back.

The blizzard that night was the worst that anyone in the Forest could remember. Down by the coast the snowstorm seemed to have become one with the churning sea. Around St Leonards Grange huge snowdrifts piled up along the hedgerows, covering them right over. The wind over Beaulieu Heath was either a searing whistle or a great white moan. And even when a faint greying in the darkness indicated that morning must have come, the blizzard continued, blocking out the light.

To Brother Adam his duty was clear. He wasn’t returning to the abbey; he must stay in the grange and give what spiritual leadership he could.

On the way back to the barn he had recognized the woman as the one he had spoken to about Brother Matthew. He was glad it should turn out to be such a good soul that he had saved from the storm.

The arrangements were simple enough. He had them set up a brazier filled with charcoal in the barn. Furzey and his wife could spend the night there well enough, while he and the others remained in the dwelling house. And in order that there should be no misunderstanding of the situation he called everyone together in the barn after the evening meal and, having said some prayers, he made them a little sermon.

On this cold night close to Christmas, he told them, as they found shelter, like the Holy Family, in a humble barn, he wished to remind them that everyone had a proper and honourable place in God’s plan. The two categories of monks in the abbey, he told them, were like Mary and Martha. Mary, the prayerful, had perhaps the better part, like the choir monks. But Martha, the loyal worker, was necessary too. For how would the abbey keep up its life of prayer without the hard work of the lay brothers? And did not they, too, need help, from the good peasants who lived outside the religious order? Of course they did. And last of all, did not the good peasant Tom need the support of his wife, humbler still but equally beloved of God?

‘You may wonder’, he said, ‘why this woman is allowed to remain here this night. For the abbot’s rule is not to be ignored. No women in the Great Close.’ He looked at them severely. ‘But’, he went on, ‘Our Lord also enjoins us to show mercy. Did not he himself save the woman taken in adultery from being stoned? And so it is, on my authority given me by the abbot, that we allow this good woman to remain here this terrible night and seek shelter from the storm.’ Then he blessed them and retired.

When the next day the blizzard continued unabated – at times it almost knocked him off his feet when he opened the door – the poor woman grew very agitated about her children. But Furzey assured him that his sister and the other villagers would be taking care of them, so he forbade the woman to leave. And thus, with the brazier providing heat and Tom at work on his cart, she remained while, three times during the day, Brother Adam led them all in simple prayers.

How she longed to go back. She didn’t really want to be with Tom. Her eldest girl would see the younger children were safe, but they would all be frightened that something had happened to her. Above all, there was Luke.

What would he do? He’d have wondered where she was when she failed to appear in the evening. Would he try to investigate the cottage? What if the children saw him? All day she waited anxiously for the blizzard to abate.

There was nothing much to do. Now and then Brother Adam would appear and she found herself watching him with interest. The lay brothers, she could see, found him distant. Tom just remarked, with a shrug: ‘He’s a cold fish.’ But then Tom never thought much about people if they didn’t belong to the Forest.

The monk came from another world, certainly. Yet, as she thought of the way he had brought her in from the blizzard, she didn’t think he was cold. She said nothing, though. When he led them in prayer, in the half-light of the great barn, his soft voice carried such quiet conviction that she was impressed. She supposed he must be so much more intelligent than simple folk like her; yet perhaps, deep inside her, a small voice might have suggested: you, also, could read and write, and know what he knows too. If so, however, she could only answer with a sigh: in another life. Until then, the monk had something she did not. She did not say it to Tom, but she thought Brother Adam, in his way of course, was rather fine.

She was entirely caught off guard late in the afternoon, when the small door of the barn opened with a brief moan from the wind and closed fast again behind the monk who, advancing to within a few feet of the brazier, beckoned to her. She went to him obediently. There was nothing else she could do.

For a moment he stood there, looking at her curiously. He was stoutly built, like Tom, she realized, but a little taller. In the glow from the brazier behind them that warmed her back, his eyes looked strangely dark. Tom, working a few yards away by the lamplight, seemed separated from them, in another world.

‘I did not realize, when you spoke to me at the abbey gate …’ He remembered her then. ‘I have just been told that Luke, the runaway, is your brother.’ She noticed that he spoke quietly, so that Tom could not hear them.

A stab of fear went through her. She could not meet his eye. Her relationship was common knowledge, of course, but in the hands of this clever man it seemed more dangerous. She hung her head. ‘Yes, Brother. Poor Luke.’

‘Poor Luke? Perhaps.’ A pause. Then, very quietly: ‘Do you know where he is?’

Now she looked him straight in the eye. ‘If we knew that, Brother, you’d already know. You see, I think he shouldn’t have run away, being innocent. And my husband would turn him in anyway.’ She could look him in the eye because, technically, she had just told the truth. She had said ‘we’.

‘You might know, though, mightn’t you?’

She was conscious of the smell of his habit. There was a scent of wax candles in the damp wool. She could smell him, too. A nice smell.

‘He could be the other end of England by now.’ She sighed. This, too, was true. He could have been.

Adam looked thoughtful. When he asked a question the lines on his broad forehead wrinkled. But when he was thinking he tilted his head slightly back and the lines smoothed in a way that was pleasing.

‘You said to me that morning at the abbey’, he said carefully, ‘that it might have been an accident – that he might not have meant to strike Brother Matthew.’ She was silent. ‘If so, I think he should come and say so.’

‘He’ll never return here, I think,’ she answered sadly. ‘He’ll have to walk to the ends of the earth.’ She wasn’t sure this satisfied the monk.

And then she did something she had never done before.

How does a woman let a man know that she desires him? It can be done with a smile, a look, a gesture. But these outward and visible signs would have been off-putting to a monk like Brother Adam. So she just stood in front of him and sent out that simple, primitive signal: the heat from her body. And Brother Adam felt it – how could he not? – that invisible, unmistakable, radiating, warmth that came from her stomach to his. Then she smiled and he turned away, confused.

Why did she do it? She was an honest woman. She didn’t flirt. She acted from a primordial instinct. She wanted to suggest an intimacy and attraction that, even if it shocked him, would divert the monk’s attention. She had to lay a false trail to protect her little brother.

Moments later, Brother Adam left the barn.

The storm did not abate. They put charcoal on the brazier for a second night. Once again, after the evening meal, Brother Adam led them all in prayer. But some hours later, alone with her husband and only the glow from the charcoal showing in the great barn’s cavernous dark, she allowed herself a faintly ironic smile when, as Tom raised his stocky haunches over her, she closed her eyes and thought secretly of Brother Adam.

It was deep in the night, about the time of the night office, when Brother Adam awoke from a fitful sleep and became aware that the moaning of the wind outside had ceased and that all around the grange was quiet.

Rising from the bench on which he had been sleeping, he went through the psalm and prayers by himself in a whisper. Then, still not satisfied, he whispered a Pater Noster. Pater Noster, qui es in coelis: Our Father, who art in Heaven …

Amen. The night. The time when the silent voice of God’s universe descended upon him. Why, then, should he feel so disquieted? He got up, wanted to pace about but could hardly do so without waking the lay brothers. He lay down again.

The woman. She was asleep, no doubt, with her husband in the barn. A good woman, probably, in her way. Like all the peasant women, she had slightly red cheeks and smelled of the farm. He closed his eyes. Her warmth. He had never felt such a thing before. He tried to sleep. The Furzey fellow. Had he made love to her in the barn this night? Might they, possibly, be doing so now, even as he lay there in the silence? Was the cart maker enveloped in that warmth?

He opened his eyes. Dear God, what was he thinking? And why? Why should his mind be dwelling on her? Then he sighed. He should have known better. It was just the devil, up to his usual tricks: a little test of faith; a new one.

Was the devil in this woman, then? Of course. The devil had been in all women from the first. When she had stood in front of him like that this afternoon he should perhaps have spoken severely to her. But it was the devil who was using her, really; just as he was using her image now to distract him. He closed his eyes again.

He did not sleep.

The morning was sparkling. The wind had passed away. It was utterly still. The sky was blue. Beaulieu, its abbey, its fields, its granges were all carpeted and coated by a soft white mantle.

When he came out of the grange, Brother Adam saw by the footprints from the barn door that the woman had already left. And for several moments, before he corrected himself, he thought of her, walking alone across the dazzling white heath.

In late February Luke disappeared and Mary hardly knew whether she was relieved or sad.

As soon as the snow had melted in late January he had started going out before dawn, returning only after dusk. Her terror had been that he might make tell-tale tracks in the frost, but somehow he didn’t, and every day she would leave a little food hidden in the loft where he slept.

All through January, while Tom was working at St Leonards, she would sneak out after the children were asleep and then, sitting together just as they had when they were children themselves, they would talk. Several times they had discussed what he should do. The full Forest Court was not meeting until April. The verderer’s court had only forwarded the case to them, so until then it wouldn’t be clear how serious a view they took of the Beaulieu matter. They discussed Brother Adam’s suggestion that Luke should give himself up, but Luke always shook his head.

‘That’s easy for him to say. But with the abbot and the prior disowning me, you don’t know what’s going to happen. At least this way I’m free.’

For her, it was a joy to have one of her family to talk to. And what talks they had had. He would describe the abbey, the prior with his stooping walk and claw-like hands, every lay brother and monk, until she laughed so hard she was afraid of waking the children. Yet there was something so gentle and simple about Luke that he never seemed to hate anyone, even Grockleton. She asked him about Brother Adam.

‘The lay brothers don’t quite know what to make of him. The monks all love him, though.’

In a way, because of his dreamy, gentle nature, Mary had never been surprised when Luke joined the lay brothers; but she couldn’t resist asking him once: ‘Didn’t you ever want a woman, Luke?’

‘I don’t know, really,’ he said easily. ‘I’ve never had one.’

‘Doesn’t that bother you?’

‘No.’ He laughed quite contentedly. ‘There’s always so much else to do in the Forest, isn’t there?’

She smiled, but didn’t bring up the subject again. With him in hiding, there wasn’t much point.

They also discussed the quarrel between Furzey and Pride over the pony. He sympathized with her, of course, but here he showed the irresponsible, rather childish side of his nature, she thought. ‘Poor old Tom’ll never get his pony back. That’s for sure.’

‘So how long will this quarrel last?’

‘A year or two, I should think.’

When Tom returned at the end of January, their meetings had to be curtailed – a snatched conversation now and then. And since there was certainly no sign of the quarrel ending she felt almost like a prisoner herself. Luke would be gone before dawn and come back after dark, with only the empty wooden bowl of food to show that he’d been there.

Then he had told her he was going.

‘Where?’

‘Can’t say. Better you don’t know.’

‘Are you leaving the Forest?’

‘Maybe. Probably best.’

So she kissed him and let him go. What else could she do? So long as he was safe, that was all that mattered. But she felt very much alone.

On the Thursday after the feast of St Mark the Evangelist, in the twenty-third year of the reign of King Edward – that is, on a wet April day in the Year of Our Lord 1295 – in the great hall of the royal manor of Lyndhurst, the court of the New Forest met in solemn session.

It was an impressive scene. From the walls of the hall, alternating with splendid hangings, hung the antlers of great bucks and stags. Presiding over all, in a blackened oak chair set on a dais at the front, the Forest justice was resplendent in a green tunic and crimson cloak. Assisting him, also in oak chairs, were the four gentlemen verderers, who acted as magistrates and coroners and ran the lower Court of Attachments. The foresters and the agisters, who were responsible for all the stock pastured on the Forest, were also present. From each of the villages, or vills as they were called, came representatives to render account for any crimes committed there. The court was also assisted by a jury of twelve gentlemen of standing in the region. Any man accused of a serious offence could, if he chose, ask that this jury should decide his innocence or guilt. The king liked juries and encouraged their use. Though not obligatory, many chose a jury trial.

Today the prior of Beaulieu had also appeared, the abbot being still away on the king’s business. Two sheriffs from neighbouring counties had come with young Martell and his friends. It was a long time since there had been such a gathering and the hall was packed with spectators.

‘Oyez, Oyez, Oyez,’ the clerk called out. ‘All manner of persons who have any presentments to make, this court is now in session.’

There were a number of cases to be heard, concerning the usual matters. Some were forest offences. All venison cases automatically went to the Forest court. So did crimes against the king’s peace. Civil cases between parties often came up too.

All through the morning the business went on. A fellow had stolen wood from the Forest. Another had made an illegal assart of land. One of the vills had failed to report a dead buck within its boundaries. Life in the Forest did not change much. But had a forester from Rufus’s time been brought there, he would have observed one difference. For whereas the Norman forest law had been designed, with its mutilations and killings, to punish and frighten the people, the accommodation between the monarch and his Forest folk had long ago been reached, even in the most formal court. There was no mutilation. Only the most habitual felons were hung. The penalty for almost all offences was a fine. The guilty party was ‘in mercy’ or ‘amerced’ a sum. And even this varied according to the wealth of the offender. A poor man amerced sixpence at the last court, who had been unable to pay, was let off. Many of the fines for encroachments on crown land were repeated so automatically in the records of court after court that they were, in effect, rents paid for illegal tenancy. Pledges were taken from the better-off that their neighbours would pay their fines, or behave themselves in future. The law in the Forest, as elsewhere in Plantagenet England, was a common-sense and communal affair.

Finally, some time after noon, they came to the Beaulieu business.

It is presented that on the Friday before the Feast of St Matthew last, Roger Martell, Henry de Damerham and others did enter the Forest with bows and arrows, dogs and greyhounds, to harm the venison …

The charge, which would be inserted in the court record in Latin, was read out by the clerk. It gave exact details of what the poachers did and was not contested. All threw themselves on the mercy of the court. The justice looked at them severely while the forest folk in the hall listened carefully.

‘This is a venison offence, carried out in open contempt of the law, by those who, by reason of their position, should know better. It will not be tolerated. You are amerced as follows: ‘Will atte Wood, half a mark.’ Poor Will. A stiff fine. Two of his cousins stood surety and he was given a year to pay it. The other local men in the party all got the same.

Next came the turn of the young gentlemen: five pounds each – fifteen times the amount of the Forest men. This was only just. Finally, the justice came to Martell.

‘Roger Martell. You were, without question, the leader of these malefactors. You led them to the grange. You took deer. You are also a young man of substance.’ He paused. ‘The king himself was not amused to hear about this matter. You are amerced the sum of one hundred pounds.’

A collective gasp. The two sheriffs looked shattered. It was a stupendous fine, even for a rich landowner; and it was also very clear that King Edward himself had approved it beforehand. Royal disfavour. Martell went white as a sheet. He would either be selling land or losing his income for many a year. Manly though he was, he visibly shook.

The court had only just started to buzz, however, when the justice said sharply to the clerk: ‘Now then, what about this lay brother?’

And again, the courtroom grew quiet. Luke was one of the Prides. There was a lot of interest. Near the back of the court Mary strained to hear every word.

The case against Luke was less clear.

‘First,’ the clerk announced, ‘that he gave shelter to the malefactors at the grange. Second, that he was in league with them. Third that he attacked an abbey monk, Brother Matthew, who sought to prevent the poachers from entering the grange.’

‘Is the abbey represented?’ the justice demanded.

John of Grockleton raised his claw, and a moment later Brother Matthew and three of the lay brothers stood with him before the justice.

The justice, naturally, was well acquainted with the facts from the steward, but there were aspects of the business he did not like.

‘You refuse to take responsibility for this lay brother?’

‘We disown him utterly,’ said the prior.

‘The charge says he was in league with these poachers. Presumably because he let them into the grange?’

‘What other explanation is possible?’ said Grockleton.

‘I should think he might have been frightened of them.’

‘They offered no violence,’ remarked the clerk.

‘That’s true. Now what about this attack?’ He turned to Brother Matthew.

‘Well.’ Brother Matthew’s kindly face was a little embarrassed. ‘When Martell refused to take his wounded companion away, I’m afraid I attacked him with a staff. Brother Luke grabbed a spade and swung it, and broke the staff. Then the spade hit me on the head.’

‘I see. Was this lay brother your enemy?’

‘Oh no. Quite the reverse.’

Grockleton’s claw shot up. ‘Which proves that he must have been in league with Martell.’

‘Or was trying to prevent this monk from starting a fight.’

‘I must confess,’ Brother Matthew said mildly, ‘I did wonder that myself, afterwards.’

‘Brother Matthew is too kind, Justice,’ the prior cut in. ‘His judgement is too forgiving.’

It was at this point that the justice decided he really did not like Grockleton. ‘So he ran?’ he continued.

‘He ran,’ chimed Grockleton definitively.

‘Why the devil isn’t the abbot trying him over his assault of this monk?’

‘He is expelled from the order. We are here to prosecute him,’ said Grockleton.

‘He’s not here, I suppose?’ Heads were shaken. ‘Very well, then.’ He eyed the prior with distaste. ‘Since he belonged to the abbey at the time of this crime, if such it was, and was within the Great Close, you do realize that you are responsible for producing him, don’t you?’

‘I?’

‘You. The abbey. Of course. For his non-appearance, therefore, the abbey is amerced. Two pounds.’

The prior went bright red. All round the court there were smiles.

‘I’m sorry he isn’t here to defend himself,’ the justice went on, ‘but there it is. The law takes its course. As the offence seems to be a felony and he’s not here, I have no option. Let him be exacted and, if he doesn’t appear at the next court, outlawed.’

From her position at the back, Mary listened with a heavy heart. Exacted: that just meant he must be produced. And outlawed? Technically it signified he was outside the law. You couldn’t be harboured by anyone; you could even be killed with impunity. You had no rights. A powerful sanction.

If only Luke had turned up. Brother Adam, the clever monk, had been right. Luke had underestimated the good sense of the court. It was obvious that the justice was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But what could she do? Luke had gone and no one even knew where he was. She could have wept.

‘That’s it, I think.’ The justice was looking at the clerk. People were preparing to move. ‘Is there any other business?’

‘Yes.’

Mary started. Tom had left her at the beginning of the proceedings to stand with some of the other men and she had not been able to see him over the crowd of heads. Yet this was his voice and she could see him now, elbowing his way to the front. Whatever was he doing? At the same time, over on her left, she was conscious of a small movement by the door.

Now Tom was standing, squared off, in front of the justice, with his tousled hair and leather jerkin, as if he was ready to fight him.

‘We’ve had no notice. This hasn’t been forwarded from the Court of Attachments,’ said the clerk crossly.

‘Well, as we’re here, we may as well hear it,’ the justice replied. He fixed Tom sternly with his eye. ‘What’s your business?’

‘Theft, my lord,’ Tom bellowed in a voice that shook the rafters. ‘Damnable theft.’

The hall fell silent. The clerk, having almost jumped off his bench at the shout, took up his quill.

The justice, a little taken aback, gazed at Tom curiously. ‘Theft? Of what?’

‘My pony!’ Tom shouted again, as if to call the heavens themselves to witness.

It took a second or two for the titters around the court to begin. The justice frowned. ‘Your pony. Stolen from where?’

‘The Forest,’ Tom cried.

Chuckles were breaking out now. Even the foresters were starting to grin. The justice glanced across at the steward, who shook his head and smiled.

The justice liked the Forest. He enjoyed its peasants and secretly relished their modest crimes. After the business of Martell, which had truly annoyed him, he had no objection to ending the day with a little light relief. ‘You mean your pony was depastured on the Forest? Was it marked?’

‘No. It was born there.’

‘A foal, you mean? How do you know it was yours?’

‘I know.’

‘And where is it now?’

‘In John Pride’s cowshed,’ Tom cried in rage and despair. ‘That’s where.’

It was too much. The whole courtroom began to laugh. Even his Furzey kinsmen couldn’t help seeing the joke. Mary had to look down at the floor. The justice turned to the agisters for illumination and Alban, in whose bailiwick this lay, stepped over and whispered in his ear, while Tom scowled.

‘And where is John Pride?’ the justice demanded.

‘He’s here,’ Tom shouted, swinging round and pointing triumphantly to the back of the crowd.

Everybody turned. The justice stared. There was a brief silence.

And then, from beside the door, came a deep voice: ‘He’s gone.’

It was no good. The hall dissolved. The Forest people howled. They wept with laughter. The foresters, the solemn verderers, even the gentlemen of the jury couldn’t help themselves. The justice, watching, shook his head and bit his lip.

‘You may laugh,’ Tom yelled. And they did. But he wasn’t done. Looking right and left, red-faced, he turned back to the justice and, pointing at Alban, he shouted: ‘It’s him, and the likes of him, that lets Pride get away with it. And you know why? Because he pays them!’

The justice’s face changed. Several of the foresters stopped laughing. At the back, Mary groaned.

‘Silence!’ the justice roared and the laughter in the hall began to die. ‘You are not’ – he glared at Furzey – ‘to be impertinent.’

The trouble was, there was some truth in it. Young Alban probably was innocent, as yet. But there was inevitably a certain traffic between the Forest people and those in authority in the bailiwicks. A nice pie, a cheese, a fence mended without charge – it might be hard after such kindnesses for the steward not to overlook some minor infraction of the law. Everyone knew it. The king himself had once remarked to the justice, not wholly in jest, that one day he would have to set up a commission to investigate the whole Forest administration. If Furzey wanted to be a troublemaker this was neither the time nor the place to be watched.

‘You are to go through the proper channels,’ the justice told him curtly. ‘Your case will only be heard here after it comes through the Court of Attachments. Clerk,’ he ordered, ‘enter that in the record. The court’, he announced, ‘is closed.’

So while Tom stood there in his impotent rage and the crowd, chuckling again, started to make for the door, the clerk dipped his quill in the ink and wrote in the parchment the record that would be preserved, as the true voice of the Forest, down the long centuries:

Thomas Furzey complains of John Pride theft of a pony. John Pride did not come. Therefore to next court, etc.

 

Luke loved to walk through the Forest. He would stride for miles. When he was a child he had learned to move fast to keep up with John and Mary; so that now, anyone who tried to walk beside him would be astonished at his speed.

People thought him dreamy, yet his eyes were always sharper than theirs. There wasn’t a stream in the whole Forest he didn’t know. The most ancient oaks, every great ivy-covered hulk, were like his personal friends.

His appearance had altered since leaving the abbey. Dressed in a woodman’s smock and jerkin, with woollen leggings and a thick leather belt, his hair and beard now grown long and shaggy, he looked exactly like a score of other such fellows and no one seeing him trudging along a forest path would have given him a second thought.

But he was on the run – about to be outlawed. What did that mean? In theory, that every man’s hand was against you. And in practice? It depended on whether you had friends and whether the authorities really wanted to find you.

As things stood at present, if one of the foresters met him face to face and recognized him, they’d take him into custody. No question. But if young Alban, say, caught sight of a shaggy figure in the distance that just might be Luke, would he ride up to challenge him? Possibly. But he was far more likely to turn his horse’s head and ride another way.

What should he do, though? He couldn’t go on like this for ever. The court at Lyndhurst had made its feelings pretty clear. He might do well to turn himself in and hope for mercy.

The trouble was – perhaps it was in his blood – Luke had an instinctive distrust of authority.

That might seem strange for a man who had chosen to live under the monastic rule of Beaulieu. Yet in reality it was not. For Luke, the abbey was a sanctuary in the middle of a huge estate where he enjoyed working and which gave him the freedom of the Forest. He liked the services in the abbey church. He would listen, enraptured, to the singing. His natural curiosity had led him to learn many of the Latin psalms and their meaning even if he could not read. But he wouldn’t have wished to go to services all the time like the choir monks. He wanted to get back out in the fields, or to help the shepherds as they went from grange to grange. The abbey fed him and clothed him, and left him free of responsibilities, without a care in the world. What more could you ask?

Above all, in his mind the abbey worked because it was tied to the natural order. Nature was what he understood. The trees, the plants, the forest creatures: they had their own rhythm. You could never know it all, but it worked; and the abbey estate made sense only because it had made itself part of the process.

So if outsiders, men like Grockleton or the king’s justices who didn’t really understand the Forest, came along and tried to impose a lot of stupid rules, if they claimed to be authority, the only thing to do was to avoid them. In his heart, the only laws he respected were the laws of nature.

‘The rest don’t amount to anything, really,’ he would say. And the authorities who set such store by these laws were certainly not to be trusted. ‘They may speak you fair one day, but they’ll get you the next. The only thing they truly care about is their power.’

It was a simple peasant’s view of authority and entirely accurate.

So he didn’t intend to trust the justice and his court, especially with Grockleton still around. The best thing to do, he reckoned, was to stay out of sight and wait for something to turn up. You never knew what might.

He had friends. He’d be all right until the next winter. In the meantime he had found plenty to keep him busy. Every few days, although she had no idea of it, he had gone to keep an eye on his sister Mary. He liked to observe her going about her tasks by the cottage, or running after the children as they played outside, even if he never spoke to her. It was as if he were a guardian angel, secretly watching over her. ‘I’m closer than you think, girl,’ he would mutter with satisfaction. He found this exercise in invisibility so pleasing that he took to watching his brother John as well. The pony was allowed to run in the field now, but there was always one of John’s children guarding it.

And then, of course, he would walk the Forest.

His route that day had taken him from near Burley over to the north of Lyndhurst. The woods were quiet. Huge oaks spread all around. Here and there, a small clearing appeared where some ancient tree, brought down by a storm, lay across the forest floor, leaving a patch of open sky in the canopy above. As he walked, he would pause occasionally to inspect some lichen-covered trunk, or turn over a fallen branch to see what creatures were dwelling under it. And he had just passed above the village of Minstead and come to a section of the Forest that bordered a high open heath, when he paused and looked down at something with interest.

It was such a tiny object: just an acorn from last year’s fall, which had escaped the hungry pigs and, nestling in the damp brown leaf mould, had cracked open and struck roots into the ground.

Luke smiled. He liked to see things grow. The tiny white roots looked so vulnerable. A little green shoot was emerging. How astonishing to think that this was the beginning of a mighty oak. Then he gently shook his head. ‘You’ll never make it there,’ he said.

How many of the acorns that fall ever become oak trees? Who knows? One in a hundred thousand? Surely not. Less than one in a hundred times that number, perhaps. This is the vast strength, the massive, numberless oversupply of nature in the forest silence. The chances of an acorn living were almost infinitesimally small. The pigs turned out for the autumn mast, or any of the other forest animals might eat them. Ponies or cattle might crush them underfoot. If an acorn survived that first season and happened to be on ground where it could strike root, it could only grow into a tree if there was a break in the canopy above to give it light. But even for those few that grew to be saplings, there was still an ever present danger.

It is not only man who destroys. Other animals, too, left to themselves, will destroy grasslands, woods, whole habitats with a stupidity as great as, perhaps even greater than, that shown by humans. The deer loved to eat oak shoots. The only way for one to survive was to have a protector. Nature provided several. Holly, although the deer ate holly, might screen an oak. Butcher’s-broom, the little evergreen shrub with the razor-sharp spikes – the deer avoided that. For some reason they seldom cared to eat bracken either.

Very carefully, scooping out the soil around the seedling with his hands, Luke carried it in a cradle of earth, without disturbing its tiny life. A few yards away there was a small ring of holly surrounded by butcher’s-broom. Entering this, ignoring the scratches on his arms, he planted the seedling in the patch of earth in the centre. He glanced up. There was clear blue sky above. ‘Grow there,’ he said happily, and went on his way.

Brother Adam knew Beaulieu Abbey so well that sometimes he thought he could have walked around it blindfold.

Of all its pleasant places none, he thought, was more delightful than the series of arched recesses, known as the carrels, that lay along the north side of the great cloister, opposite the frater where the choir monks ate their meals. They were perfectly sheltered from the breeze; facing southwards, they caught and trapped the sun. Sitting, book in hand, on a bench in one of the carrels, gazing across the quiet green square of the cloister, smelling the sweet aroma of cut grass laced with the sharper scent of daisies – this, it seemed to Adam, was as close to heaven as anything knowable by man on earth.

His favourite carrel lay near the middle. Down the stone steps from the doorway to the church: that was five steps down. Turn right. Twelve paces. If it was a sunny afternoon you felt the warmth through the open arches by the seventh step. Turn right after the twelfth pace and you were there.

There had been few opportunities in the last weeks to enjoy this pleasure. His work in the granges had changed all that. But he had managed to do so one warm May afternoon and he was sitting quietly with his hood up – the monk’s sign that he does not want to be disturbed – rather idly reading a life of St Wilfrid, when his reverie was interrupted by a novice hurrying round the cloister and calling softly: ‘Brother Adam! Come quickly. Salvation is here. And everyone’s going to see.’

Naturally, therefore, Adam arose at once. ‘Salvation’, as the ignorant novice had rather sweetly called it, was Salvata, the abbey’s ship, a squat, square-rigged vessel in frequent use. After leaving the Beaulieu estuary her first port of call was nearby; at the head of the great inlet from the Solent water, which ran up the eastern side of the Forest, a flourishing little port had grown up in the last few centuries, known as Southampton. By its quay the Beaulieu monks had their own house to store the wool clip that was to be exported. Later, the returning Salvata would pick up all kinds of goods at Southampton, including the French wine the abbot’s guests enjoyed. From Southampton she might proceed along the coast to the county of Kent and thence across the English Channel. Or she might continue round, into the Thames estuary, to London or more likely up England’s eastern coast as far as the port of Yarmouth, where she would collect a large cargo of salted herrings for the abbey. Salvata’s return to the jetty below the abbey was always a source of excitement.

Sure enough, by the time Brother Adam arrived, most of the community at the abbey – over fifty monks and about forty lay brothers – had gathered to watch, and the prior, who loved this kind of thing, was calling out unnecessary orders: ‘Steady. Watch that mooring rope.’

Adam observed the scene with affection. There were times, it had to be admitted, when even the most devout of the monks became almost like children.

The cargo was salted herrings. As soon as the gangplank was in place, they all seemed to want to roll out one of the barrels.

‘Two to each cask,’ the prior called out. ‘Roll them up to the store.’

Twenty barrels were already on their way up. The monks were joking to each other; there was a festive atmosphere about the place, and Brother Adam was just about to return to the peace of his cloister when he noticed the ship’s master go over to the prior and say something. He saw the man point downstream and John of Grockleton start violently.

Then the shouting began.

If there was one thing in the world that would put Grockleton in a rage it was an attack on the abbey’s earthly rights. He had invested his life in protecting them. Among these many rights were those over the fishing on the Beaulieu river. ‘Villainy!’ he shouted. ‘Sacrilege.’ The monks rolling their barrels stopped and turned. ‘Brother Mark,’ the prior called, ‘Brother Benedict …’ He started pointing at one brother after another. ‘Fetch the skiff. Come with me.’

One did not need inspiration to guess what had happened. A party of men had been seen fishing – openly casting nets from a boat – further down the river. Worse, one of them was a merchant from Southampton, where the burgesses had stoutly maintained that they, too, had fishing rights, older than the abbey’s, on the river. This was just the kind of battle, Grockleton believed, that God had intended him to fight.

It is not every day that God calls those who have forsworn all worldly delights to the excitement of the chase. In, it seemed, the twinkling of an eye, a skiff containing three monks was skimming downstream while two parties, each of a dozen monks and lay brothers, were hurrying down the river banks. Leading the one down the western bank, his staff in his hand, his bent back causing him to lean forward like an attacking goose, was Grockleton. Brother Adam attached himself, unasked, to his party.

They kept up a remarkable pace. Using his staff as though it were an extra leg, the prior punted himself forward so fast that some of the monks had to lift their habits and almost run as they bustled along at his heels. Two of the lay brothers were allowed to run ahead to scout. For over a mile the path led through oak woods before emerging on to a big marshy bend of the river; and no sooner had they appeared than they heard a cry from the skiff on their left and at the same moment saw their quarry ahead of them, just below the bend.

The Southampton men had a big, clinker-built boat with a single mast and eight oars. As there was no sign of a sail, they presumably intended to row themselves round the coast back to Southampton. Their nets were still out in the river but, with infernal cheek, three of them had built a little fire on the river bank and were in the act of cooking themselves a meal. From the quality of his dress, Adam guessed that one of these was a merchant of some position. This was confirmed when the prior hissed: ‘Henry Totton.’ The man even owned the warehouses next to their own woolhouse near the quay.

‘Trespassers!’ Grockleton’s voice honked across the marsh. ‘Villains. Desist at once.’

Totton looked up, surprised. It seemed to Adam that he muttered something, then shrugged. His two companions seemed uncertain what to do. But there could certainly be no doubt about the attitude of the people in the boat.

There were five of them. One, in the bow, was a curious-looking fellow. Though at least two hundred yards off, there was no mistaking him because, apart from his black hair, which was pulled back and tied behind his neck, his straggly beard could not conceal the fact that, once it had descended past his mouth, his face had decided to cut down straight into his neck, dispensing almost completely with the boring necessity of a chin. There was a certain cheerfulness in his face, which suggested he was pleased with this arrangement. And it was this fellow who now, turning slowly, with no particular malice but more as a general salutation, looked straight at the prior and, raising his arm, lifted a solitary finger.

To Grockleton, it might have been an arrow from a bow. ‘Impious dog!’ he screamed. ‘Seize them,’ he shouted, pointing at the men on the bank. ‘Beat them,’ he cried, waving his staff.

For just an instant his followers hesitated. Some looked round for sticks to use as weapons. Others clenched their fists in preparation before dashing upon the men by the campfire.

It was only an instant, but Brother Adam used it. ‘Stop!’ he shouted, in a voice of authority. He knew he was cutting across the prior, but he had to. Moving swiftly to Grockleton’s side, he murmured quickly: ‘Prior, if we use violence, I think the men in the boat might attack us.’ He pointed, as if he were drawing something to his attention that Grockleton had not seen before. ‘Even with right on our side,’ he added with deference, ‘after the trouble at the grange …’

The sense was clear. The reputation of the abbey would hardly be enhanced if the prior started a brawl.

‘If we have their names,’ Adam added, ‘we can bring them to justice.’ He paused and held his breath.

Grockleton’s reaction was curious. He gave a little start, as if he had been awoken from a dream. He stared at Adam for a moment, apparently uncomprehending. The brethren were all watching him. ‘Brother Adam,’ he suddenly said loudly, ‘take their names and identify them. If any show resistance we shall overpower them.’

‘Yes, Prior.’ Adam bowed his head and went forward promptly. After a few steps he turned and requested respectfully: ‘May I take two brothers with me, Prior?’

Grockleton nodded. Adam indicated two of the monks, then hurried about his task.

He had done all he could to save the prior’s face. He hoped it had worked. So he was dismayed when, as soon as they were out of Grockleton’s hearing, one of his companions muttered: ‘You really showed the prior up then, Brother Adam.’

For he knew that Grockleton would never forgive him now.

A week later, in a secluded part of the western forest, two men rested quietly by their little campfire and waited.

A few yards away, adding to the shadowy mystery of the scene, stood a huge, turf-covered mound and, from holes here and there in its sides, wisps of smoke were issuing. Puckle and Luke were making charcoal.

The charcoal burner’s craft is very ancient and requires much skill. During the winter Puckle would cut the huge quantity of sticks and logs – the billets as they are called. All the main forest woods – oak and ash, beech, birch and holly – were good for charcoal. Then, late in the spring, he would construct his first fire.

The charcoal burner’s fire is unlike any other. It is huge. Slowly and carefully, Puckle would begin by laying out logs in a great circle, about fifteen feet in diameter. By the time he finally completed it, the mountain of wood stood over eight feet high. Then, climbing up a curved ladder on to his mighty construction, Puckle would coat the entire pile with a skin of soil and turf, so that when it was done it resembled a mysterious grassy kiln. He lit it from the top. ‘Charcoal fire burns downwards,’ he explained. ‘Now we just wait.’

‘How long?’ Luke had asked.

‘Three, four days.’

The charcoal cone is a wonderful machine. Its object is to convert the moist and resinous wood within to a material which is, as near as possible, pure carbon. To do this it is necessary to char the wood without allowing it to burn away and oxidize to useless ash, and this is achieved by restricting the oxygen within the cone to a minimum, hence the turf sides. The process is also slowed and controlled by burning the material downwards, which is more gradual. The resulting charcoal is light, easy to transport and, once heated in a brazier to a point when it ignites, will burn slowly, without a flame and giving off a heat far more intense than does the wood from which it is derived.

By the end of a day, the first time they had done this, Luke noticed that the smoke from the holes was steamy and that the upper sides of the cone were moist.

‘That’s called sweating,’ Puckle said. ‘Water’s coming out of the wood.’

On the third day, towards the completion of the process, Luke noticed that tarry waste was coming out through the run-offs at the base. At the end of that day Puckle announced: ‘It’s done. All we have to do now is wait for it to cool.’

‘How long’s that?’

‘Couple of days.’

They would fill their little cart many times with the charcoal from that cone.

Luke was happy as a charcoal burner. These men lived out in the Forest mostly; seldom seen, hardly noticed. It was a perfect role for him, especially as the area around Burley where Puckle operated was far from the abbey, and the forest officials in that bailiwick did not know him. The work was undemanding. While the fire was burning he could wander off to roam the woods or watch Mary whenever he liked.

Puckle was quite content to shelter him. The woodman had always been a law unto himself. His family was extended, what with his own children, his dead brother’s and various other family progeny whose origins no one ever bothered to enquire about. So when a forester had once asked him who his assistant was, and he had casually replied ‘one of my nephews’, the man had just nodded and thought no more about it.

He could remain out in the Forest with Puckle, Luke reckoned, at least for some months. Only Puckle’s family knew about him. They didn’t talk.

‘Fewer people that know the better,’ Puckle had said. ‘You’ll be safe that way.’

Even so, Luke could not suppress a small shudder of alarm that May afternoon when Puckle, suddenly glancing up, remarked: ‘Hello. Look who’s coming.’ And then added quietly: ‘Do as I told you, now.’

Brother Adam rode his pony slowly. He was feeling rather listless. He thought he knew why. He even muttered the word to himself: ‘Acedia.’ Every monk knew the state. Acedia – the Latin word had no real equivalent in the English tongue. A falling away, into boredom, depression, listlessness; one’s feelings seemed to have died; a sense of nothingness; a numbness, as when a tolling bell is heard but never answered. It came to him some afternoons, like a drowsiness, or at certain times of year – midwinter, when nothing was happening, or late summer, after the harvest was done. One had to fight it, of course. It was only the devil, trying to sap one’s spirit and weaken the faith. Hard work was the best way.

He had certainly been doing that. He had been over in the Avon valley in the last few days. Great cartloads of hay would wend across the Forest from there when the meadows were mown. Lodging at Ringwood, he had gone up and down the river inspecting every meadow. He had practically inspected the peasants’ scythes. Three lay brothers would be despatched to oversee operations and he would be supervising them himself. Not even Grockleton could suggest that he had been neglecting his duty.

For once, he had to confess, he had been glad to be away from the abbey. The days after the incident on the river had been strained. It was the duty of every monk to put all evil thoughts and intentions away from him and to be charitable to all his brothers, and, like him or not, Grockleton had probably tried in all sincerity to do this. But Adam’s presence just then could not fail to be irritating to him, and so Adam was glad to go.

But now he had to return, and he didn’t want to. By the time he reached Burley he was already depressed; hardly aware that he was doing so, he had let his pony take a wrong track and he was cutting across the woods to the proper path, a little guiltily, when he saw the charcoal burners at their work.

A year ago he would probably have ridden by without more than a quick salutation, but now it seemed natural to pause and speak with them. And if it was also an excuse to delay his return a little, he did so all the same.

The woodman was standing beside the small campfire; the second fellow had moved away a little, to the other side of the smoking charcoal cone. Brother Adam thought he had seen Puckle before, delivering stakes for the abbey’s vines the previous year. The younger man had also looked vaguely familiar, but as all these Forest folk were related that wasn’t surprising. Looking down at Puckle, he asked in a friendly tone if the charcoal fire was nearly done.

‘Another day,’ Puckle replied.

Adam asked a few more obvious questions – where Puckle came from, who the charcoal would be sold to. An easy topic of conversation with any of the forest folk, better even than the weather, was the movement of the deer.

‘I thought I might see the red deer over by Stag Brake,’ he remarked.

‘No, they’ll be nearer Hinchelsea now, most likely.’

Adam nodded. Then his eyes went over to the charcoal cone behind which the other fellow was lurking. ‘You’ve only the one helper?’ he asked.

‘Just one today,’ Puckle replied. Then, quite casually, he called out: ‘Peter. Come here, boy.’ And Brother Adam looked curiously as the young man came towards him.

He seemed shy as he shuffled forward. His head was bowed, his eyes were cast down. His jaw appeared to be hanging slackly. A rather pathetic specimen, really, the monk thought. But not wishing to be unkind he enquired: ‘So, Peter, have you ever been to Beaulieu?’

The young man seemed to start but then mumbled something incoherent.

‘He’s my nephew,’ Puckle remarked. ‘Doesn’t talk much.’

Brother Adam stared at the shaggy head before him. ‘We use your charcoal to heat the church,’ he said encouragingly, but couldn’t think of anything else to add.

‘That’s all right, boy,’ Puckle said quietly, waving the young man away. ‘Actually,’ he confided to the monk, as his nephew withdrew, ‘he’s a bit simple in the head.’

As if to give living proof of this fact, as he reached the great smoking cone, the fellow paused, half turned, pointed at the charcoal cone and in a voice of perfect imbecility uttered a single word: ‘Fire.’ Then he sat down.

Adam should have moved on, but for some reason he didn’t. Instead, he remained a while with the charcoal burner and his nephew, sharing the quiet of the scene. What a strange sight it was, that huge turf cone. Who knew what mighty heat, what ardent fire was contained, quite hidden, in that great green mound? Then there was its smoke, issuing silently from the crevices in its sides, as though from Tartarus, or the infernal region itself, deep below. An amusing thought suddenly struck him. What if Puckle, here, deep in the New Forest, was really guarding the entrance to hell? The thought caused him to observe the charcoal burner once again.

He had not noticed before what a curious figure Puckle really was. Perhaps it was the shadowy setting, or the reddish gleam from the embers of the campfire, but suddenly his gnarled form looked as if he were a gnome, his weathered, oaken face seemed to take on a mysterious glow. Was it devilish? He chided himself for his foolishness. Puckle was just a harmless peasant. And yet there was something about him that was unknowable. There was a heat, deep, hidden, strong – a heat he himself did not seem to possess. At last, with a nod, he gave his pony a light kick and moved off.

‘Dear God,’ Luke laughed, as soon as he was out of sight. ‘I thought he was never going.’

He should not have taken the way he did. After passing the little church at Brockenhurst, Brother Adam had followed a track that led southwards through the woods and brought him to the quiet ford in the river. The place was as deserted as when Adela and Tyrrell had used it. On the other side of the ford however, at the top of the long path that led up from it through the woods, the broad shelf of land had been cleared into several large fields, which the monks supervized.

Ahead, over the lip of this cleared land under the open sky, lay Beaulieu Heath and the track that led eastwards towards the abbey. That was the path he should have taken. But instead he turned south. He told himself it made no difference, but that wasn’t true.

He kept to the edge of the woods. After a time he came to a track on the right. Down there, he knew, set alone on a dark knoll looking over the river valley, was the old parish church of Boldre. He did not go there, though. He continued southwards. Soon he came to a small cow station, a vaccary as they were called, with pasture for thirty cows and a bull, and a few cottages: Pilley. He hardly noticed it.

Why had the woman come into his mind – the peasant woman who had stood in front of him in the barn? There was no reason he could think of. He was bored. It was nothing. He went on, nearly another mile. Then he came to the hamlet. Oakley it was named.

He could go across the heath just as well from there.

The villages of the New Forest were the same as ever. They seldom had a centre. They straggled, sometimes by a stream, or along the edge of open heathland. No manorial lord had coerced them into a tidy shape. The same thatched cottages, homesteads with small wooden barns, smallholdings all, rather than farms, declared that these were the communities of equals that had nestled in the Forest since ancient times.

The track through Oakley ran east–west and had the usual forest surface of peaty mud and gravel. Instead of turning east, Adam turned west and walked his pony along. There were several cottages, but after less than a quarter of a mile these ended and the track then started to descend, between deep banks, into the river valley. He noticed that the last place, which lay on the northern side of the track, was a homestead with several outbuildings including a small barn. Behind it lay a paddock, some open ground dotted with gorse and beyond that woodland.

He wondered if this was where the woman lived. If she appeared, he supposed he would stop and ask politely after her husband. There could be no harm in that. He took his time turning his pony, to see if anyone came out, but nobody did. He paused, surveying the other cottages, then went slowly back. At the point where he had started he saw a peasant and asked him who lived at the homestead he had passed.

‘Tom Furzey, Brother,’ the fellow replied.

He was aware of a little leaping sensation in his stomach. He nodded calmly at the peasant and glanced back. So that was where she lived. He suddenly wanted to turn. But with what excuse? He exchanged a word or two more with the peasant, remarked casually that he had never looked at this village but then, fearing he might look foolish, went on.

At its eastern end, the hamlet gave on to a green with a pond at the side. The last homestead here, somewhat larger than the others and with a field beside it, belonged, he knew, to Pride. There were some stunted oak, small ash and willows dotted along the edges of the pond, which was covered with white water crowfoot.

The track went past Pride’s, then out on to the heath.

He rode slowly across. It was marshy in places. Had he crossed further to the north it would have been drier.

He was sorry he had not seen the woman.

When he was halfway across, he saw the dull light catching the pale mud walls of a sheepcote out on the heath. Beyond, lay the fields of Beufre grange.

Soon he would be back at the abbey.

Acedia.

Tom Furzey was so pleased with himself that when he was alone he would sit there silently hugging himself with joy. He was honestly astonished that he’d been able to think of it all. The plan was so subtle, so full of irony, it had such perfect symmetry; Tom might not know such words as these, but he would have understood them, every one.

The thing had come out of the blue sky. John Pride’s wife had a brother who had gone to Ringwood and now he was getting married there; a good marriage, to a butcher’s daughter with money. The whole Pride family were going. Better yet, Tom’s sister had informed him: ‘They’ll be staying late at Ringwood. Won’t come back till next day at dawn.’

‘All of them?’ he’d asked.

‘Except young John.’ This was Pride’s eldest son, a boy of twelve. ‘He’s got to look after the animals. And the pony.’ She had given him a little look when she said that.

‘Set me thinking, that did,’ he had said to her proudly, later, when he told her his plan.

She was the only one who knew, because he needed her help. She had been impressed by it, too. ‘I reckon you’ve thought of everything, Tom,’ she said.

Sure enough, on the day, the Prides departed early to Ringwood in their cart. The morning was warm and sunny. Tom went about his business as usual. In the middle of the day he mended the door of the chicken house. It wasn’t until late afternoon that he told Mary: ‘We’re going to get my pony back today.’

He had been looking forward to her reaction and it was just as he had foreseen.

‘You can’t, Tom. It’ll never work.’

‘It’ll work.’

‘But John. He’ll …’

‘Nothing he can do.’

‘But he’ll be angry, Tom …’

‘Really? Seem to remember I was, too.’ He paused while she digested this. The best was yet to come. ‘There’s one other thing,’ he added placidly. ‘You’re the one that’s going to take it.’

‘No!’ She was horrified. ‘He’s my brother, Tom.’

‘It’s part of the plan. Vital, you might say.’ He took his time now, before delivering the final blow. ‘There’s something else you’ve got to do.’ And then he told her the rest of the plan.

She didn’t look at him, after he was done, as he had guessed she wouldn’t. She just looked down at the ground. She could refuse, of course. But if she did her life would hardly be worth living. It was no good pleading, pointing out how humiliating it would be for her. He didn’t care. He wanted it to be so. It was his revenge against them all. She wondered, when it was all over, where this would leave her. He’ll be cock of the walk, she thought. But he doesn’t really love me. And with this proof of his feelings she bowed her head. She would do it, to keep the family peace. But she would despise him. That would be her defence.

‘It’ll work,’ she heard him say quietly.

As the sun began to set, young John Pride felt quite pleased with himself. Of course, he’d fed the chickens and the pigs, cleaned out the cowshed and done every other job about the place a thousand times before. But he’d never been left in charge for a whole day and he’d been understandably nervous. Now all he had to do was bring the pony in from the field.

He’d been careful of the pony, exactly as his father had told him. Never let it out of his sight all day. Just to be really sure, he was going to sleep in the shed that night.

The scream that cut the evening air came from close by. Tom Furzey’s sister only lived across the green. She and John Pride didn’t speak much since the pony business, but their children saw one another most days. You couldn’t do much about that. And the scream came from Harry, a boy his own age.

‘Help!’

He ran out of the yard and across the green, skirting the edge of the pond. The sight that met his eyes was shocking. Harry’s mother was lying face down on the ground. She seemed to have slipped by the gate and maybe banged her head against the post. She was lying very still. Harry was trying to lift her, without success. Just as he got there her husband and Tom Furzey came out of their cottage. Tom must have been visiting. The rest of her children came as well.

Tom was all action, knelt down beside his sister, felt her neck for a pulse, turned her over, glanced up. ‘She’s not dead. Hit her head, I reckon. You boys’ – he gave young John a quick nod – ‘take her legs, then.’ He and her husband each lifted under her arms, and they carried her into the cottage. ‘You better go out now,’ Tom told the children. He was gently patting his sister’s cheek as they left.

John hung about there for a few minutes. Another neighbour came by. He didn’t notice anyone over by the Pride farmstead, though.

After only a few moments Tom came out and gave them all a smile. ‘She’s coming round. Nothing to worry about.’ Then he went back in.

A few moments later John thought he’d better go back to his home. He walked round the pond and into the small yard. He glanced into the paddock and didn’t immediately see the pony. He frowned, looked again. Then, rushing round, with an awful, sinking sense of panic, young John Pride saw that the field was empty. The pony had gone.

But how? The gate was shut. The field was bordered by an earth wall and fence: surely it could not have jumped that. He ran to check the shed. It was empty. He dashed round on to the green and started running round it. Halfway, he saw Harry, who called to ask him what was up. ‘Pony’s gone,’ he cried.

‘Hasn’t been here,’ the boy replied. ‘I’ll come with you.’ And he ran with John back to the Pride farmstead. ‘Let’s try the heath,’ he shouted. So together they ran out on to Beaulieu Heath.

The sun was sinking now. A reddish glaze was covering the heather and the gorse cast dark shadows. Here and there, sure enough, were the dark forms of ponies by the brakes. Young Pride looked out desperately.

Then his companion nudged him and pointed. ‘Look there.’ It was the pony. He was sure of it. The little creature was standing by a gorse brake over half a mile away. The two boys started running towards it. But, as though it had seen them, the pony suddenly seemed to dart away, and vanished behind a dip in the ground.

Harry stopped. ‘We’ll never get him this way,’ he gasped. ‘We’d better ride after him. You can ride my pony. I’ll take my father’s. Come on.’

They hurried back. Young Pride was so anxious that he wouldn’t even wait to saddle up. So a short while later the two boys set off, with the red glow of the sunset behind them.

‘I reckon they’ll be out all night,’ Tom chuckled.

He had planned it all exactly and it had worked.

Some time after dark, Mary had led the pony through the woods behind their farmstead and he had helped her bring it into the little barn. There, with the door closed, they had inspected it by lamplight. It was even prettier than he had remembered. He could see, although she said nothing, that Mary was thinking the same thing. It was well into the night when they finally left, bolting the door behind them.

When Tom woke it was already past dawn and the sun could be seen above the horizon. He leaped up. ‘Feed the pony,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll send word when you’re to come.’ And without pausing, he hurried out of the cottage and along the track towards John Pride’s. He didn’t want to miss Pride’s face when he returned.

All was well. Pride was not yet back.

But his son was. Poor young John was sitting on the edge of the green with Harry beside him. He looked pale and miserable. They’d been out all night, said Harry, who’d followed his uncle’s instructions and never left the boy’s side. Now John would have to tell his father he’d let the pony escape.

Tom even felt a little sorry for the boy. But this was his day and all Prides must suffer.

He had rehearsed everything. People were starting to gather: his sister, tactfully wearing a bandage over her head, some of the other hamlet folk, a gaggle of children, all waiting to see the Prides’ return. Tom knew exactly what he was going to say.

‘That pony get out, then, John? I dunno how he did that.’ Hadn’t he been with young Pride just when it happened? Hadn’t his sister’s son pointed it out on the heath? ‘Out on the Forest, is he?’ That’s what he was going to say next. ‘You’d better go look for him, John. I reckon you’re good at finding ponies, John.’

But the best bit of all was going to come next. As soon as Pride appeared, young Harry was to run and fetch Mary. And now Mary would come up the track and call out: ‘Oh, Tom, guess what. I just found that pony of ours wandering on the heath.’

‘Better put it in the barn, Mary,’ he’d reply.

‘I have, Tom,’ she’d say.

And what was John Pride going to do when his sister said that? What was he going to do about that, then?

‘Oh, sorry about that, John,’ he’d cry. ‘I reckon he just wanted to come home.’

It was going to be the best moment of his entire life.

Minutes passed. People chatted quietly. The sun was a watery yellow, just over the trees. The dew was still thick on the ground.

‘Here they come,’ a child called. And Tom made an imperceptible nod to young Harry, who slipped away.

Mary had stood for a while in the little barn after she had gone in to feed the pony. At first she had been so surprised that she had just stared. Then she had frowned. Finally, after glancing up at the loft where she had spent so many happy hours that winter, she nodded.

That must be it. She couldn’t see any other explanation. She even whispered, ‘Are you there?’ But this was met only by silence. Then she sighed. ‘I suppose’, she murmured, ‘that’s your idea of a joke.’ She hardly knew whether to laugh or cry.

She walked outside after that, and went over to the fence and looked across the open ground to the trees. She half expected a signal, but there was none. Forgetting even the pony for a few moments, she stood gazing out, as if in a dream.

This was his way of letting her know he was there, watching over her. She felt a warm rush of happiness. Then she shook her head. ‘But what have you done now, Luke?’ she muttered.

Then young Harry appeared.

It had all gone to plan. Tom was almost chortling to himself with pleasure and excitement. The words had all been said, John Pride was looking at his son like thunder; the boy was close to tears. The whole hamlet was enjoying the joke as the Prides got out of their cart looking uncomfortable.

‘Better check none of your other animals is missing,’ he called out. ‘Maybe they all walked off! Eh?’ He had only just thought of that one. He was so pleased with it, and the laughs it produced, that he went even further. ‘Something about your place they don’t like, then, is it, John? Something they don’t like?’

Oh, they were laughing now. He glanced at the track. Mary should be arriving any moment. The final surprise. The triumph. She’d better hurry up, though. While everyone was there.

One of Pride’s younger children had run round to the cowshed, just to see for herself. She returned now, looking puzzled. She was tugging at Pride’s jerkin, saying something. He saw Pride frown and then walk round to the cowshed himself. Oh, this was rich! Now Pride was returning, looking straight at him. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about, Tom Furzey,’ he called out. ‘That pony’s in the cowshed.’

Silence. Tom stared. Pride shrugged, contemptuous now, after his shock. Still Tom stared. It was impossible.

He couldn’t help himself. He ran forward. He ran straight past Pride, through the yard to the cowshed. He looked in. The pony was tethered there. One look was enough. You couldn’t mistake it. For just an instant the thought flashed through his mind to take it, seize the rope and lead it out with him. But it would never work. In any case, the pony itself was hardly the point now. He turned and came back.

‘Whoah, Tom. Something wrong there, Tom?’ The joke was on him now. The little crowd was having its fun.

‘Run back home and lock himself in, did he, Tom?’ ‘Where did you think he was, Tom?’ ‘We know you was worried about him.’ ‘Don’t you worry, Tom. That pony’s safe now.’

John Pride was looking at him, too; but not exactly laughing. He was still puzzled. You could see that.

Tom walked past him. He walked past the crowd. He didn’t even look at his own sister. He went along the edge of the pond and down the lane.

How? It was impossible. Had somebody tipped Pride off? No. There wasn’t time. Pride hadn’t known. You could see that. Had his son guessed what had happened and stolen the pony back? Couldn’t have. Young Harry was with him all night. Who even knew? His sister and her family. Had one of them been talking? He doubted it. Anyway, he didn’t think anyone in the hamlet was going to do John Pride’s work for him.

Mary. The only link left. Could she have gone out in the night while he slept? Or got someone else to do it? He couldn’t believe it. But then, he thought, he couldn’t believe the way she’d behaved over the pony in the first place.

He didn’t know. He supposed he’d never know. One thing was sure: if he’d been made to look a fool before, he looked twice as big a fool now. It doesn’t matter where I walk, he thought, the ground is always going to be shifting under my feet.

She was standing in the yard alone when he got back. Just looking at him. Not saying anything. But you could see she knew there’d be trouble. Well, if that was what she wanted she could have it.

As he reached her, therefore, he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t going to, either. But suddenly swinging, with an open hand, he struck her across the face as hard as he liked and she crashed to the ground.

He didn’t care.

Harvest time. Long summer days. Lines of men in smocks, with long scythes, working their way slowly, rhythmically across golden fields. Lay brothers in white habits and black aprons, following behind with scythes and sickles. The air thick with dust; fieldmice and other tiny creatures patter and scuttle to the droning hedgerows; flies in summer swarms, everywhere.

The sky was cloudless, deep blue; the heavy heat of the sun was oppressive. But already showing itself in one quarter of the sky, a huge full moon was gently rising.

Brother Adam sat calmly on his horse. He had been to Beufre; now he was at St Leonards. He was going across the heath after that, to the fields above the little ford. He was being vigilant.

The abbot had come back the week before, then gone again, to London. Before going he had given Adam particular directions. ‘Be especially careful at harvest time, Adam. That’s when we have the most hired hands. Take care they don’t drink or get into trouble.’

A cart was coming up the track, pulled by a great affer, as the Beaulieu men called a carthorse. In it were loaves of bread from the abbey bakery, made from the coarser ‘family’ flour for the workers, and barrels of beer.

‘They’re to have only Wilkin le Naket,’ Adam had firmly instructed. This was the weakest of the several abbey beers. It would quench their thirst, but no one would get drunk or sleepy. He glanced up at the sun. When the cart arrived, he would declare a rest period. He looked across the other way in the direction of the heath. The wheat in the next field had been harvested the day before.

And there he saw the woman, Mary, dressed in a simple kirtle, tied at the waist, coming towards him across the stubble.

Mary took her time. Tom was not expecting her. That was the point. She was carrying a little basket of wild strawberries she had picked for him.

What does a woman do when she is forced to live with a man? When there is no escape; when there are children to share? What does she do when she lives in a farmstead where a marriage is over and yet is not?

They had been cold to each other for so long and, even though she did not love him, she couldn’t bear it any more. What did it take, then, to save a marriage? A little gift, a show of love. Perhaps, if she were determined, if love were returned, she might even somehow manage to feel love again herself. Or near enough to get by. This was her hope.

The pony was never mentioned now. Tom didn’t want to think about it, probably didn’t even want it back, she guessed. Once or twice, on some pretext like, ‘I just need to drop this at John’s’ she had been to her brother’s, and Tom had made no comment. She had been careful always to come straight back. Perhaps, in time, she could stay a little longer. Luke she had not seen or heard from. A few times Tom had mentioned him. He might have suspected he was in the Forest somewhere. It was hard to tell.

To outward appearances they seemed tranquil enough. But never once, since the incident in May, had there been any intimacy between them. Tom had been quiet, but cold – or evasive, which was the same thing. When the harvest had come, at which time the hired men often slept out at the granges or in the fields, he had seemed glad of the chance to go, and made no attempt to return home at nights.

She entered the field just as Brother Adam gave the order for the men to rest.

Tom was surprised to see her. He even looked a shade embarrassed as she came towards him and gave him the basket, explaining: ‘I picked them for you.’

‘Oh.’ He didn’t, it seemed, want to show feelings in front of the other men, so he turned up his scythe and started to sharpen it with a small whetstone.

The men were moving over towards the cart where a lay brother was dispensing beer. Tom had his own wooden mug tied with a thong to his belt. She untied it and went to fetch some beer, then stood quietly by while he drank.

‘You came a long way,’ he said at last.

‘It’s nothing,’ she answered and smiled. ‘The children are all well,’ she added. ‘They’ll be glad when you’re back.’

‘Oh yes. I dare say.’

‘So will I.’

He took another gulp of the thin beer, muttered, ‘Oh, yes’, and non-committally went back to sharpening the scythe again.

Some of the other men were coming over now. There were nods to Mary, an inspection of the basket, some appreciative murmurs: ‘That’s nice.’ ‘Nice strawberries your missus brought you there, Tom.’ ‘Be sharing them will you, then?’ The mood of the little group was rather jolly. Tom, still a little cautious, went so far as to say: ‘Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t.’ Mary, relieved by the light-hearted mood, was anxious to laugh.

So the conversation went on, as it often does when people really have nothing to say, each person feeling obliged to keep the little stream of laughter going at the centre while, at the edges, those of a different humour form eddies, their muttered jokes and darker comments sometimes curling away and sometimes re-entering the stream.

‘Them Prides look after you,’ came now from the centre. ‘Here’s Tom with strawberries and the rest of us got nothing.’

Mary laughed gladly at this friendly comment and smiled at Tom.

‘I ’spect Tom gets everything he wants, eh, Tom?’ from the edges. Though a bit cheeky and sadly inaccurate, Mary laughed at this, too, and Tom, a little flummoxed, looked down at the ground.

But then some evil spirit caused one of the younger men at the edge of the group to cry out in a raucous voice: ‘If you’d married her brother, Tom, you could have got a pony!’

And again Mary laughed. She laughed because they were laughing. She laughed because she was anxious to please. She laughed because she was caught, for a moment, by surprise. She laughed only for an instant before, realizing what had been said, and seeing Tom’s stunned face, she checked herself. Too late.

Tom saw something different. Tom saw her laughing at him. Tom saw her gift for what he’d suspected it was, a ploy like giving an apple to a pony to keep him happy. These Prides were all the same. They thought they could just hoodwink you and you’d be so stupid you wouldn’t notice. They’d even do it in front of other people to make a bigger fool out of you. Tom saw her openly laughing at him and then check herself as if she’d suddenly thought: oh dear, he’s noticed. He saw even greater mockery and contempt in that. And all the pent-up resentment and rage of that spring and summer rose up inside him again.

His round face flushed. With his boot he kicked the little basket, scattering the tiny strawberries in a red spray across the stubble. ‘You can get out of here,’ he told Mary. Then he swung his arm so that the back of his hand caught her across the face. ‘That’s right. Go on,’ he called.

So, choking, Mary turned and walked away. She heard their murmurs, some voices raised in remonstrance with Tom, but she didn’t look back and she didn’t want to. It wasn’t the blow that stunned her. She could understand it. But it was the tone of his voice which, it seemed to her, said plainly, in front of them all, that he did not care about her any more.

Brother Adam had been some way off when this happened, but he had seen it all and he could hardly let it pass. Walking across to the group, he told Furzey sharply: ‘You are on abbey lands. This sort of behaviour is not tolerated here. And you should not treat your wife in such a way.’

‘Oh?’ Tom looked at him defiantly. ‘You never had a wife, so what do you know, monk?’ There were looks all round at this. What would the monk do?

‘Control yourself,’ Adam said and turned away.

But Tom had worked himself up too far. ‘I can say what I like to you! And you just keep your nose out of business that don’t concern you,’ he shouted.

Brother Adam stopped. He knew he couldn’t let it go at that; and he was about to turn and order Furzey off the field when he thought of the woman. Fortunately, the lay brother in charge was standing close by. He turned to him instead. ‘Take no notice and leave him be,’ he ordered calmly. ‘There’s no point in his going after his wife when he’s in this state.’ He said it just loudly enough for a couple of the other hired men to hear. Retribution would have to follow, of course, but not now.

Then he went across to his horse and rode away. It was time to inspect the fields across the heath.

He had paused to talk to the shepherds near Bergerie, so it was not until he reached the open heath that he caught sight of her. He did not know whether he had supposed he might see her or not.

He hesitated, watching her for a little while as she walked through the heather. He saw her almost stumble. Then he urged his horse towards her.

As he drew close, she must have heard him, for she turned. There was a red mark across her face and it was clear that she had been crying. She still had almost three miles to go, across rough terrain.

‘Come.’ He leaned down, stretching out his arm to her. ‘Your village is on my way.’ She didn’t argue and a moment later, surprised at the monk’s strength, she found herself lifted up and placed easily astride the big horse’s withers in front of him.

They went at a slow pace over the heath, taking care to skirt the marshy ground. Far away on the right they saw a flock of the abbey sheep moving across the landscape.

The sun beat down heavily; the heather was a purple haze, its sweet scent heady as honeysuckle. The full moon added its strange silver presence to the azure sky.

They rode in silence, Brother Adam’s arms holding the reins around her body, and neither spoke until they were ascending the slope from a little stream in the middle of the heath, when she asked: ‘You are going up to the fields above the ford?’

‘Yes, but I can take you to the village.’ It only meant a detour of a mile of so.

‘I’d sooner walk down from where you’re going. There’s a back way through the woods. I don’t want them all to see me with my face like this.’

‘What about your children, though?’

‘At my brother’s. I’ll collect them this evening.’

Brother Adam said nothing. There was a stretch of flat open heath in front of them, beyond that, about a half a mile away, a screen of trees, which hid the vaccary of Pilley beyond. There was not a soul to be seen, only a few cattle and ponies.

He felt hot, and observed that little beads of sweat had formed at the nape of Mary’s neck and the back of her shoulders, which had become exposed under her kirtle. He could smell her salty skin – it seemed to him like wheat with a faint tang of warm leather from her soft shoes. He noticed the way her dark hair grew from the paler skin of her neck. Her breasts, not large but full, were only just above his wrists, almost touching. Her legs, strong peasant’s legs, but nicely shaped, had become exposed from the knees down as they rode.

And suddenly it came to him, with a rush, a vivid urgency that he had never experienced before: that foolish peasant Furzey could hold this woman, become intimate with this body, any time that he wished. In his head he had always known it, of course. It was obvious. But now, suddenly, for the first time in his life, the simple physical reality hit him like a wave. Dear God, he almost cried out, this is the daily life, the world of such simple fellows. And I have never known it. Had he missed life – had he missed it all? Was there another voice in the universe, warm, blinding like the sun, echoing, racing in his veins, that he had never heard in those star-filled silences in his cloister? And, taking him utterly by surprise, he felt a sudden sense of jealousy against Furzey and the whole world. All the world has known it, he thought, but not I.

They still did not speak as they entered the screen of trees that reached out like a curving arm on to the heath. The woods were empty, the dappled light falling softly through the summer leaves. It was quiet as a church.

Once or twice he caught a glimpse, across the fields, of one of the thatched roofs of the hamlet cottages, golden in the sun. Then, as the wood curved southwards, the track went deeper into the trees, along the crest of the little gulf that led down to the river. They had gone some way, making an arc round the hamlet, when she pointed to the left and he turned the big horse off the path and rode through the trees.

After a short while she nodded. ‘Here.’

He saw now that they were only twenty paces from where the trees gave way to some gorse bushes and a small paddock. Dismounting, he reached up and lifted her gently to the ground.

She turned. ‘You must be hot,’ she said simply. ‘I will give you water.’

He hesitated, took a moment to reply. ‘Thank you.’ He tethered his horse to a tree and rejoined her. He was curious, he supposed, to see more closely the farmstead where she passed her days.

They could not be seen from the next cottage as they crossed the paddock. The gate in the paddock fence gave on to the small yard. The cottage was on the left, the barn on the right. By the barn was a rick of cut bracken, like a miniature haystack. She disappeared into the cottage for a moment, then came out with a wooden cup and a pitcher of water. She poured the water into the cup, placed the pitcher on the ground and then, without a word, went back into the cottage.

He drank. Then refilled the cup. The water was delightfully cool. The hamlet’s water, like that from many of the forest streams, had a fresh, sharp taste, like fern. She did not reappear at once, but he decided it would be impolite to leave without thanking her; so he waited.

When she returned he saw that she had bathed her face. The cold water had already lessened the redness of the mark on her cheek. Her hair had been brushed; her kirtle somewhat pulled down so that the tops of her breasts were slightly exposed – from the act of washing he imagined.

‘I hope you feel better.’

‘Yes.’ Her dark-blue eyes surveyed him thoughtfully, it seemed to Adam. Then she gave a faint smile. ‘You must see my animals,’ she said. ‘I’m very proud of them.’

So he followed her, attentive as a knight upon a lady, as she led him round her domain.

She took her time. She fed the chickens and told him their names. They inspected the pigs. The cat had just had kittens; they duly admired them.

But most of all he admired the woman who was leading him. It was remarkable to him how well she had recovered her equanimity. Her face was calm; she looked refreshed. When she told him the chickens’ names she had a faintly ironic smile. They seemed so apposite – one or two were rather witty – that he asked her if she had thought of them all.

‘Yes.’ She gave him a wry look. ‘My husband goes to the fields. I name the chickens.’ She gave a little shrug and he thought of the scene in the field that he had witnessed. ‘That’s my life,’ she said.

He felt a tenderness as well as admiration. He felt protective; he hovered beside her, watching all that she did. How gracefully she moved. He had not realized before. Although quite sturdily built, she was light on her feet and she walked with a delightful swinging motion. Once or twice, as she knelt down to tend her animals, he observed the firm line of her thighs and the lovely curves of her body. When she reached up, almost on tiptoe, to pull down an apple from the tree and the sunlight caught her, he saw her breasts in perfect silhouette.

The afternoon sun was warm upon him. As well as the faint smells of the yard, he detected honeysuckle. It was strange: in her presence, now, everything – the animals, the apple tree, even the blue sky above – suddenly seemed more real, more actual than they usually did.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘I have one more creature to visit. It’s in the barn.’ And she led the way past the rick, which scented the air with bracken.

He followed her, but at the door of the barn, instead of entering, she paused and glanced up at him. ‘I’m afraid this must be boring for you.’

‘No.’ He was taken aback. ‘I’m not bored at all.’

‘Well.’ She smiled. ‘A farm can’t be very interesting to you.’

‘When I was a child,’ he said simply, ‘I lived on a farm. Some of the time.’ It was quite true. His father had been a merchant, but his uncle had possessed a farm and he had spent part of his childhood there.

‘Well, well.’ She seemed amused. ‘A farm boy. Once upon a time.’ She gave a soft laugh. ‘A very long time ago.’

Then she reached up and gently touched his cheek. ‘Come,’ she said.

When had the idea taken shape in her mind? Mary was not quite certain herself. Was it out on the heath, when the handsome monk had rescued her, like a knight rescuing a damsel in distress? Was it the soothing motion of the horse, the feel of his strong arms around her?

Yes. Perhaps then. Or if not then exactly … It was probably when they had taken the track through the woods and she had thought: we are unseen. The village, her sister-in-law, even her brother – all unaware that she was passing close by with this stranger. Oh, yes, her heart had been pounding then.

And even if she had not been certain what she wanted before she arrived back, then surely she had known it when she washed her face. The tingling cold of the water on her brow and on her cheeks; she had pulled her kirtle down and some drops had fallen on her breasts; she had gasped and given a tiny shudder. And there, through the half-open door, she had seen him, waiting for her.

They entered the barn together. The creature to which Mary had referred was not part of the farmstead’s livestock. Instead, going into one corner and kneeling down, she showed him a small, straw-filled box. ‘I found him two days ago,’ she said.

It was just a blackbird, which had broken its wing. Mary had rescued it and made a tiny splint for the wing, and she was keeping it in the barn for safety until it was healed. ‘The cat can’t get at it here,’ she explained.

He knelt down beside her and, as she gently stroked the bird, he did the same, so that their hands lightly touched. Then he leaned back, watching her, while she continued to bend over the bird on its bed of straw.

She did not look at the monk. She was aware only of his presence.

It was strange: until today he had been just that for her – a presence, almost a spirit. Someone unobtainable, above her, forbidden, protected by his vows and reserved from the touch of all women. And yet, now she knew, he was also like other men.

And obtainable. She knew it was so. Her instinct told her. Although her husband might choose to humiliate her it was in her power to attract, to have this man, so infinitely superior to poor Tom Furzey.

Suddenly she was overcome by desire. She, modest Mary on her farmstead, had the power – here, now – to turn this innocent into a man. It was a thrilling, heady sensation.

‘See.’ She lifted the bird’s wing so that he would lean forward to touch it. As he did so, she half turned, so that her breasts brushed lightly against his chest. She slowly rose and stepped past him. Her leg touched his arm. Then she moved to the door of the barn, which was ajar, and stood gazing out at the bright sunlight. Her heart was beating faster.

For a moment she thought of her husband. But only for a moment. Tom Furzey did not value her. She owed him nothing more. She closed him out of her mind.

She was conscious of the sunlight upon her, of the tingling in her breasts and of a fluttering sensation that seemed to be spreading like a blush down her whole body. She closed the door of the barn and turned round. ‘I don’t want the cat to get in.’ She smiled.

She moved quietly towards him. The barn was shadowy but here and there the slivers of bright sunlight came in through cracks in the wooden walls. And as she came towards him he slowly rose, so that in a moment they were standing face to face, she looking up, almost touching.

And Brother Adam, who loved the voice of God in the great panoply of the stars at night, knew only that his universe had been invaded by a warmer, larger brightness that had caused the stars to vanish.

She reached up her arm, curving it behind his neck.

The summer afternoon was quiet. Far away, on the Beaulieu grange, the reapers had resumed their work and the faint drone of the hedgerows had been joined by the rhythmic hiss of scythes upon the stalks of golden wheat. By the little farmstead all seemed quiet. Now and then a bird fluttered in the trees. On the grassy verges the forest ponies moved occasionally as they grazed upon their shades or drank from the tiny streams and rivulets that still flowed in the summer dryness. Across the wide open heath the sun, watched by the pale moon, bore down upon the purple glow of the heather and the bursting yellow flower of the spiky gorse. And to the south, in the Solent channel, the sea tide ran and its healing waters washed the New Forest shore.

The morning service. The unchanging forms. The eternal words.

Laudate Dominum … Et in terra pax …

Prayer. Pater Noster, qui es in coelis …

Sixty monks, thirty each side of the aisle, each in his place, which only death can change. White habits, tonsured heads, voices all raised together in the nasal chanting of the unchanging psalms. The Cistercians had a precise, clipped form of Gregorian chant, which he had always found particularly satisfying. Laudate Dominum: Praise the Lord. Voices rising in strength, in joy, from the very fact that these psalms and prayers were the same five hundred years ago, and today, and for ever. The joy and comfort of the certain marriage, the knowledge that your fellowship is with the one order that has no end.

There they all were: the sacristan who was responsible for the church, the tall precentor leading the chant, the cellarer who looked after the brewery and the sub-cellarer who controlled all the fish. Dear Brother Matthew, now novice master, Brother James the almoner, Grockleton, his claw hooked round the end of his stall – grey-haired, fair-haired, tall or short, thin or fat, busy with their chant, yet watchful, the sixty or so monks of Beaulieu Abbey, joined by about thirty lay brothers down in the nave, were at their morning service all together and Brother Adam, too, was in his proper place among them.

There were no candles on the choir stalls this morning. The sacristan saw no need. The summer sun was already falling softly through the windows on to the gleaming oak stalls and forming little pools of light on the tiled floor.

Brother Adam looked around him. What was he singing? He’d forgotten. He tried to concentrate.

Then a terrible thought occurred to him. He was seized with a sense of panic. What if he had blurted something out? What if he had said her name? Or worse. Hadn’t his mind just been dwelling upon her body? The innermost recesses. The taste, the smell, the touch. Dear God, had he shouted something out? Was he doing so now, unaware of it?

They all sank down to pray. But Brother Adam did not murmur the words. He closed his mouth, clamped his tongue between his teeth just to make sure. He blushed with his sense of guilt and stole a look at the faces opposite. Had he said anything? Had they heard? Did they all know his secret?

It did not seem so. The tonsured heads were bowed in prayer. Was anyone stealing a furtive glance in his direction? Was Grockleton’s eye about to stare at him in terrible judgement?

It was not so much guilt that afflicted him; it was the terror that he might have blurted it out in that enclosed space. The morning service, instead of refreshing him, brought him only a nervous torture that day. He was relieved, when it ended, to get outside.

After breakfast, somewhat calmer, he went to see the prior.

The time of morning business in the prior’s office was normally given over to routine administration. But there were other matters that could come up. If, for the sake of the community’s well-being, it was necessary, as it was your duty to do, to make any personal reports – ‘I am afraid I saw Brother Benedict eating a double helping of herrings,’ or ‘Brother Mark went to sleep instead of doing his tasks yesterday’ – then that was when you did it.

Wondering whether anyone was going to report on him, he waited until the end before he went in. If he had been caught, he thought he’d sooner know now. When he finally joined Grockleton, however, the prior gave no sign of having such information.

‘I’m afraid’, he explained, ‘it’s Tom Furzey.’ He gave Grockleton a precise account of what had taken place in the field and the prior nodded thoughtfully.

‘You did quite right not to send the man home at that moment,’ Grockleton said. ‘He would probably have struck his poor wife again.’

‘He must go now, though,’ Adam pointed out. ‘We can’t have indiscipline.’ He knew the prior would heartily agree with that.

Yet instead, Grockleton paused. He eyed Adam thoughtfully. ‘I wonder,’ he said, pushing himself gently back in his chair with his claw, ‘if that is right.’

‘Surely, if a hired worker insults the monk in charge …’

‘Reprehensible, of course.’ Grockleton pursed his lips. ‘Yet perhaps, Brother Adam, we need to take a larger view.’

‘A larger view?’ This was indeed a new departure for the prior.

‘Perhaps it is better if this man and his wife are apart. He will miss her. Let us hope he will repent. In time one of us may speak to him, quietly.’

‘Doesn’t that leave me in an awkward position, Prior? He will feel – all the men may think – that they can speak to me rudely with impunity.’

‘Really? Do you think so?’ Grockleton looked down at the table where his claw was now very comfortably resting. ‘Yet sometimes, Brother Adam, we must work hard not to consider our own feelings, but the greater good of others. I have no doubt, if we leave Furzey where he is, that the work will still be done and well done. You will see to that. Perhaps you may imagine you look foolish – even feel humiliated. But we must all learn to live with that. It is part of our vocation. Don’t you agree?’ He smiled quite sweetly.

‘So Furzey must stay? Even if he is rude to me again?’

‘Yes.’

Brother Adam nodded. He’s paid me out nicely for humiliating him at the river, he thought, although that was really his fault and not mine. But it was not so much his public humiliation that he was thinking of, as he now bowed his head before the happy prior.

By sending Furzey away, he would have ensured that he returned home to his wife. That would make any further relations with her on his own part almost impossible. But now she would be alone. He wondered what would happen.

How little you know, John of Grockleton, he thought, what you may just have done.

Luke crept forward in the darkness. There was only a sliver left of the silver moon, but he could see well enough by the starlight. The horse was tethered to a tree about a hundred yards off. This was the third time he had seen it there.

He lay down at the edge of the tree line. He could see the little barn from there, the barn where he had spent so many winter nights. Behind him, in the woods that rose up from the small river valley by Boldre, an owl hooted. He waited patiently.

It was still some time before dawn when he saw the figure slip out from the barn and make its way silently along the edge of the paddock to the trees. It passed fifty yards away from him, but he had no doubt about the stranger’s identity. It was only a few moments before he heard the horse moving through the trees behind him.

Luke waited a little, then started to make his way towards the barn.

The abbot had still not returned when the news came that the Forest court would meet again just before Michaelmas and John of Grockleton thought for two days before deciding to take his own initiative. Before announcing it, however, he sent for Brother Adam.

There was no doubt, he thought, as the monk stood before him, that Adam looked uncommonly well. The weeks out in the fields had left him rather suntanned. He looked fitter, even taller. Since he knew that Adam would rather have been in the cloister, and as this almost muscular bearing was not really appropriate for a choir monk, Grockleton did not begrudge him his well-being. He only wanted to know one thing anyway. ‘Has any of the hired men heard anything of that runaway, Brother Luke?’

‘If they have,’ Adam answered with perfect truth, ‘they’ve said nothing to me.’

‘Do you think anyone knows where he is?’

Brother Adam paused. Mary had twice spoken to him of Luke. She had told him Luke’s version of events and, although he had never asked her directly, he assumed she knew that her brother was in the Forest somewhere. ‘I believe most of our hired hands think he’s left the Forest.’

‘The court is going to meet again. If he’s in the Forest, I want him found,’ said Grockleton. ‘What do you advise?’

Adam shrugged. ‘You know,’ he replied carefully, ‘there is a feeling that he may have been trying to prevent an affray. The justice himself did indicate that such a view could be taken. I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to let sleeping dogs lie.’

‘The court may take any view it likes,’ Grockleton snapped. ‘I’m supposed to produce him and I intend to. So I’m going to offer a reward. A price on his head.’

‘I see.’

‘Two pounds to anyone who can bring him in. I think that should concentrate the Forest people’s minds, don’t you?’

‘Two pounds?’ It was a small fortune to men like Pride and Furzey. His face fell as he thought of Mary and how worried she would be.

‘Something wrong?’ Grockleton was eyeing him sharply.

‘No. Not really, Prior.’ He recovered himself quickly. ‘It seems a lot.’

‘I know,’ said Grockleton, with a smile.

Sometimes, when Adam lay with Mary, he was overcome by a sense of wonder that such a thing should have happened at all.

They did not use any light. They did not dare. She would come out to the small barn late at night when the children were asleep – thank God they took so much exercise that they always slept soundly – and he, watching from the trees, would sneak across to meet her. He was getting good at that.

Once, the third time they had met, she had stood in a shaft of moonlight that came through a crack in the door and silently undressed before him. He had watched, entranced, as she took off her rough gown and stood, barefoot, in only her linen kirtle. With a little shake of her head she had let her dark hair fall loose over her shoulders. Then she had pulled down the kirtle, slowly exposing her full, pale breasts and, letting it drop to the floor, stepped out, turning her naked body towards him while he gasped.

It was all a revelation: the touch, the smell of her flesh as he explored her body without shame. When they were apart in the first days, her presence would come into his mind like a spirit, but soon he found his imagination dwelling on her body. He would tense with desire and lust as he thought of some new way to approach and possess her.

But it was more than that: her whole physical presence, her life, the way she thought; now that he had entered this new world, he wanted to know it all. Dear heaven, he thought, I had known God’s universe, yet missed His whole creation. Nor did he really feel guilty: that was the strangest thing. He was far too honest a man to deceive himself about it. He was proud of himself. Even the danger of the business only added to his pride and excitement. God knows, he considered, I have never done anything dangerous before.

And the threat to his immortal soul? Sometimes, when he was within her, in the full power of his passion, it seemed to him as though he had entered another landscape, as simple, as full of God’s echoing presence as the ancient desert was, before these ideas of celibacy were born. And at such times, whatever vows he had taken, it felt to Brother Adam as if his innermost soul had not been lost but found.

How long could it go on? He did not know. Furzey had made only brief visits to his home. He didn’t seem to want to spend time there, so it was easy enough to ensure he was kept busy at the granges. Adam had already thought of tasks to keep the peasant busy until late September. As for his own absences, they were easy to explain. Many nights he was at the abbey; but if he muttered one evening that he was leaving one grange to visit another, no one even thought twice about it. As for the prior, he was only too glad to think of Adam being forced to spend a night out. So all this could last into the autumn. After that he did not know.

He and Mary were lying together drowsily, late in the night, when he told her about the prior’s plan to put a price on the head of her brother. As he had imagined it possible that she might know Luke’s whereabouts, in common kindness, he had thought of warning her. But even so, he had not quite expected the reaction he got when he gave her the news.

She sat bolt upright in the straw. ‘Oh, God. Two pounds?’ She seemed to be staring straight ahead. ‘Puckle won’t give him away. Not even for that.’ She paused, then turned towards him. ‘So.’ She sighed. ‘Now you know.’

‘He’s with Puckle, the charcoal burner?’

‘Yes. Over Burley way.’

‘Well, I’m not going to tell anyone.’

‘You’d better not.’

‘Actually.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘That’s rather funny.’

‘Why?’

‘I think I must have seen him.’

‘Oh.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘There’s something else you may as well know. He came here the other morning. Early.’

‘And?’

‘He knows about us. He saw you.’

‘Oh.’ This opened up new vistas for the monk. The runaway lay brother had information on him now – a new kind of danger. ‘What did he say about it?’

‘Nothing much.’

‘I should think’, Adam reflected, ‘he’s as safe with Puckle as anywhere. But if I hear anything I’ll tell you.’

They passed another three hours together and the first light of dawn was already spreading when Adam slipped out, after agreeing to return in two nights’ time. As usual, he made his way cautiously out to the trees and then rode quietly through the woods towards the ford.

This time, however, his departure from the barn had been seen by a watchful pair of eyes. And they did not belong to Luke.

The news of John of Grockleton’s two pound reward was known the next day. By evening it had reached Burley. Puckle himself was at home that evening, having left Luke out watching a new charcoal fire in the woods. His extended family was gathered round in front of the cottage.

‘It’s two pounds,’ said his son.

‘Two pounds of nothing,’ said Puckle.

‘Still, two pounds …’ echoed one of his nephews.

Puckle looked round them all. He looked also at his wife, who wisely kept silent.

He was roasting a hare on a spit over a small fire he had built outside. Its skin lay on the ground by his feet. He did not speak for a little while, then he pointed. ‘Ever seen me skin a hare?’ he asked quietly. They all nodded. Then he gestured to the hare roasting on the spit. ‘If any one of you opens his mouth about Luke.’ He looked quite calmly both at his son and his nephew, then allowed his eyes to move round the rest of the circle. ‘That’s what I’ll do to him.’

There was silence. It was wise, if an old Forest man like Puckle said a thing like that, to pay attention.

Early the next morning Puckle talked to Luke. ‘Two pounds is a lot,’ he said sadly.

‘Your lot won’t talk, will they?’

‘Better not. But people are going to start looking now. They see you they’ll think: “Now which one of his nephews is that?” I reckon someone’ll put two and two together.’

‘I told Mary.’

‘That was stupid.’ Puckle shrugged. ‘Still, I don’t reckon she’ll talk.’

‘So what’ll I do?’

‘Don’t know.’ He looked thoughtful. Then suddenly his gnarled face broke into a grin. ‘I reckon I do, though.’ He nodded his shaggy head. ‘How’d you like to help me build another charcoal fire?’

Tom Furzey’s sister had always been puzzled about the pony, but now, she thought, as she walked across Beaulieu Heath towards St Leonards, she probably had the answer.

And best of all, it was worth a fortune.

It had been chance that she should have been up so early the day before. Her husband had set two rabbit snares in the woods in the valley and she had decided to walk down that way to see if he’d caught anything. She’d been just about to go down the slope when she had caught sight of a muffled figure running, stooped over, from Tom’s place into the trees.

For some time she’d stood there, wondering who it could possibly be. Even when she had found a rabbit and brought it home, she had kept the thing to herself. Then, that very day, had come news of the prior’s reward and the suspicion had grown into a certainty. It was Luke. It had to be.

That probably explained the pony too. Luke Pride was hanging about at Tom’s place, sneaking in and out at night. He must have been the one who replaced the pony like that, then. Cheeky devil.

She smiled now, though. The Prides were going to get their come-uppance after all. She and Tom could enjoy it equally. ‘A pound for him and a pound for me,’ she muttered.

It was near the end of the working day when she reached St Leonards. She found Tom easily enough and took him to one side.

When she had finished her tale, his round face broke into a happy smile. ‘Got ’em,’ he said.

‘It’s Luke, isn’t it?’

‘’Course it is. Has to be.’

‘Two pounds, Tom. Equal shares. We can start watching tonight.’

He frowned. ‘Trouble is, I’m supposed to stay here tonight. We start at dawn, see?’ Brother Adam had come past only a short while before to ensure himself that everyone was accounted for.

‘You could slip away, couldn’t you? After dark?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I’ll be waiting, then. Two pounds, Tom. I’ll take it all if you don’t turn up.’

It was long past dark when Brother Adam quietly tethered his horse and began to creep towards the edge of the paddock. It was very black so that once or twice he even had to feel his way. At the edge he paused. Slowly he began to make his way towards the vague shape of the barn.

When something threw him to the ground.

It was like a huge double blow to his back. He had no idea what it was, but he hit the ground so hard he was winded. An instant later his two assailants had his arms and were trying to turn him over. He still couldn’t speak, but he kicked out violently. He heard a man’s voice curse. Then one of the two wrapped his arms round his legs while the other punched him, very effectively in the solar plexus. It seemed to Adam that neither of his assailants was very large, but both were strong.

Were they robbers? Here? His mind was just starting to work again when, with a sinking heart, he heard the voice of Tom Furzey.

‘Caught you.’

What in the world could he say? He could think of nothing. Was this peasant going to haul him back to the abbey for fornicating with his wife? What would become of him?

One of the two was fumbling with something. Then suddenly a lantern was being shone in his face.

‘Brother Adam!’

Thank the Lord he still had his wits about him. Tom Furzey’s voice expressed such total astonishment, such confusion: whatever it meant, it was not him they had expected. His legs were let go. Another sign that they felt at a disadvantage. He struggled and sat up. He must bluff. ‘Furzey? I know your voice. What’s the meaning of this? Why aren’t you at St Leonards?’

‘But … What are you doing here, Brother Adam?’

‘Never mind that. Why are you here and why have you attacked me?’

There was a pause. ‘Thought you might be someone else,’ Furzey’s voice replied sullenly.

‘He isn’t worth two pounds anyway.’ A woman’s voice, but not Mary’s.

And then, of course, he realized. ‘I see. You thought Luke might come this way.’

‘My sister reckons she seen him.’

‘Ah.’ Thank God. He knew what to say now. ‘Well, Furzey,’ he said slowly, ‘you should not have left the grange without permission, but that is why I am here too. I had an idea he might be coming here and if so he’ll be taken.’

‘Then we won’t get our two pounds but you will, I suppose,’ said Tom.

‘You forget, I have no use for two pounds. Monks have no worldly goods.’

‘You mean we can catch him?’

‘I suppose so,’ Adam said drily.

‘Oh.’ Furzey audibly brightened. ‘Maybe we can all watch for him then.’

What could he do? Adam gazed towards the barn. What if Mary, wondering what had become of him, were to come out looking for him? Worse still, call his name? Could he tell them he was going to inspect the barn and try to warn her? He decided that was too risky. They’d think his presence might alert Mary to the fact that they were watching for her brother.

Worse yet, what if Tom went in and Mary, seeing him, mistook him for her lover and called out the wrong name?

Fortunately, he soon realized, Tom was far more eager to catch Luke than to encounter his wife. But there was still the possibility that poor Luke would come to visit his sister at dawn. He wondered if there were some way he could head him off, but could not see how, in the dark.

So they waited. There was no sound from the barn, nor did Luke appear. When light came, they agreed to give up. Might he come and watch again? Furzey asked him.

‘I suppose so,’ Brother Adam replied. Then he rode away.

He had much to do.

The sun was well up when he reached the site where he had encountered the charcoal burner near Burley. It did not take him long to find Puckle, who had evidently seen him coming.

There were two great charcoal cones he was tending now. The burning process of one was almost completed, by the look of it; the other had just started. Puckle was alone. There was no sign of Luke.

Brother Adam did not waste time. ‘I’ve a message for Luke.’

‘For who?’

‘I know. You haven’t seen him. Just give him a message.’ He told Puckle briefly about Tom’s vigil. ‘He’d better not go there. Now.’ He took a deep breath – he’d thought about trying to give her the message himself but decided the risk was too great – ‘I need to ask a favour of you. Please tell Mary the house is being watched. You can tell her I told you. She’ll understand.’

And how much, he wondered, would Puckle understand? Might he wonder why he was doing Mary and Luke a favour or might he guess the whole truth? Staring at that oaken face it was impossible to know. He looked Puckle in the eye. ‘Silence buys silence, I hope.’

Puckle just looked at him, then gazed down at his fire. Only as the monk rode away did he mutter: ‘Always has done in the Forest.’

Dear God, thought Adam, as he went back towards the abbey lands, I’m even in league, criminally, with Puckle now. Yet, as he listened to the morning birdsong, he found only a strange sense of exhilaration at his fall from grace.

He would have been most surprised, once he was out of sight, to see what happened to the second charcoal fire. A small door opened in its turf side from which, not at all burned or even heated, Luke emerged.

The hiding place Puckle had contrived was the neatest thing imaginable. The top half of the huge cone was constructed internally more or less as an ordinary charcoal fire, except that by using damp materials Puckle could produce a great deal of smoke with very little heat. But below this, with a thick turf inner roof, was a hollow space in which Luke could remain, quite comfortably, with air holes providing ventilation, for as long as he liked. Each day at dawn Puckle intended to remake the fire at the top and no one passing by, even the sharpest-eyed, would ever guess its secret.

The next week was a busy one in the Forest.

On two successive days, because of the insistence of the prior, the foresters had the hounds out. The steward was so bored by the business that he gave the whole responsibility to young Alban. The first day they drew in the woods near Pride’s and went all the way across almost to Burley. But there the scent became so confused that they did nothing but go round in circles. The next day they tried over towards Minstead. But mysteriously the scent seemed to lead straight to the house of the forester, who was not at all amused.

Half the Forest, either openly or secretly, was on the lookout. The foresters and their stewards rode about in groups. Cottages were visited, every woodsman stopped. It all came to nothing, but as Puckle remarked sadly to Luke one night: ‘It’s going to be difficult for you to come out.’

Mary waited for ten days before she set off to her appointment. During this time she did not see Brother Adam once. But he was seldom out of her thoughts.

What does a woman feel when she seduces a monk? She smiled now, a little, to think that even on that first afternoon, although she had been distressed and he protective, he was still unaware that it was she, really, who had seduced him. It was his innocence that she instinctively wanted, this strong, manly man who had never known a woman. And she, the peasant wife of a humble labourer, had it in her power to teach him to know life. He had taken a step, even half a step towards her. He had asked without even knowing he was asking – or certainly for what he was asking.

I have taken a man of God, a man forbidden, and I have made him blaze like the sun: at moments she had been almost heady with the sense of her womanly triumph. Not that she had let him see it. Not at first, anyway. She had brought him along, she thought with a smile, very nicely.

Was that all, then? Just a seduction? Oh, no. There was the reason that she had been drawn to him in the first place: his fineness, his intelligence; her sense that he had what she did not; her certainty that, even if she wasn’t quite sure what these things were, she wanted to have them.

At first, when they talked in the night, she would ask him: ‘What are you thinking?’ And he would reply something that he thought she would understand. But soon, when she made clear she wanted more, he would make an effort and try to explain his nightly musings. ‘There was a great philosopher, you see, called Abelard, and he thought …’ he might explain. Or he would speak of far-off lands, or great events, a world that was far beyond anything she had known, yet which, dimly, as though seeing light coming through a church window, she could discern. And he was in that other world. She knew it. ‘Your mind is in the stars,’ she once whispered, but not in mockery. And when another time, after he had told her some wonderful idea, she laughed – ‘And being inside me made you think of that?’ – she was, in truth, more pleased than she had ever been in her life.

But recently there had been more to worry about.

Her appointment with Luke, made when Puckle brought her the message, was in a quiet place in the woods north of Brockenhurst. She took care she was not followed.

He was already waiting for her there, by a huge old oak tree, thick with moss and ivy. She was glad to see he was looking well and he seemed quite cheerful. Yet the news he had was less so. ‘Puckle thinks I ought to leave the Forest. The prior’s never going to give up.’

‘After the Michaelmas court he might.’

‘No.’ Luke sighed. ‘You don’t know him.’

‘I still think you should turn yourself in. They aren’t going to hang you.’

‘Probably not. But you can’t trust them.’

‘Where’d you go?’

‘On pilgrimage, maybe. Compostella. Thousands of people go there.’

Compostella. Spain. You could beg along the way, they said. She doubted it. She shook her head. ‘You’ve never been out of the Forest.’

‘I like walking, though.’

For a while they were silent.

‘What’s happening with Brother Adam, then?’ he asked.

Now it was her turn to announce worrying news. ‘I think I’m pregnant.’

‘Oh. You sure?’

‘Almost. I think so. It feels like it.’

‘Couldn’t be Tom?’ She shook her head. ‘What’ll you do?’ She only shrugged. Luke was thoughtful. ‘Reckon you and Tom … You’d better give him a chance to think it’s his, hadn’t you?’

She took a long breath. ‘I know.’ Her voice was flat. He’d never heard it quite like that before.

‘You’ve been with him a lot of years. Can’t be so bad.’

‘You don’t understand.’ He didn’t. They were all just forest creatures to him.

‘You going to tell Brother Adam?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You know, Mary, this can’t go on. I mean, it’ll be winter. Tom’ll be home. You’ve a family and Brother Adam’s a monk.’

‘There’ll be next spring and summer, Luke.’

‘But Mary …’

How could he understand? He was a simple boy. She might lie with Tom. She’d have to. There was no way out of that, really. But Adam was there too. She’d heard women talk about lovers. Such things occurred in some villages, especially around harvest time. Perhaps when she’d started with Brother Adam she’d thought that, being a monk, he’d be safe: back in Beaulieu Abbey where he belonged when it was over. The trouble was, she had known a finer kind of man now. The fact of Brother Adam could never be taken from her. She could not step back into the same stream. The landscape had subtly changed.

‘Beaulieu’s not far, Luke. I’m not going back to only Tom.’

‘You have to.’

‘No.’

Luke and Puckle talked for a long time that night.

In the end Puckle said: ‘I think you’ve got to do it.’

‘Will you help me?’ Luke asked.

‘Of course.’

If one walked along the eastern side of the cloister at Beaulieu from the church one came first to the big locked cupboard – for that was all it was – known as the bookcase, where the abbey’s stock of books was mostly kept. Then came the vestry; after that the larger chapter house where every Monday morning, while the abbot was away, Grockleton would read out the abbey’s rules to the assembled monks. Then the scriptorium where Brother Adam liked to spend his time studying, then the monks’ dormitory and just round the corner, next to the big frater, was the warming house, a spacious room with a fire.

John of Grockleton had just emerged from the warming house when the message came and he hurried to the gate.

The messenger was a servant, from Alban, who desired to speak with him privately. His message caused the prior’s face to crease into a smile: ‘We think we have Brother Luke, Prior.’

The problem was that he wasn’t talking. Alban, it seemed, was reluctant to turn up at the abbey with him unless he was quite sure who he was. Otherwise, he felt, they’d all be made to look like fools again. So he was holding the fellow secretly at his house. Would the prior come, discreetly, and identify the lay brother? ‘I am to conduct you, if you are willing,’ the servant explained.

‘I shall come at once,’ Grockleton said and sent to the stables for his horse.

It was all the prior could do, as they rode across the heath, to contain his enthusiasm. They proceeded at a trot or a canter. He would happily have galloped. At the far edge of the heath, they entered the woods west of Brockenhurst and started to canter along a track. The prior was smiling. He had hardly been happier in his life.

‘This way, sir,’ called the servant again, taking a track to the left. ‘Short cut.’ The track was narrower. Once or twice he was smacked in the face by overhanging branches, but he didn’t care. ‘This way, sir,’ called the servant, veering right. He followed eagerly, then frowned. Where the devil had the fellow gone? He pulled up. Called out.

And was greatly astonished when a pair of hands seized him from behind, pulling him off his horse and, before he even had time to struggle, slipped a rope round him which, a second later was made fast to a tree.

He was about to cry out ‘Murder! Thieves!’ when another figure appeared miraculously in front of him. A shaggy, forest figure whom he recognized, after only a moment, Brother Luke.

‘You!’ His natural posture was to lean forward. Now the prior strained towards him so hard it seemed as if he meant to bite him.

‘It’s all right,’ the insolent fellow replied. ‘I only wanted a talk. I’d have come to the abbey, but …’ He smiled and shrugged.

‘What do you want?’

‘To return to the abbey.’

‘Are you mad?’

‘No, Prior. I hope not.’ He sat down on the ground in front of Grockleton. ‘Can I talk?’

It was not, Grockleton had to admit, what he would have expected. Firstly, Luke spoke of the abbey and its granges and his years there. He did so quite simply and with such feeling that, like it or not, Grockleton could see that he genuinely loved the place. Then he explained what had happened that day at the grange. He made no excuses about letting the poachers in, but explained how he had tried to stop Brother Matthew striking Martell and how he had panicked and fled. Little as he liked this either, the prior secretly guessed that it was true.

‘You should have returned then.’

‘I was afraid. Afraid of you.’

It did not wholly displease Grockleton that this peasant should be afraid of him. ‘And why should I do anything for you now?’ he demanded.

‘If I told you something important, for the good of the abbey, something nobody knows, might you see your way …?’

‘It’s possible.’ Grockleton considered.

‘It would be bad for one of the monks, though.’

Grockleton frowned. ‘Which monk?’

‘Brother Adam. It’d be very bad for him.’

‘What is it?’ The prior could not conceal the glint in his eye.

Luke saw it. This was what he needed. ‘You’ve got to send him away. No scandal. That’d be bad for the abbey anyway. He’s got to go away. And I’ve got to come back, with no more Forest court or anything. You can arrange that. I need your word.’

Grockleton hesitated. He understood deals and his word was his word. But there was an obvious difficulty. ‘Priors don’t bargain with lay brothers,’ he said frankly.

‘You’ll never hear another sound from me afterwards. That’s my word.’

Grockleton pondered. He put it all in the balance. He thought also of the reaction of the court and the foresters, who he knew very well were sick of him, if they heard this honest fellow speak as eloquently in court as he had just done now. He might be better off with Luke on his side. And then … Luke said he had something on Brother Adam. ‘If it’s good, you have my word,’ he heard himself saying.

So Luke betrayed Brother Adam and his sister Mary.

Except, Grockleton thought as he listened to the peasant, that it was not really a betrayal. Seen from Luke’s point of view there was something profoundly natural about it. He saw his sister’s family about to be blasted by a storm; so he was protecting them. A sudden blow, the shedding of blood; it was just nature.

Nor did the perfect balance of the thing escape the prior. Once Adam was gone, Mary would have no choice but to live in peace with her husband. The child would be treated as Tom’s. It was in nobody’s interest to say a word. Except his own, of course, if he wanted entirely to destroy Brother Adam. But even that made no sense. For if he exposed Adam, he’d damage the abbey’s reputation. And what would the abbot say about that? No, the peasant’s judgement was good. Besides. He thought of something else, something in the secret book, known only to the abbot. He had to be a little careful himself.

What of Luke, though? Could he be trusted to behave himself? Probably. He had no wish to hurt his sister by making trouble, though he continued to hold the threat of his knowledge about the monk as a sort of protection. In any case, I’m better off with him safely inside the abbey than outside, the prior considered.

And so, for the first time in his life, Grockleton started to think like an abbot.

With what joy, a few days later, the monks of Beaulieu learned that their abbot had returned and that, so far as he knew, there were no plans for him to depart from them again in the foreseeable future.

Brother Adam, too, was glad. His only concern was lest the abbot, out of a now mistaken sense of kindness, should decide to relieve him of his duties at the granges. He had prepared for this carefully, however. His record was excellent. It would take anyone else a year to learn what he now knew. Who else would want the job? For the good of the abbey he should certainly keep it another year or two. All in all, he hoped he was well prepared.

As for his guilty secret, he had learned to get through the offices now without the terror of giving himself away. He had already, he confessed to himself, become hardened in his sin. He was just glad the abbot knew nothing, that was all.

When he received a summons to present himself before the abbot and the prior one morning he was prepared for everything except what awaited him.

The abbot looked friendly, if somewhat thoughtful, when he entered. Grockleton was sitting there, leaning forward with his claw on the table as usual. But Adam was too glad to be looking at the abbot again to take much notice of the prior. And it was the abbot, not Grockleton, who spoke. ‘Now, Adam, we know all about your love affair with Mary Furzey. Fortunately neither her husband nor the brethren in the abbey do. So I’d just like you to tell us about it in your own words.’

Grockleton had wanted to ask him whether he had anything to confess and give him the chance to perjure himself, but the abbot had overruled him.

It did not take long. If his humiliation was complete, the abbot did nothing to prolong it. ‘This will remain a secret,’ he told Adam, ‘for the sake of the abbey and, I may add, for that of the woman and her family. You must leave here at once. Today. But I want no one to know why.’

‘Where am I to go?’

‘I’m sending you to our daughter house down in Devon. To Newenham. Nobody will think that strange. They’ve been struggling a bit down there and you are – or were – one of our best monks.’

Adam bowed his head. ‘May I say farewell to Mary Furzey?’

‘Certainly not. You are to have no communication with her whatsoever.’

‘I am surprised’ – it was Grockleton now, he couldn’t resist it – ‘that you should even think of such a thing.’

‘Well.’ Adam sighed. Then he looked at Grockleton sadly, though without malice. ‘You have never done such a thing.’

There was silence in the room. The claw did not move. Perhaps the prior might have stooped forward a little lower over the dark old table. The abbot’s face was a mask as he gazed carefully into the middle distance. So Brother Adam did not guess that in the abbot’s secret book there was a notation concerning John of Grockleton and a woman, and a child. But that had been in another monastery, far away in the north, a long time ago.

After he had gone the abbot asked: ‘He doesn’t know she’s pregnant, does he?’

‘No.’

‘Better he shouldn’t.’

‘Quite.’ Grockleton nodded.

‘Oh dear.’ The abbot sighed. ‘We are none of us safe from falling, as you know,’ he added meaningfully.

‘I know.’

‘I want him given two pairs of new shoes,’ the abbot added firmly, ‘before he goes.’

It was not quite noon when Brother Adam and John of Grockleton, accompanied by one lay brother, rode slowly out of the abbey and up the track that led to Beaulieu Heath.

As he rode, Adam noticed the small trees that crowned the slope opposite the abbey. The salt sea breeze from the south-west had not bent them, but shaped the tops so that they all looked as if they had been shaved down that side; and they flowered towards the north-east. It was a common sight in the coastal parts of the Forest.

White clouds were scudding over the tranquil, sunlit abbey behind them and, as they crested the little ridge, Adam felt the sharp salt breeze full upon his face.

Brother Luke returned quietly to St Leonards Grange a week later. His case did not come up before the justice at the Michaelmas court.

At about the time of the court, Mary told her husband that he might be going to be a father again.

‘Oh.’ He frowned, then grinned, a little puzzled. ‘That was a lucky one.’

‘I know.’ She shrugged. ‘These things happen.’

He might have thought about it more, except that, a short time later, John Pride – who had suffered two hours of his brother Luke’s urging – turned up to suggest that their quarrel should be over. With him he brought the pony.

1300

On a December afternoon, when a yellow wintry sun, low on the horizon, was sending its parting rays across the frozen landscape of Beaulieu Heath, which was covered in snow, two riders, muffled against the cold, made their way slowly eastwards towards the abbey.

The snow had fallen days before; and right across the heath, now, there was a thin layer of icy crust, which broke as the horses’ hoofs stepped on it. A light, chill breeze came from the east, sweeping little particles of snow and ice dust across the surface. The branches of the snow-covered bushes cast long shadows, fingering eastwards towards Beaulieu.

Five years had passed since Brother Adam had left the abbey to go down to the bleak little daughter house of Newenham, so far along the western coast – five years with only a dozen other brothers in the little wilderness. It might have seemed a cheerless scene that greeted him now, this icy landscape lit by the sulphurous yellow glow of a falling winter sun, but he was not aware of it. He was only aware, as if by a homing instinct, that the grey buildings by the river lay less than an hour away.

It is a curious fact, never fully explained, that at around this time in history a number of the monks belonging to the little house of Newenham in Devon started suffering from a particular affliction. The abbey records of Beaulieu make this very clear, but whether it was the water, the diet, something in the earth or the buildings themselves, nobody has ever been able to discover. Several, however, suffered so acutely that there was nothing to do for them but bring them back to Beaulieu where they could be looked after.

This was what had happened to Brother Adam. He was unaware of the yellowish light around him because he was blind.

 

It was often remarked with wonder by the monks of Beaulieu, from that time on, how Brother Adam could find his way about unaided. Not only in the cloister. Even in the middle of the night, when the monks came down the passageway and the stairs to perform the night office in the church, he would walk down with them quite unaided and turn into his choir stall at exactly the right place. Outside, too, he would pace about in the abbey precincts without, it seemed, ever getting lost.

He seemed to find all manner of tasks he could perform without the use of his eyes, from planting vegetables to making candles.

He was still a handsome, well-made man. He conversed little and liked to be alone, but there was always about him an air of quiet serenity.

Only once, for a matter of a few days some eighteen months after his return, did something occur within him that seemed to distract his mind. Several times he became lost, or bumped into things. After a week, during which the abbot was rather worried about him, he seemed to recover his equanimity and balance, and never bumped into anything again. No one knew why this brief interlude had occurred. Except Brother Luke.

It had been a warm summer afternoon when the lay brother had offered to escort him along his favourite path down along the river.

‘I shall not see the river, but I shall smell it,’ Adam had replied. ‘By all means, then.’

It had been necessary, in this instance, for Luke to take his arm, but with an occasional warning about any small obstacles along the path, they had been able to stride along quite easily through the woods, emerging finally on to the open marsh by the river bend where, to his delight, the monk had heard the sound of a party of swans, rising off the water on the wing.

And they had been standing in the afternoon silence for a little while, feeling the sun on their faces very pleasantly, when Brother Adam heard light footsteps on the path. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked Luke.

‘Someone to see you,’ the lay brother replied. ‘I’m walking off a little way now,’ he added. And it was with a slight shock of surprise, a moment or two later, that Adam realized who it must be.

She was standing in front of him. He could smell her. He was, as only the blind can be, aware of her whole presence. He wanted to reach out to touch her, but hesitated. It seemed to him that she was not alone.

‘Brother Adam.’ Her voice. She spoke calmly, softly. ‘I have brought someone to see you.’

‘Oh. Who is that?’

‘My youngest child. A little boy.’

‘I see.’

‘Will you give him your blessing?’

‘My blessing?’ He was almost surprised. It was a natural thing to ask of a monk, but, knowing what she did about him … ‘For what my blessing is worth,’ he said. ‘How old is the boy?’

‘He is five.’

‘Ah. A nice age.’ He smiled. ‘His name?’

‘I called him Adam.’

‘Oh. My name.’

He felt her move very close, her body almost touching, but so that she could whisper, close in his ear. ‘He is your son.’

‘My son?’ The revelation hit him so that he almost staggered back. It was as if, in his world of darkness, there had been a great flash of golden light.

‘He doesn’t know.’

‘You …’ His voice was hoarse. ‘You are sure?’

‘Yes.’ She was standing back now.

For a moment he stood there in the sunlight, quite still, though he felt as if he might be swaying. ‘Come, little Adam,’ he said quietly. And when the small boy approached, he reached down with his hands and felt his head, then his face. He would have liked to lift him, feel him, press him to him. But he could not do this. ‘So, Adam,’ he said gently, ‘be a good boy, do as your mother tells you and accept another Adam’s blessing.’ Resting his hand on the boy’s head, he recited a brief prayer.

He wanted so much to give the boy something. He wondered what. Then, suddenly remembering, he drew out the cedarwood crucifix that, so long ago, his mother had given him and, with a single pull, broke the leather string that secured it round his neck and handed it to the boy. ‘My mother gave me this, Adam,’ he said. ‘They say a crusader brought it from the Holy Land. Keep it always.’ He turned to Mary with a shrug. ‘It is all that I have.’

They went, then, and soon afterwards he and Luke made their way back towards the abbey.

They did not speak, except once, halfway along the path through the woods.

‘Does the boy look like me?’

‘Yes.’

Of all the times, during the long years of his blind existence, it was on those sunny afternoons as he sat quietly meditating in the carrels in the sheltered north wall of the abbey cloister, that Brother Adam appeared most serene. It seemed to the younger monks that, being obviously very close to God, Brother Adam was in a silent communion that it would be impious to interrupt. And sometimes he was. But sometimes, also, as he smelled the grass and the daisies in the cloister, and felt the warm sun coming from over the frater, it was another thought that filled his mind with a joy and delight which, if it led him down even to perdition, he could not help.

I have a son. Dear God, I have a son.

One afternoon, when he was all alone with no one to see, he even took out a small knife he had been using earlier in the day, and discreetly carved a little letter ‘A’ in the stone beside him.

‘A’ for Adam. And sometimes, he thought, if his punishment was to be cast out of God’s garden into some darker place, then still, perhaps, for the sake of his son, he would do it all again.

So, for many years, Brother Adam lived with his secret, in the abbey of Beaulieu.