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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Never mind.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Catholics, too, might worship?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘He is bound to hate me, Sire.’

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

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

Who, she wondered, could the young man be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was too much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So he had no right to Estovers?’

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

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

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

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

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

1685

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

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

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

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

But the house was also a serious place, on account of the visitors: the men of religion. King Charles’s promise to Alice at Bolderwood, that he would give his subjects religious freedom, had actually come to pass in 1672. But it hadn’t lasted. Within a year, Parliament had struck it down. Dissenters were thrust firmly back to the margin of society and forbidden all public office. The only effect of the brief freedom was to cause all the dissenters to come out into the open so they’d be known in future. Alice quietly continued to provide a haven for Puritan preachers and was generally left alone; but it brought a certain air of seriousness and purpose into the house that was bound to affect the young girl living with her. There was something else, besides: although Alice hardly realized it, the preachers who came to seek her hospitality were older than they had been before.

For a few years Betty had been sent to a school for young ladies in Sarum; but while she had been happy enough there and made some friends, she had never really felt satisfied by the conversation of the other girls. Used to older people, she found them rather childish.

After this her mother had sent her, once or twice a year, to stay with relations or friends, on the assumption that she would meet young men. And she had; but often as not she had found them insipid until at last Alice had told her firmly: ‘Do not look for a perfect man, Betty. No man is perfect.’

‘I won’t. But do not force me to marry a man I can’t respect,’ she countered, ignoring her mother’s sigh.

By the time she was twenty-four, Alice was near despair. Betty herself was happy enough. ‘I love the house. I love every inch of the Forest,’ she told her. ‘I can live and die here alone contentedly enough.’

Until this June, while they were staying in London.

‘And when you consider’, her eldest daughter Tryphena remarked to Alice, ‘that this has occurred when all the world is thinking only of the great events now shaking the kingdom, I think she must be serious indeed.’

But that, alas, for Alice, was just the problem.

 

Figures in a landscape. A July night. There had been thousands the night before. But most, by now, had melted away into town, farm and hamlet, hiding their arms, going about their business as if they had never been out at all, the days before, marching round the western towns, trying to seize a kingdom.

Not all would be lucky, however. Some would be named, others given away, and sent to join the several hundred captured.

Figures on horseback, keeping out of sight, moving through woods when they can or out on to the bare, deserted ridges with none to witness them but the sheep, or a lonely shepherd, or the ghosts, perhaps, in the grassy earthwork inclosures, those silent reminders all over the countryside of the prehistoric age. Figures moving eastward now, still out on the chalk ridges, twenty miles or more south-west of Sarum.

Monmouth’s Rebellion was broken.

Nobody had expected King Charles to die. He was only fifty-four. He himself had expected to live many years and Sir Christopher Wren had been building him a fine new palace on the hill above Winchester where the king had looked forward to residing. But then suddenly, that February, Charles had been struck with an apoplexy. Within a week he was dead. And that left a huge problem.

Although Charles II had had numerous sons by his various mistresses, several of whom he had obligingly created dukes, he had left no legitimate heir. The crown, therefore, had been due to pass to his brother James, Duke of York. At first James had not seemed so bad a choice: he’d married a Protestant wife, had two Protestant daughters and one of those had married her cousin, the very Protestant ruler of the Dutch, William of Orange. But when James’s wife died and he married a Catholic princess, the English were less pleased. And when he soon afterwards admitted he was a Catholic himself, there had been consternation. Wasn’t this just what Protestant Englishmen had dreaded for a century? England was more Protestant now than it had been in the time of the Armada or even the Civil War. Charles, to appease them, assured everyone that, if his brother should succeed him, he’d uphold the Church of England whatever his private views. But could anyone really believe that?

Most of the Parliament did not. They demanded that Catholic James be debarred from the throne. King Charles and his friends refused; and so began the great divide in English politics between those who would keep a Catholic off the throne – the Whigs – and the royalist group – the Tories. The problem dragged on for years. There were endless discussions and demonstrations. Although violence was avoided, it was really the same debate that had led to the Civil War: who should have the last say, king or Parliament? King Charles II, however, wheeling and dealing, had pursued his merry way for more than a decade, racing horses, chasing pretty women, getting money from Louis of France; and because the English liked the jolly rogue and thought he’d probably outlive his Catholic brother anyway, they went along with it. Mercifully, also, James had produced no heir with his Catholic wife. Time seemed to be on Protestant England’s side. Until this sudden death.

James became king. A Catholic on the throne – the first since Bloody Mary a century and a quarter ago. The country held its breath.

Then, in June that same year, Monmouth’s Rebellion had begun.

In a way it was bound to happen. Charles II had always adored his eldest natural son. Monmouth the handsome. Monmouth the Protestant: when the Whigs in Parliament wanted to exclude Catholic James, they told King Charles they’d rather have Monmouth. Charles, a Catholic Stuart at heart, protested that the boy was not legitimate, but the pragmatic English Parliament told him they’d worry about that. Charles had refused to allow such a thing but, as far as Monmouth was concerned, the damage had been done. He was a spoiled young man, forever getting into trouble, always protected by his doting father. It seemed the English wanted him as king. Even before his father’s death he had allowed himself to be implicated in one aborted plot that might have killed both Charles and James. Small wonder, then, if, with Catholic James suddenly placed over a most unwilling English nation, Monmouth, in his thirties now but vain and immature, might have thought the English would rise for him if he gave them the chance.

He had started in the West Country. People had flocked to his banner – small farmers, Protestants from the ports and trading towns – several thousand strong. The local gentry, the men of influence, however, had held back, cautious. And wisely so. For yesterday, at the Battle of Sedgemoor, the royal troops had smashed the rising. Everyone had scattered, to hide or flee as best they could.

Figures in a landscape, in the misty morning. Monmouth was fleeing. He had only two companions with him now. He needed to find a port from which to sail, somewhere he would not be betrayed. ‘We had better go’, he decided, ‘to Lymington.’

There were other fugitives, too, that July morning, heading in the same direction.

‘But isn’t he everything you have taught me to love?’ Betty was looking at her mother in genuine confusion. ‘You can hardly object to his family,’ she added, ‘since he is an Albion.’

Alice sighed. There had been no news, yet, from the West Country. Was Monmouth about to succeed? The whole business made her fearful. And now her daughter insisted on troubling her with a suitor. She wished the young man, just for a month or two, could be made to disappear.

Peter Albion was a credit to his family. If his grandfather Francis had deserved her own grandfather’s scorn, Francis’s son had done better. He’d become a physician and married a rich draper’s daughter. Young Peter had practised law and, with his parents’ numerous friends to help him, had already, by the age of twenty-eight, established himself as a rising man. He was handsome, with the traditional Albion fair hair and blue eyes; he was industrious; he was clever, thoughtful, ambitious. It was Tryphena who had encountered him and invited him to call; and it was she who summed him up: ‘He looks an Albion, but he’s just like father.’

Perhaps, Alice thought, that was why Betty liked him so much. He fitted the description of the father she’d never known.

But that, unfortunately, was precisely why Alice wanted to discourage him. ‘I’m getting old,’ she told Tryphena. ‘I’ve seen too many troubles.’ Troubles in England; troubles in the family. She did not doubt that the causes her husband had fought for had been just; she was quite sure, when she helped the dissenters, that she did right. But was it all worth it – the fighting, the suffering? Probably not. Peace was worth more, it seemed to her, than any of the small freedoms won in her lifetime. And peace was what she wanted now, for her old age and, above all, for her daughter.

It wasn’t so easy to come by. A couple of years ago, at the time of that stupid plot to assassinate the king and his brother, Tryphena’s husband had been arrested and questioned for days. Why? Not because he had even the faintest connection to the plot, but because of his family associations and friends. Once you were an object of suspicion you would always remain so. It was inevitable.

But for young Betty things could be different. Her youngest child, having lost her father, had missed the joys of early childhood she had known; but the rest would be better: a life of peace and security – the sort of life that she, Alice, had always expected to live in her house in the friendly Forest.

The very day after news of Monmouth’s arrival in the West Country Peter Albion had come to Tryphena’s house to pay his respects to his cousin Alice and her daughter. He had been pleasant company, very polite, but quietly forthright. ‘The English will not tolerate a Catholic king,’ he stated. ‘Nor do I think they should.’ He bowed to Alice as though he clearly expected she would endorse these views. ‘Let us hope Monmouth succeeds.’ He had smiled. ‘I have some friends in that camp, Cousin Alice. I expect word of success at any time. Then, I can assure you, we shall see King James sent packing.’

As he spoke, she had felt herself go cold. It was her own husband again, John Lisle. ‘Do not say such things,’ she cried. ‘This is dangerous.’

‘I should not, I assure you, Cousin Alice,’ he said quietly. ‘Except in such company as this.’

Such company as this; the phrase had terrified her. Was Betty already assumed to be a conspirator? Was Peter Albion going to drag her into that role? ‘Leave us, Sir,’ she begged, ‘and speak no more of this.’

But he had, nonetheless, seen Betty again a few days later. And although she had not liked it, it had been difficult to refuse her kinsman entry to the house. Wisely, he had never made any reference to these dangerous subjects again, but as far as she was concerned the damage was done. She had begged her daughter to have no more to do with him, to no avail. It wasn’t easy: Betty was twenty-four. And she might, that very day, have taken her back to the safety of the Forest if she had not received, this morning, a letter from John Hancock.

Do not, I urge you, return to Albion House. Rebellion has broken out at Lymington. They have sent to you for support already. For God’s sake stay in London and say nothing.

She had hastily torn up the letter and thrown it in the fire.

Say nothing. Would young Peter Albion say nothing? And Betty? She looked at her daughter desperately. ‘Dear child,’ she began softly, ‘if you are not careful we shall soon be hunted.’ She shook her head at the thought of it. ‘Like deer in the Forest.’

Stephen Pride walked slowly past Oakley pond. He was seventy-five, but he certainly didn’t feel it. Tall and lean, he still strode about – more slowly, a bit stiffly perhaps – just as he had all his long life. Common sense told him he wouldn’t live much longer, but whatever cause God had prepared to strike him down, he had no sense of it. ‘I’ve known men live to be eighty,’ he remarked contentedly. ‘Reckon I might.’

It had been one of the small joys of his long life to watch the pond by the hamlet’s green. Its fluctuations were always the same, year after year, with the seasons. By late autumn, after the rains had fallen, the pool was fairly full. In winter it often froze. Two years ago, in the coldest winter Pride could ever remember, the pond had been frozen solid from November to April. Then, when the spring showers came and the warmth of May, the pond’s whole surface would be covered with white flowers, as though the water itself had broken into blossom.

The wonder of the pond was the way it filled. There was no stream, as such, not even a rivulet. But as the rains fell on the nearby heath, somehow, as by a miracle, they drained off invisibly, tiny trickles you hardly saw that gathered by the hamlet into a small snake of water that ran across the green and spread out into the shallow depression beside it.

By summer, however, the pond began to evaporate. The warm heath soaked up any showers that fell upon it. The snake of water disappeared. Day by day the animals cropping the lush grass by the pond’s edge advanced a little further. By the fence month in midsummer the pond was only half its springtime size. By August it was often completely dry. As he looked at it now, two cows and a pony were grazing in the green depression beside the three or four large puddles remaining at its centre.

Stephen Pride was feeling relieved. He had been to Albion House that morning and had just walked back. The news there had been exactly as he’d hoped: Dame Alice was still in London and no word had come to say she was returning. That was good. He’d known and loved Dame Alice all her life, and he didn’t want to see her back at present, not the way things were at Lymington.

Because of his wife and her family, Pride usually knew more than most of the Oakley people about what was going on in Lymington, but nobody could have failed to be aware of the way feeling was running there in the last few years. If the little harbour town had been seething, so had almost every borough in England.

There might be some in the county who still hankered for the old Catholic faith, but the century since the Armada had thinned their ranks greatly by now. As for the townsfolk, they wanted none of it. The merchants and small traders of Lymington had disliked Charles I and distrusted Charles II. A few years ago, when concerns about the Catholic succession had been especially high in Parliament, a rogue named Titus Oates had invented a Catholic plot to depose Charles and put James in his place. The Jesuits were to take over the country; honest Protestants would be murdered. The whole thing was a fiction from start to finish, by which Oates aimed to make himself a rich celebrity. But the English were so afraid of Catholicism by then that they believed it. Hardly a week went by without Oates creating some further tale. Up and down the country people started imagining Jesuits peeping from behind windows or lurking round corners. And the growing port of Lymington was no exception. Half the town was looking for Jesuits. The mayor and his council were ready to arm the citizens.

So when Monmouth had raised his banner for the Protestant cause, Lymington had not hesitated. Within a day the mayor had several dozen men under arms. The local merchants and gentlemen were mostly with him. Pride himself had seen half a dozen local worthies riding past Oakley on their way up to Albion House to seek Alice’s support. A message had already been sent by a swift horseman to Monmouth to assure him: ‘Lymington is with you.’ The afternoon before, there had been a march through the streets with pipes and drums, followed by ale and punch for everyone at the house of one of the merchants. It was like a carnival.

And Stephen Pride the villager, like John Hancock the lawyer, looked on cautiously. ‘Let the townspeople get excited,’ he had told his son Jim. ‘But those of us in the Forest may be wiser. No matter what happens with Monmouth, I’ll still have my cows and you’ll still be underkeeper. I just thank God’, he added, ‘that Dame Alice isn’t here. They’d draw her in whether she wanted it or not.’

He was in a reasonably cheerful mood, therefore, when he caught sight, a hundred yards past the pond, of a group of people listening to an argument. He went towards them.

It wasn’t often you saw the two Furzey boys together. They were actually middle-aged men now and, since Gabriel’s death a few years ago, George Furzey had taken over his cottage; but to Stephen Pride they were still the Furzey boys. God knows they both looked just like old Gabriel. George was a little bigger, but they both bulged at the waist in the same way. And, Stephen thought privately, they were both just as obstinate as their father.

William Furzey had never made much of himself over at Ringwood: he worked for a farmer as a stockman, looking after the cattle. A long way to go for no good reason, it had always seemed to Pride, but then he could never quite approve of anyone who went to live outside the Forest boundary. He’d come over to see George Furzey about something, evidently, and now they were standing side by side like a pair of infuriated bantam cocks. The cause of their fury, he now saw, was his own son.

‘You ain’t got the right,’ George Furzey was protesting, ‘an’ I ain’t going to do it anyway.’ He looked at his brother who was too busy hating Jim Pride to take time off to speak. ‘So that’s that.’

The trouble, as Jim Pride had put it to his father only a week ago, was predictable. ‘George Furzey doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.’

If the Furzeys had never accepted the fact that they hadn’t the right of Estovers – if, to this day, they refused even to acknowledge Alice Lisle with a nod when they saw her and called her a thief – then the one thing that had been intolerable to them was when, a year ago, Jim Pride had been transferred from the post of underkeeper at Bolderwood to that of underkeeper in the South bailiwick.

For Stephen Pride this transfer had been very welcome. Bolderwood was almost nine miles from Oakley, but now he could see his son and his grandchildren almost every day.

For George Furzey, however, Jim’s presence meant something very different, for the underkeeper was responsible for supervising common rights, including that of Estovers. ‘I’m not answering to Jim Pride,’ he had told his family. He wasn’t going to be made a fool of by the Prides. And he had made a point of collecting firewood from the Forest just to prove his point.

Yet even then, matters needn’t have come to a head. Jim Pride hadn’t been an underkeeper for fifteen years without learning some wisdom. If Furzey had quietly taken some underwood when he needed it, Jim would have ignored it. But, of course, George Furzey was incapable of doing that.

Two days ago at the little inn at Brockenhurst, he had announced for everyone to hear: ‘I don’t take no notice of Jim Pride. If I want Estovers I take them.’ Then, looking round in triumph, he added, ‘I’ll take wood for cooper’s timber, too’ and had given everyone a broad wink. The right of Estovers applied only to wood that was to be used by a cottager for his fire. Cooper’s timber was wood that was to be sold for making barrels or fencing, and was illegal.

It was a stupid and unnecessary challenge, and it left Jim Pride with no option. ‘I’ve got to come down on him now,’ he told his father.

So that morning he had arrived at Furzey’s cottage and informed him, as politely as he could: ‘I’m sorry, George, but you’ve been taking wood you aren’t entitled to. You know the rules. You’ve got to pay.’

George and William Furzey looked at old Stephen now – the sight of him, it seemed, only infuriated them more – and after William had taken time, with careful deliberation, to spit on the ground, George summarized his position with a shout: ‘I’ll tell you who’s going to pay, Jim Pride. You’re going to pay. You and that old hag Lisle! You and that witch. You’re the ones that are going to pay.’

With that, the two Furzeys turned and stamped back to their cottage.

Colonel Thomas Penruddock sat on his horse and coolly observed the crowd which, whatever it really felt, showed signs of rejoicing. His cousin from Hale was beside him.

Behind the two Penruddocks was Ringwood church with its broad, cheerful square tower. In front of them was the vicarage with guards on the door. Inside the vicarage, being questioned by Lord Lumley, was the Duke of Monmouth. There was no small excitement in the air. Ringwood had never been at the centre of English history before.

The last two days had been hectic. As soon as it was known that Monmouth was on the run a huge reward – five thousand pounds – had been offered for his capture. Even a sighting would be worth something. Half the south-western counties were out looking for him. Lord Lumley and his soldiers had clattered into Ringwood and had been scouring the New Forest. They had raided several houses in Lymington, where the mayor had already taken ship and fled abroad.

But now Monmouth was captured and unless he could find some way to persuade his uncle, the new King James, to pardon him, he was undoubtedly going to die.

Colonel Thomas Penruddock felt no emotion, personally. If Monmouth had succeeded that wouldn’t have worried him much either. He felt none of the emotion for the cause of James II that his father had felt for his brother Charles. Why should he? He wasn’t a Catholic. The reigning Stuarts had never done anything for his family to repay their loyalty. The colonelcy he wanted had gone to another. He had finally obtained it only four years before. No, he felt nothing for the Stuarts any more.

But he did believe in order and Monmouth, by rebelling, threatened disorder. As he’d failed, he must die.

The fact that this was exactly what had happened to his own poor father did not make Thomas Penruddock sympathetic in the least. Rather the reverse. Monmouth should have learned from the other man’s mistakes, he told himself grimly. The rebellion had been poorly organized and had come too soon. Very well, then. They killed my father, he thought. Let Monmouth suffer his turn now.

Monmouth’s capture had been a wretched business. Penruddock and his cavalry squadrons had been out on the ridges below Sarum and been unlucky to miss the fugitive, who had somehow slipped past them. But he had finally been discovered about seven miles west of Ringwood, disguised as a shepherd, half starved and hiding in a ditch. The honour of spotting him had gone to a militia man named Henry Parkin. Penruddock had ridden down to Ringwood as soon as he received word of the capture, out of curiosity as much as anything, and had not been surprised to find his cousin, who was a local magistrate, already there.

But now the door of the vicarage was opening. They were bringing him out. The crowd was watching expectantly.

He had been given some clothes to wear, but he was still a bedraggled figure. He looked dead beat. In that haggard face, with a week’s growth of beard, Penruddock found it hard to see the handsome, spoiled youth he had briefly caught sight of that day in the Forest, fifteen years ago, when he had gone to see the king.

They didn’t waste any time. They hustled him down the street, past a row of thatched Tudor cottages, to a larger house by the market place where he could be conveniently held under guard.

‘What will they do with him now?’ Penruddock asked his cousin.

‘Keep him here a day or two,’ the magistrate replied, ‘then to the Tower of London I should think.’

‘My men are still out looking for fugitives. I hear they’ve rounded up hundreds further west.’ He looked after the figure of Monmouth as he disappeared into the other house. ‘You think he has any chance?’

‘Doubt it.’ The magistrate shook his head. ‘I’m sure he’ll appeal to the king for mercy, but’ – he gave his cousin a sidelong glance – ‘with the feeling in the country the way it is, I doubt whether the king can afford to let him live.’

Colonel Thomas Penruddock nodded. Even with Monmouth dead, Catholic King James II was unlikely, in his opinion, to be secure on his throne for very long.

His cousin the magistrate, echoing his thoughts, looked down at the ground. ‘Too little, too soon,’ he murmured.

The crowd was breaking up.

‘I think I’m going,’ Colonel Penruddock remarked and was just turning his horse’s head when he noticed a man who, it occurred to him, looked uncommonly like a turnip – a rather grumpy turnip, come to that. The fellow seemed to be watching them. ‘Who’s that ugly fellow?’ he asked his cousin. ‘Any idea?’

The magistrate glanced at William Furzey and shrugged. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Looks like a turnip.’

Although William Furzey knew perfectly well who the magistrate was, and had been gazing with mild envy at the fine horses that he and the Colonel rode, his mind had not been on the Penruddocks at all.

If he was not looking his best that morning, it really wasn’t his fault. He’d only just got back from Oakley when he heard about Monmouth’s defeat and the reward. He hadn’t wasted any time. He’d seized a cudgel and a short length of rope, put a loaf of bread and an apple in a napkin, sent word to the farmer that he was sick and prepared to set off.

Of course, he had known it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. On the other hand, it would have been foolish not to try. And, as he thought about it, William Furzey reckoned he had a chance.

After all, Monmouth had to be looking for a port. Lymington, therefore, was still his best bet. True, the king’s troops were watching the place, but Lymington was full of sympathizers and you could hide an army of fugitives in the Forest. He’d only need to get word to some of the people down by the quay. The Seagulls, to William Furzey’s knowledge, would take the devil himself as long as he paid.

How would the fugitive get to Lymington? He’d certainly avoid Fordingbridge and Ringwood, but he’d have to cross the river Avon.

Tyrrell’s Ford, then. It was the obvious place.

So Furzey had sidled up to a group of troops gathered in Ringwood market place and asked casually if any of their number had gone south along the river. They had told him no. He’d already noticed that not one of the troops who had arrived was a local man. Typical, he thought, of the authorities to conduct a search with soldiers unfamiliar with the territory.

But it was good for him. Without another word, he’d set off for Tyrrell’s Ford.

He’d waited down there a day and a night before he heard that his quest was in vain and Monmouth was already found: due west of Ringwood, though, and heading south. Monmouth had been heading for Tyrrell’s Ford all right.

The thought that he’d been cheated of his reward so narrowly did nothing to improve his temper.

Colonel Penruddock and his men continued to search the area around Sarum for several more days. They found no one. Meanwhile, however, the numbers taken in the west went to over a thousand.

Then the search slowed and stopped. There was a watch kept at every town, of course, but all seemed quiet.

Figures in the landscape. There were still fugitives out there, however: men of the Protestant cause; men who had vanished into houses where they could find shelter; men who must keep moving on, cautiously, towards the Forest.

Two weeks after the arrest of Monmouth, Alice Lisle could bear it no longer. Peter Albion had been calling almost every day.

Although Monmouth had written to King James and even had an interview with him, it hadn’t done him any good. A week after his capture, on the little green in the Tower of London, he was executed. Meanwhile, preparations were in hand to deal with the huge mass of his followers who had been captured down in the West Country. A huge assize, at which they would all be tried, was to be held in August, with James’s hand-picked man, Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys, presiding.

Yet none of this seemed to alter Peter Albion’s view. ‘The king is just going to make himself more hated. I predict nothing but trouble,’ he announced.

And I predict nothing but trouble for you, Alice thought, if you don’t keep your mouth shut.

Her terror was that he was going to propose marriage. She had no doubt that Betty would want him. And then what was she to do? Refuse her consent? Cut Betty off?

When she confided her fears to Tryphena and even that she was afraid Betty might elope, Tryphena with her usual tact, nodded sagely. ‘We must consider, Mother, that although Betty loves you, if she had to choose between you and a young man she will certainly choose him.’

The best course, surely, was to keep the two apart. Once Monmouth was executed and the search for his followers dying down, Alice felt she could safely return to the Forest. Indeed, it was looking a safer place than London every day, with the threat of Peter Albion so present. But she also feared that, if she announced their departure, it might bring matters to a head with Albion and provoke a proposal.

A week after Monmouth’s execution, however, he announced that he must go down into Kent for a few days upon business. Telling him that she looked forward to seeing him on his return, Alice said a fond farewell. The very next morning she told Betty they were leaving for the country before noon.

By that night they were already at an inn twenty miles down the road.

‘We should be in Winchester by tomorrow night,’ Alice said cheerfully.

Jim Pride was surprised, two days later, to see a carriage containing Alice and Betty Lisle passing through Lyndhurst. At the same moment he saw them, Alice Lisle caught sight of him and waved for him to come over.

Betty, he noticed, was looking a bit subdued, but Alice greeted him warmly, asked after his father and mother, and demanded to know all the news.

The Forest, as it happened, had been quiet for a week, until today. A rumour from somewhere had caused the authorities to think there might be fugitives about to embark from Lymington. There had been a house-to-house search there that morning, but nothing had been found.

‘I reckon it’ll all be quiet after this,’ Jim said.

Alice, however, had looked thoughtful. ‘I think, all the same, we won’t go to Albion House just yet,’ she said. ‘It’s too close to Lymington.’ She smiled at Pride. ‘Tell the coachman we’ll go to Moyles Court instead,’ she requested. ‘We’ve still time to get there before dark.’ Moyles Court, right across in the Avon valley, seemed a safer bet altogether.

William Furzey had just finished work for the day and he was walking up the Avon to a spot where he intended to do a little unobserved fishing, when he came upon the man on the horse. The horse was not impressive. The man was a rather frail-looking fellow, with grey hair and mild, watery blue eyes. He seemed to be lost. ‘Could you tell me’,’ he enquired, ‘the way to Moyles Court?’

William eyed him. A townsman by the look of him, a small trader or craftsman, perhaps. Didn’t sound local. William Furzey wasn’t stupid; he knew an opportunity when he saw it. The fish could wait. ‘’T’ain’t easy to find,’ he said. The house was, in fact, less than a mile off by a straight lane. The stranger looked tired. ‘I could take you there,’ William offered, ‘but it’d be out of my way.’

‘Would sixpence repay your kindness?’ A day labourer’s wage was eight pence. Sixpence from an ordinary townsman like this, therefore, was handsome. He must want to find the place badly. Furzey nodded.

He took a circuitous route. Moyles Court lay in a clearing just below the ridge that led up from the Avon valley to the heathland of the Forest. This part of the valley was quite wooded, so it wasn’t difficult for Furzey to stretch the journey to two miles, taking paths that sometimes doubled back on themselves. Since the stranger made no remark, Furzey concluded that his sense of direction wasn’t strong. It also gave him the chance to find out more about him. Had he come from far? The man was evasive. What was his occupation?

‘I am a baker,’ his companion admitted.

A baker, from a long way off, prepared to pay sixpence to find Moyles Court. This man was almost certainly a dissenter, then, looking for that damned Lisle woman. Furzey bided his time before speaking. ‘You seek a godly lady,’ he ventured in a pious voice, at the next wrong turn he made.

‘You think so?’

‘I do. If it is Dame Alice you seek.’

‘Ah.’ The baker looked pleased. His watery blue eyes brightened hopefully.

Furzey wasn’t quite sure where this conversation would lead, but one thing was certain: the more he could learn from this man, the more chance he had of using it for profit. And the beginning of an idea was starting to form in his mind. ‘There are many good folk she has helped,’ Furzey continued. He thought of the hated Prides and mentioned the names of some of their Lymington relations. ‘But I must be careful what I say,’ he added, ‘not knowing who you may be.’

And now the poor fool smiled gladly. ‘You may know me, friend,’ he cried. ‘My name is Dunne and I come all the way from Warminster. I have a message to deliver to Dame Alice.’

Warminster: west of Sarum by twenty miles. A long way for a dissenting baker to be carrying a message. His first suspicions began to grow. This fellow might be useful indeed.

‘By what name may I know you?’ the baker asked eagerly.

Furzey hesitated. He hadn’t the least intention of giving his name to this probably dangerous friend of the cursed Lisle woman. ‘Thomas, Sir. Just Thomas,’ he replied, adding cautiously: ‘These are difficult times for godly men.’

‘They are, Thomas. I know it.’ The baker’s watery blue eyes gave him a look of tender understanding.

Furzey led him on another hundred yards before quietly remarking: ‘If a man needed shelter, in these dangerous times, this’d be a good place, I should say.’

Yes. There was no doubt of it, the baker was looking at him gratefully. ‘You think so?’

‘I do. Praise God,’ Furzey added devoutly. He had run out of detours now, but he knew all he needed to. ‘Moyles Court lies just up there.’ He pointed. It was less than a quarter-mile. ‘Your business and that of Dame Alice is your own, Sir, so I’ll leave you here. But may I ask if you will be remaining there or returning?’

‘Returning forthwith, good Thomas.’

‘Then, if you need a guide to conduct you on your way so that you will not be seen, I’ll wait for you, if you please.’ With gratitude the baker thanked him and went upon his way.

William Furzey sat on a tree stump. There was no doubt in his mind now as to what this must mean. The baker was helping fugitives. Why else should he come and go again like this? He wanted to bring them to Dame Alice. He smiled to himself. He might have missed Monmouth himself – and several people who had helped find Monmouth had been handsomely rewarded – but if the baker’s friends were of any importance then there’d surely be something in it for him. The question was, how and where to find them? He couldn’t very well accompany this baker all the way home. But if the men were to be brought to Moyles Court … A grin spread over his face. That would bode ill, now, for that cursed Dame Alice, wouldn’t it?

An hour passed before Dunne the baker returned. One look at his face was enough. He was smiling contentedly.

‘You saw Dame Alice?’ Furzey enquired.

‘I did, my friend. And I told her of your kindness. She was curious as to who you were, but I said you were a quiet fellow who minded his own business and wished to know nothing of ours.’

‘You did right by me, Sir.’

They said no more for a while, but after about a mile the baker asked: ‘If I come again, with my friends, would you take us by a discreet way to Moyles Court?’

‘With all my heart,’ Furzey replied.

They parted near Fordingbridge.

‘Meet me here, then, in three days’ time, at dusk,’ the trusting baker said as they parted. ‘May I count upon you, Thomas?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said William, ‘you may count on me.’

Alice Lisle stared at the table, then at the letter again.

She and Betty had only arrived back at Moyles Court themselves an hour before Dunne called, so she had been rather preoccupied when he gave it to her. Perhaps, she now considered, she hadn’t paid the matter enough attention.

It was very brief. It came from a highly respectable Presbyterian minister named Hicks, whom she knew slightly. She thought she remembered him staying at Albion House once, years ago. Hicks asked if she would allow him and a friend to come for a night on his way eastwards.

It was a simple request and normally she would hardly have given it much thought. When she’d asked Dunne what this meant he had said only that he was a messenger but that Hicks seemed a most respectable man. So she had agreed that they might come there on Tuesday, which was in three days’ time, and let Dunne go. She had wondered who this man Thomas might be, who had shown Dunne the way, but there were probably many people in the area who had friends in the Lymington community. The man was obviously a well-wisher.

Yet as the evening wore on she began to have second thoughts. Had she been careless? Dunne had come a long way. What if these men were fugitives? Dunne had said nothing about that, but then he probably wanted to accomplish his mission, possibly even get them off his own hands. As for this man Thomas – could he really be trusted? The more she thought of it the less she liked it and the more she was cross with herself. A moment of weakness, a failure to keep watch, a slowing down, a weariness. Every creature in the Forest knew better than that.

She felt a sudden fear, a burst of urgency. She must put them off. She could send a messenger after Dunne in the morning. Assuming, of course, that he had returned to Warminster and not somewhere else. It was worth a try. She sighed. She’d sleep on it.

Yet every creature in the Forest, sooner or later, will be guilty of carelessness, for which the penalty can be high. In the morning, in the quiet shade of Moyles Court, she told herself that she was worrying unduly.

William Furzey didn’t waste any time. As soon as he had parted from Dunne he had continued northwards. It was a four-mile walk up to Hale, but he wasn’t taking any chances. If, by ill luck, the baker should be caught and questioned, Furzey couldn’t run any risk of being accused as an accomplice. Penruddock of Hale, therefore, was his first objective.

It was twilight when he arrived. The magistrate, about to go to bed after a busy day, was not best pleased to see the man who looked like a turnip, but as soon as Furzey began his tale he was all attention. By the time William had finished he was looking approving. ‘Fugitives. I haven’t a doubt of it,’ he said briskly. ‘You did well to come here.’

‘I’m hoping not to be the poorer for it, Sir,’ William Furzey said frankly. He’d considered bargaining at the start but wisely concluded this might irritate the magistrate.

‘Certainly.’ The other nodded. ‘It’ll depend on who they are, of course. But I’ll see you’re not the loser if we take them. You have my word.’ He gave Furzey a quick look. ‘They’ll probably think you could be useful, you know, at any trial.’

‘Yes, Sir.’ Furzey understood. ‘Whatever is wanted.’

‘Hm.’ The magistrate didn’t particularly care for this kind of business himself, but it was as well to know where one stood. ‘You say’, he resumed, ‘you’re to conduct them to Moyles Court on Tuesday night and that Dame Alice will shelter them?’

‘That’s what he told me, Sir.’

Penruddock the magistrate considered silently for a few moments. Alice Lisle, he thought grimly to himself. How the wheel turned. ‘Tell no one. Not a soul. Meet them exactly as planned. Have you a horse?’

‘I can get one.’

‘Ride straight to me as soon as they are at Moyles Court. Can you do that?’

Furzey nodded.

‘Good. You can sleep in the barn here tonight, if you wish,’ Penruddock offered kindly.

That night, before he went to bed, the magistrate wrote a message to be taken to his cousin, Colonel Thomas Penruddock of Compton Chamberlayne, at dawn the next day.

George Furzey looked at William Furzey and shook his head in wonder. ‘You dog,’ he breathed. ‘You clever dog. Tell me again.’ So William repeated everything.

The magistrate had instructed him to tell no one, but William didn’t count his brother, so as soon as he was able on Sunday, he had quit the farm and crossed the Forest to Oakley, to share the news. The joy it brought George Furzey was everything William could have wished for him.

George was not a man of deep imagination. He did not concern himself in detail with what might befall Alice Lisle. All he knew was that the woman who had cheated and humiliated his family was going to get her come-uppance. That thought was so large, and so beautiful, that all others were extinguished before it like stars before the rising sun.

‘She’ll be arrested, I reckon,’ said William.

The thought of Dame Alice being hauled off to the magistrate, humiliated in front of the whole Forest, seemed to William to be God’s perfect justice: a fitting tribute to his father’s memory. And then, as he considered the sweetness of it, another idea came into his mind like a flash of morning sunlight. ‘Know what?’ he said. ‘We could send Jim Pride along there too. If they found him at Moyles Court he’d have some explaining to do, wouldn’t he?’ He let out a chuckle. ‘We could do that, I reckon, William. We could do that, then!’

‘How’d you do it, George?’ his brother asked.

‘Don’t you worry about that.’ George was in a transport of delight. The Lisles and the Prides. All humiliated. All in one go. ‘That’s easy, that is. Don’t you worry.’

Moyles Court was bigger than Albion House. It had a number of large brick chimneys rising from its various parts and a large open courtyard. It was set in a clearing, with trees all around, although there were two small paddocks on the slope up to the Forest opposite. The manor’s main fields lay on the Avon valley floor, not far away.

Betty was standing in the courtyard when the letter from Peter Albion was brought on Monday morning. The messenger who delivered it had already gone to Albion House and been sent on there.

It was brief. Peter’s business in Kent had been cut short and he had returned to London only the day after they had left. He had been shocked to find them gone, because he had an important matter to discuss with her. He was following in person and expected to arrive at Albion House on Tuesday afternoon.

As she read, Betty felt her heart quicken. She had no doubt what this must mean. In her mind there was only one question, therefore: should she tell her mother before she went to Albion House, or not? She realized that the servants at Albion House would surely send him on to Moyles Court anyway. He’d be there by Tuesday evening. And whatever her feelings, Dame Alice could hardly send him away. She was receiving other visitors that evening, wasn’t she? But all the same, the thought of going to meet him was attractive.

George Furzey waited until Tuesday morning before going over to Jim Pride’s. He found the underkeeper leaving his lodge.

Jim wasn’t particularly pleased to see him, but he was civil enough, as George delivered his message: ‘Dame Alice wants to see you at Moyles Court.’

‘Moyles Court?’ Pride frowned. ‘I can’t get over there till evening. I’ve got things to do.’

‘She don’t want you there till evening. She said she’s out till dusk anyway but wants you to come by after that. She said sorry to ask you to come so late but it’s urgent.’ He felt pretty pleased with this.

‘What does she want me for?’ the puzzled underkeeper asked.

‘I don’t know, do I?’

‘How come it’s you bringing me this message?’ Pride demanded with a trace of irritation.

‘How come it’s me? ’Cause I was going by Albion House, that’s why. And the groom said he had to go on with a message, but he was late, so I said I’d take it for him. That’s why. I’m just being helpful, aren’t I? There something wrong with that?’

No. No, Pride allowed, there was nothing wrong with that.

‘You be sure to go, mind. I don’t want to get blamed if you don’t show up.’

‘I’ll go,’ Pride promised.

‘All right then,’ said Furzey. ‘I’m off.’

The early evening was warm as William Furzey rode out of Ringwood, where he had borrowed a horse from a blacksmith he knew. There were two hours to go before dusk, so he took his time.

The River Avon between Ringwood and Fordingbridge is particularly lovely. Often, towards evening, when the fishermen come out, there is a magical mist that drifts across its watery meadows, as if the silence itself had coalesced into a damp but tangible form. The first hint of such a mist was just beginning to arise on the water as Furzey rode northwards through the dappled shadows cast, like fishermen’s lines, across the lane.

Would they come? He certainly hoped so. He wondered how much the authorities would think they were worth. Five pounds, perhaps? Ten? What if they were captured on the way, though? Possible, but it seemed to him unlikely. He guessed the authorities would rather take them together with Dame Alice, whom they could not possibly like, at Moyles Court.

He rode along cheerfully, therefore.

Stephen Pride had been feeling his age a bit that day, but he kept himself cheerful. A few aches and pains were to be expected. A walk usually eased the stiffness in his leg. It was because of the pain there, although he didn’t care to admit it, that he had set off in the afternoon to call upon his son.

Jim Pride had been out when his father arrived, but his wife and children had been there and Stephen had spent a pleasant hour playing with his grandchildren. The youngest, a four-year-old boy, had insisted on making his grandfather try to catch him, which had left old Stephen a little more tired than he wanted the child to see. He was grateful when his kindly daughter-in-law took pity on him and called the children indoors for a while so that he could sit in the shade of a tree and take a nap.

Jim returned just after he awoke and told him about the message from Dame Alice. Stephen had no more idea than his son what this might be about, but agreed that if Dame Alice wanted him, he should certainly go.

At their insistence, he remained with Jim and his wife until early evening.

The lengthening shadows were providing a pleasant coolness under the blue August sky by the time Stephen Pride made his way slowly along the edge of Beaulieu Heath towards Oakley; and he had just passed the path that led across to Boldre church when he caught sight of a figure a little way ahead. It was a lone, mounted woman, quite motionless, gazing out across the heath, apparently unaware of his approach. Only as he drew close, and she turned to look at him, did he realize it was Betty Lisle.

She greeted him affectionately. ‘I’m waiting for my cousin Peter Albion,’ she explained.

She had been at Albion House since early afternoon. Rather than risk a confrontation, she had finally decided to tell her mother she was going for a ride in this direction; that way she could meet Peter without interference and return with him to Moyles Court in the evening.

Her mother had raised no objection to her ride and she had arrived at Albion House in good time; but there had been no sign of Peter. All afternoon she had waited at the house but at last, unable to bear it any longer, she had told the servants to keep her cousin there if he turned up from the Lyndhurst road and had gone out to the edge of the heath to watch, in case he decided to cut across that way. She was glad to see Stephen; at least she could talk to him and take her mind off her vigil.

Stephen was interested to hear about this cousin. He knew the Albions well enough to understand at once who Peter was. He told Betty that he could even remember seeing the young man’s grandfather, Francis, once when he had been a boy.

‘I meant to return with him to Moyles Court this evening,’ she told him. ‘If he doesn’t come soon, I don’t know what I should do. Go back without him, I suppose.’

Pride told her next about the message Dame Alice had sent to Jim.

This puzzled her. ‘As my mother knew I was coming this way, I’d have thought she’d have asked me to carry the message,’ she remarked. ‘I didn’t see any groom go off. Still,’ she added, ‘I suppose it’s something to do with the men who are coming to the house this evening.’ And she told Pride briefly of the stranger who’d been brought to Moyles Court three days before.

Soon after this, Pride went upon his way.

William Furzey waited quietly. The shadows cast by the departing sun had merged into a general orange glow and then into brownness. The mist was spreading in ghostly patches all over the meadows. The Avon valley had entered a slow summer gloaming as the first stars appeared over the Forest in a pale turquoise sky.

He saw them now: three horsemen, coming quietly through the mists towards him.

George Furzey couldn’t help it. It was more than he could bear. He put his two hands between his knees and rocked back and forth for joy, murmuring: ‘Oh my. Oh my.’

In the east, the first faint stars were just appearing. Had the horsemen come to William by now? Possibly. Had Jim Pride left on his fool’s errand? Any time now. Furzey had been so excited he couldn’t stay in his cottage. He’d come out into the warm evening, found a fallen birch tree by the edge of the heath and sat there, gazing with rapture at the beauty of the sky. He rocked himself again. ‘Oh my.’

And this was how Stephen Pride found him as he arrived, rather weary after his long day, back at Oakley. ‘Well,’ he remarked, ‘you’re looking cheerful for once, George Furzey.’

George Furzey really couldn’t help it. All his life, it seemed to him, the Pride family had been looking down at him. But not any more. Not after tonight. ‘Maybe I am cheerful. I reckon I can be cheerful if I want,’ he replied.

‘You be as happy as you like,’ said Pride. Was there a hint of contempt in his voice?

Even if there wasn’t, this was what Furzey heard. ‘Some people may be laughing the other side of their faces, Stephen Pride,’ he said with a note of malicious triumph that couldn’t be mistaken. ‘Some may, before long.’

‘Oh?’ Pride looked at him carefully. ‘And what do you mean by that?’

‘Never you mind. I don’t mean nothing. Or if I do, it ain’t none of your concern. Or if it is’ – Furzey warmed to his theme – ‘you’ll find out when you find out, won’t you?’

And rather pleased with this bit of high diplomacy, Furzey gave him a look which, even in the fading light, plainly said ‘You’ve got something coming to you’.

Stephen Pride shrugged and walked on. This unexpected aggression left him feeling suddenly very tired.

When he reached the door of his home, his wife took one look at him and made him sit down at once. ‘I’ll bring you some broth. You rest a while,’ she commanded.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. Perhaps, he thought, he’d just sleep a few minutes. But instead of sleeping he found the events of the last few hours passing through his mind: playing with his grandchildren, talking to Jim, meeting Betty; the strange fact that she knew nothing about the message Furzey had brought; the visitors coming to Moyles Court that night; Furzey’s unusual air of triumph.

Suddenly, he sat bold upright, with a shock – as though a flash of lightning had passed, with a great thunderclap, through his brain. A moment later a tide of cold panic surged through him. He was horribly awake. ‘Lord Jesus,’ he cried and stood up, as his wife hurried anxiously to his side. ‘That devil!’ he exclaimed. He did not know exactly what this business meant, but he saw the shape of it. The message Furzey had delivered must be a fake. That’s why he was so pleased with himself. He had Jim going over to Moyles Court where visitors were expected. No doubt they were dissenters. Dissenters? Fugitives, more like. That was it. The Forest man’s instincts told him at once that it was a trap.

‘Got to get the ponies,’ he cried, pushing past his wife. ‘Don’t worry,’ he explained, as he checked himself and gave her a kiss. ‘I haven’t lost my wits. Come with me.’

By the barn, saddling up both their ponies with feverish haste he explained to her what he knew. ‘You better take the small pony. Get up to Jim’s, fast as you can. If he hasn’t gone, tell him to stay home, but don’t tell him why. I don’t want him coming after me, see? Just tell him George Furzey made a mistake.’

‘What’ll you do?’

‘Go and warn them at Albion House. Tell them to stay put if they haven’t gone.’

‘And then?’

‘I’ll ride across the Forest. Cut Jim off if you miss him. Then I’ll go on to Moyles Court.’

‘Oh, Stephen …’

‘I’ve got to. If it’s a trap, that means Dame Alice …’

She nodded. There was no argument. Minutes later, husband and wife were cantering along the edge of the heath northwards. The dusk was gathering, but even the stars would be enough for these two, who knew every inch of the Forest. At the place where the track led towards Albion House, Stephen Pride and his wife of fifty years paused for a moment and kissed, before riding their separate ways.

‘God protect you,’ she murmured, as she glanced back, with love and fear in her heart, at the dark path through the trees into which he had vanished.

Colonel Thomas Penruddock stared at William Furzey in the candlelight of the hall of the magistrate’s house at Hale.

Although he had looked pleased with himself when he first arrived, Furzey was a little nervous now. With their braided uniforms and yellow sashes, their huge riding boots with folding tops, their broad leather belts and clanking swords the colonel and his dozen men seemed larger than life.

‘You are sure these men are at Moyles Court?’ Colonel Penruddock demanded severely.

But about this Furzey seemed confident. ‘They were when I left them,’ he said. ‘That’s for sure.’

‘We leave here at midnight,’ Penruddock ordered his men. ‘We’ll surround the house and move in before dawn. That’s the time to catch them off guard.’ He turned to Furzey. ‘You will remain here until morning.’ Having completed his orders, Colonel Thomas Penruddock bade his cousin goodnight and went to an upstairs chamber and lay down.

But he did not sleep.

Alice Lisle. This was the third time she had come into his life. Once when she murdered his father; once when he had found her with the king; and now, caught with traitors. This time, surely, would be the last: the completion.

Retribution. It was not only his father. She represented everything he hated: those sour Puritan looks, that humourless self-righteousness; the Puritans, it seemed to him, believed that God’s kingdom was only served by the cruel destruction of all that was lovely, chivalrous, gallant. Alice Lisle the Cromwellian, the regicide, the thief of other men’s estates, the murderer. This was how he saw her. How could it be otherwise?

Yet as he lay there, a colonel surrounded by his troops, with all the authority of the kingdom behind him, Thomas Penruddock found that he was conscious above all of his power. The evil old woman down at Moyles Court seemed in his mind’s eye no less hateful, but small and frail. Like some vicious old fox that has terrorized an area for many seasons, she was in her decline now and all nature called for her to die. He was not going to destroy the woman, he told himself; he was just going, as one goes to a guttering candle, to snuff her out.

Peter Albion had taken longer than he expected and Betty had almost given up when at last, just as it was getting dark, he arrived. He looked tired. At the suggestion that they might ride on across the Forest to Moyles Court that night he looked dismayed; and Betty was just wondering what to do when Stephen Pride arrived.

‘I thought you’d still be here,’ he said. ‘I got a message for you.’

He’d had to think hard on the way. If he told Betty the truth, that her mother was in danger, he was afraid she might go running back to Moyles Court whatever anyone said. So he’d prepared a lie – not a very good one, but he thought it would do.

‘I just sent the groom back to your mother. Met him at Boldre bridge. I told him you were here. She says to stay. She doesn’t want you riding across the Forest at night.’ The obvious relief on Peter Albion’s face told him he need say no more.

‘Thank you, Stephen.’ She smiled. ‘I don’t think my cousin Peter has any desire to ride more today.’

The young man smiled too and Pride nodded his head politely. A handsome young man, he thought. Just right for Betty. It seemed to him that Betty might think so too. ‘I’ll be getting home then,’ he said as casually as he could and rode back to the lane.

A minute later he was urging his pony forward as fast as he could, up the lane towards the quiet little ford. Soon after, he had crossed it and was making his way swiftly up the long track that led to the western heath.

There was no time to lose. Jim might be out there, ahead of him somewhere. And at Moyles Court Dame Alice had probably already received her visitors. Had the trap been sprung by now? Late at night was more likely, he thought. Such things were usually done late at night.

His heart was beating fast. He felt a little light-headed as he came out on to the edge of the western heath by Setley. It was many a year since he’d gone rushing about all day and all night like this. His physical exhaustion seemed to have evaporated, though. He was too nervous and too excited to be tired.

The stars were gleaming brightly now. He decided to cut straight up north, skirting Brockenhurst, then take the track that led out above Burley. That was the way Jim would be going. He pushed his pony along. Thank God it was a sturdy little creature. That pony could carry him all day … and all night.

He skirted Brockenhurst. Ahead of him lay a section of forest known as Rhinefield. A quarter moon was rising. Its light caught the pale sand and gravel along the path. It was like a silver trail of stardust across the heather.

On any other errand his heart would have filled with joy at such a sight – the open heath of the Forest under starlight, the Forest he loved. His heart was pounding. He took deep gasps of the warm August air. The hoofs of his pony were beating, beating upon the path.

There was something out there, ahead of him. He felt a little strange. Something pale out on the heath: cattle probably. No, the moon. The moon was on the heath. He shook his head to clear it. And then a great white flash, like lightning came with an awesome thunder into his head.

And just short of Rhinefield, Stephen Pride, having suffered a single stroke, fell on to the gentle warmth of the Forest floor.

Alice Lisle stood at the open window and looked out.

Above the trees on the small ridge opposite the starlit sky had clouded over, as though it had been muffled with a blanket. Moyles Court was quiet in the silence before the dawn.

No one had come since the visitors had arrived that evening. She had not been surprised when Betty did not arrive back, for the simple reason that she knew exactly where Betty was. A message from Tryphena on Sunday had warned her that young Mr Albion had arrived back in London early and that, having called at the house, he was almost certainly on his way to the Forest. Betty’s suggestion that she should ride to Albion House hadn’t deceived her mother for a moment.

She hadn’t tried to stop her. If young Peter Albion was as determined as that, and if her twenty-four-year-old daughter had deceived her in order to meet him, it was clear that there was nothing more she could do. Albion House, quite likely, would return to the Albions. It was fate. Whatever her reservations, young Peter was actually a better match than any of her other daughters had found: better placed to succeed, more gently born. Perhaps it was the result of being back in the familiar surroundings of the Forest, but it seemed to her now that if this was what Betty chose it was useless to fight it any more.

But now, suddenly, there was shouting in the dark. Men were moving outside. There was a bang at the door. She heard a voice.

‘Open! In the name of the king.’

More bangs. Alice ran to the next chamber. Dunne and Hicks were in there. ‘Wake up!’ she cried. ‘Quickly. You must hide.’ The other man, Nelthorpe, was in the next room. She found him roused already, pulling on his boots.

They ran down the oak staircase, all four of them, in the darkness, the men clumping so loudly in their boots that it was hard to believe they wouldn’t be heard at Ringwood.

‘The back,’ she hissed, leading the way to the kitchens. But even as they got there they could see shadows outside the window there. ‘Hide as best you can,’ she told them and hurried to the stairs. Running up, her heart beating wildly, she found two of the servants already standing on the landing, looking pale and frightened. ‘Close the beds,’ she whispered, indicating the two rooms where the men had been. ‘Leave no sign. Quickly.’ The hammering on the doors, both front and back, was growing louder. Another minute and they might start to break them down. Again she raced downstairs, seized a candle from a table where she had left it the night before, lit it from the glowing embers of the fire and went to the door. Taking a deep breath she began to turn the heavy key and slip the big iron bolt. The last thing she thought, before she opened the door, was that she must not show fear.

Thomas Penruddock looked down at the woman before him.

She was in her nightdress, a shawl covering her shoulders. Her hair, mostly grey, was hanging loose. Even in the candlelight she looked pale. She stared at him. ‘What is the meaning of this, Sir?’

‘In the king’s name, Madam, we are to search your house.’

‘Search my house, Sir? In the middle of the night?’

‘Yes, Madam. And you will let us in.’

There were two large troopers behind the colonel Alice now realized. They looked as if they were about to push past her. She tried to appear calm.

But it was at this moment that she also realized her terrible mistake. If the troops entered the house, was there really any chance they wouldn’t find the three men? If they had been sleeping innocently, it might not look so bad, but the fact that she was trying to hide them suggested guilt. What could she do? A panic seized her; she saw that her hand, holding the candle, had started to shake. She fought to master herself. Perhaps she could bluff. It was her only hope now. ‘By what warrant do you dare to invade my house, Sir?’ She stared at him haughtily.

‘My warrant is the king’s name, Madam.’

‘Produce your warrant, Sir,’ she cried furiously, although she hadn’t the least idea if a warrant were needed or not, ‘or be gone.’ Did he hesitate? She wasn’t sure. ‘So,’ she cried again, ‘I see you have none. You are nothing but common trespassers, then.’ And she started to close the door.

Penruddock’s boot was in the way. A moment later the two troopers had pushed rudely past her. Then two more, out of the shadows, came blundering in.

‘Lights,’ voices were calling. ‘Bring lights.’

It did not take long to find them. Beyond the kitchen lay a large, barn-like room known as the malt-house. Hicks the minister, who was a large, corpulent man, and Dunne the baker had tried to bury themselves under a pile of refuse in there and were dragged out, looking foolish. Hicks’s companion Nelthorpe, a tall, thin fellow, had tried to hide in the kitchen chimney.

Penruddock addressed them briefly. ‘Richard Nelthorpe, you have already been outlawed as a rebel; John Hicks, you also are known to have been with Monmouth; James Dunne, you are their willing accomplice. You are all arrested. Alice Lisle,’ he added crossly, ‘you are harbouring traitors.’

‘I am giving shelter to a respectable minister,’ she retorted scornfully.

‘To traitors fleeing, Madam, from Monmouth’s rebellion.’

‘I know nothing of that, Sir,’ she replied.

‘A judge and jury will decide that. You are under arrest.’

‘I?’ She glanced down at her nightdress. ‘And what sort of soldier are you, Sir,’ she said with contempt, ‘who comes to arrest women in the night?’ She defied him; she despised him openly in front of his own troops.

How strange it was, he thought. He had expected to find an evil old witch; instead he found that same haughty, forceful woman who even now was ready to stare him down. Just as they had once before, the years seemed to fall away and he was looking at the terrible figure of vengeance who, if he were still alive, would strike his poor father down again. As she stared at him with those cold grey eyes, he could almost have trembled. And, taken by surprise, he suddenly felt, like a blow to the stomach, all the old pain of the loss of the father he had so loved. To his utter astonishment he found he had to turn away.

It was not so much with anger as with pain that, striding out into the darkness, he called back: ‘Arrest them all.’

It took some minutes before they were brought out. He did not bother to interfere. When they came he saw that Alice was still dressed only in her nightclothes. He also observed that one of the troopers had obviously appropriated a silver candlestick and some linen. He did not care.

‘Where are we going?’ cried Dunne.

‘To Salisbury gaol,’ he answered bleakly. And off they went, with Dame Alice incongruously made to ride pillion behind one of the troopers.

He shouldn’t have allowed it, Thomas Penruddock thought, but he truly didn’t care.

On 24 August in the Year of Our Lord 1685 there arrived near the city of Winchester a large cavalcade. Five judges, a flock of lawyers, Jack Ketch, the official and highly incompetent executioner, marshals, clerks, servants and outriders – the whole panoply of justice needed, in the reign of His Majesty King James II of England, to hang, decapitate, burn, whip or transport to the colonies the more than twelve hundred men unlucky enough to be caught after marching with Monmouth. At the head of this great legal deputation, as promised, was no less a personage than the Right Honourable George, Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys.

The assize which was to be held down in the West Country, after executing three hundred and thirty and sending eight hundred and fifty to the American plantations, would be known as the Bloody Assize; the presiding judge would go down in English history as Bloody Jeffreys. But before that great business began an introduction was to be held in the great hall of Winchester Castle: the trial of Alice Lisle.

As she looked around the great stone hall of the Norman and Plantagenet kings, Betty could not help being impressed by the ancient majesty of the setting. A soft afternoon light filtered into the church-like space through the pointed windows. On the dais sat the five judges in their scarlet robes and long white wigs; below them the lawyers and clerks like so many black old birds; before them a crowd of people. And alone, dressed in grey, sitting quietly in an oak chair on a raised platform, was her mother.

In a place of such solemnity, thought Betty, before such reverend and learned men, justice would surely be done and her mother – as Peter had explained the law to her – should undoubtedly go free. She glanced at Tryphena, who was sitting beside her and gave her an encouraging smile. On her other side Peter squeezed her hand.

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

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

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

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

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

It was late afternoon when the trial began.

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

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

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

‘With the help of a guide named Thomas.’

‘Where is he? Let him stand up.’

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

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

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

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

Betty herself was white. She glanced at Peter.

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

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

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

‘That’s right.’

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

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

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

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

‘It was that Mr Hicks was a dissenter.’

‘That is all?’

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

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

But not, it seemed, without a fight.

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

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

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

And looked again, in astonishment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No, My Lord.’

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

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

‘Silence!’ he cried. ‘Too late.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Say something,’ Betty whispered back.

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

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

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

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

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

Then Judge Jeffreys sentenced her to burn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tell me.’

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

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

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

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

‘I know. I’m so sorry.’

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

‘But …’

‘You saw a moment of cowardice?’

‘Yes. I suppose so.’

‘Which I call discretion.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Which is?’

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

‘Ah. I see.’

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

‘You must be very wise, Mother.’

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

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

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

This was greeted with silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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