ALBION PARK

1794

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

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

‘Miss Albion?’

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

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

Her ambition, like her absent-mindedness, was quite without malice. It was, for her, a little ladder to a humble heaven. It brought with it, however, certain small peculiarities. Whether it was because she thought it a kind of wit, or whether she supposed it indicated her own roots in some gentle antiquity, she liked to use expressions or exclamations that hearkened from a former time. She would pick these up from time to time and use them for several years before moving on to others. At present, if she wished to convey something of particular significance, she would say: ‘Methinks …’ Or if she broke a cup, or told a funny story of a vicar getting drunk, she would conclude: ‘Alack-a-day.’ Expressions so dated that you might really suppose she had been present at the court of the merry monarch himself.

She was also the mistress, or at least the devotee, of the meaningful gaze. She would fix you with her dark-brown eyes and give you a look of such arch significance that, even if you had no notion what it meant, you felt privileged. When the look was accompanied by ‘Methinks …’ you really knew you were in for something, quite possibly a state secret.

And when you considered that she was the daughter of a Bristol haberdasher and her husband a Customs officer, these social marvels could only be described as a triumph of the human spirit.

Mrs Grockleton was of medium height, but with a fine display of powdered hair. Her husband was tall and lean with hands curiously like claws. Mrs Grockleton’s intention, which she planned to achieve as soon as she could, was to raise Lymington to the status of a social centre to rival Bath. And then to preside over it.

Samuel Grockleton inwardly groaned. It is not easy for a man to know that his wife is careering unstoppably towards her social doom, especially when he himself, through no fault of his own, must be the cause of the disaster. ‘You must not forget our own position in society, Mrs Grockleton,’ he observed. ‘And given my office, we can never raise our hopes too high.’

‘Your position is very respectable, Mr Grockleton. Quite gentlemanly.’

‘Respectable, yes.’

‘Why, Mr Grockleton, I declare you are held in great esteem and affection. Everyone has told me so.’

‘Neighbours are not always truthful.’

‘Oh, fie, Mr Grockleton,’ said his wife cheerfully. And a moment later she was off again, explaining her plans for the future.

You could say what you liked about Mrs Grockleton, but she was never idle. She had not been a month in Lymington when she saw that it had need of an academy for young ladies; and since it happened that a lease was available on the big brick house next to their own, which lay a little way past the church at the top of the High Street, she had persuaded her husband to take it and here she had set up her establishment.

She had been skilful. First she had secured the mayor’s daughter and her best friend whose father, an attorney, belonged to a landed family in the next county. Next she had gone to the Tottons. They lived nowadays in a handsome house just apart from the town. Although Mr Totton was certainly involved in the town’s trade, his sister had married old Mr Albion of Albion House, so the young Tottons and Miss Albion were cousins. Edward Totton was up at Oxford. When Louisa Totton was snared, therefore, Mrs Grockleton could reasonably feel that this advanced the academy into the sphere of the local gentry. At the apex of the merchant families was another, more recently arrived in the area: Mr St Barbe gave his business as grocer, salt and coal merchant, but he was a most gentlemanly and philanthropic man, a pillar of the community. One of the St Barbe girls was duly obtained. Within a few months, by allowing some girls to come for only certain lessons and others, from further off, to board there, Mrs Grockleton had drifted almost twenty young ladies into her academic corral.

The academy had two features of which she was particularly proud. It taught French, which was done by herself. She had acquired this fashionable accomplishment quite humbly as a girl from a French dressmaker in Bristol, but her fluency certainly reinforced her claims to social authority in Lymington. And while a command of French would undoubtedly be an asset to any of the daughters of Lymington merchants who wanted to shine in the great London houses or the courts of Europe, it was surely an inducement that they could also practise upon the charming young French officers who had recently been stationed in the town.

The second was the art class. The Reverend William Gilpin had not only been the loved and respected vicar of Boldre for two decades; he was also a notable artist, selling his drawings and paintings from time to time for charitable causes. Mrs Grockleton had purchased two and, soon afterwards, when Mr Gilpin arrived to award prizes in the academy, he was astonished to discover it was his own work that the young ladies were instructed to emulate or even copy. The vicar was no fool, but it was hard, after that, to refuse the invitation to deliver a lecture and take a class at the academy once a month; and in fact he rather enjoyed it.

So Mrs Grockleton’s academy grew. Its growth, so far as Mrs Grockleton could manage, was spiral in form – starting with the better families in the town, then sweeping round those whose gentility had taken them to the environs and finally, circling ever wider, like a great, revolving seashell, she hoped to suck young ladies even from the distant manor houses of the gentry into the pleasant vortex of her establishment. Thus Miss Fanny Albion had already come to join her cousin Louisa Totton for the French classes – a triumph that had brought the academic huntress a deep joy – and no doubt there would be others. The one family she had hoped for, and which had so far eluded her, was that of Burrard.

The Burrards were very big in Lymington now. While the Tottons had remained, as it were, at the top of the town, the bolder and now much richer Burrards had long ago acquired a country estate called Walhampton, which lay on the other side of the river from Lymington. Their generations of marriages into gentry families like the Buttons had entirely established them in that class. But Lymington town was their base of operations and they ran the politics of the place. She had not yet managed to get past the Burrards’ park gates. But one day, she felt sure, she would. Indeed, if all her hopes succeeded, it was inevitable that she must.

For the school was only the beginning. Her plans for Lymington were far larger. ‘I can see it, Mr Grockleton,’ she declared. And indeed she could. On the ridge overlooking Pennington Marshes and the sea, there would be rows of handsome Georgian houses and villas: with its ample supply of clay, the New Forest nowadays boasted a number of thriving brickfields; but in her mind’s eye she saw stone, like that at Bath. Perhaps, she considered, stucco painted white would do. The old medieval houses along the High Street, although still structurally intact, had mostly received squared-off Georgian façades by now. Any lingering medieval gables, she considered, could be quickly covered. The modest bathhouse down by the beach would be converted into something more like the Roman baths at the great spa in the west. The present Assembly Rooms, adjoining the Angel Inn, would of course be quite inadequate for the new resort. Something new, classical and splendid would be needed, up at the top of the hill, she supposed, very near her own house. Well, perhaps she’d be in something grander by then.

Then there was the theatre. It wasn’t bad. Similar playhouses had been set up at Sarum and other western towns. It had a modest pit with wooden benches for the poorer sort, a tier of boxes for the gentry and a gallery of cheaper seats above. During the season, from July to October, you could hear Shakespeare, or one of Mr Sheridan’s comedies, and a varied repertoire of melodramas and tragedies. Lymington theatre usually contrived one or two offerings with a nautical flavour. No doubt, once the town was fashionable, the theatre could be redecorated. Mrs Grockleton’s only regret was that it should have been near the Baptist chapel which, as far as she was concerned, should be moved well away from the fashionable public’s sight.

No, the only complaint she had about the town lay down by the beach itself. Those salterns, with their grubby little furnaces and windpumps, and the dock where ships from northern Newcastle brought coal – coal of all things! – to fuel the furnaces: something would have to be done about them. The salt pans might still bring profit to the Tottons, but if the fashionable world was to take the waters there, the salterns would have to go.

Was her vision just a fantasy all of her own? Not entirely. The New Forest, after all, was a place with royal connections. For over twenty years the king’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, had been Warden of the Forest; and since his wife wasn’t welcome at court, he had often chosen to stay at Lyndhurst. The Prince of Wales came to stay in the Forest too. But Mrs Grockleton’s hopes grew out of larger considerations.

In the great political calm that had graced Georgian England for several generations now, society itself was changing. A burgeoning commercial empire was bringing the island kingdom huge new wealth. Although land inclosures and new production methods had taken the traditional livelihood from some peasant farmers, the landowners had prospered. In London and the handful of big cities that dotted the vast stretches of rural England, speculators were building handsome Georgian squares. People were moving about. Even the open wastes of the Forest were now crossed by a turnpike road – the first return to such a civilized transport system since Roman times. Like the latter-day Romans they were, the fashionable English classes were going in search of health and leisure. In the West Country the ancient Roman spa of Bath had been revived and a gracious resort built around its mineral springs. More recently the royal court of King George III, in the belief that it might help cure the king’s bouts of madness, had become interested in the benefits not only of mineral waters but of those of the sea. Several times in recent years King George III had come to the New Forest on his way to the little seaside resort of Weymouth, some forty miles further west along the coast. He had stayed with the Drummonds and the Burrards, and visited the Isle of Wight.

‘Why go all the way to Weymouth, when Lymington is so much closer and surely just as healthy?’ Mrs Grockleton declared. People came to bathe at Lymington, some of them very respectable. If the king and his court made regular stays there the fashionable world would surely follow. ‘And then,’ she explained to her silent husband, ‘our own position, what with the academy and my other plans, is assured. For we shall, you see, be there already. They will come to us.’ She gave him a delighted smile. ‘I have not told you, Mr Grockleton, of my latest idea.’

‘And what is that?’ he enquired, as he knew he must.

‘Why, we are going to give a ball!’

‘A ball? Dancing?’

‘Indeed. At the Assembly Rooms. You see, Mr Grockleton, with our girls at the academy, their families and friends – don’t you understand? Everyone will come!’ She did not say so, but she had already secretly included the Burrards in this number.

‘Perhaps’, Mr Grockleton said sagely, ‘nobody will come.’

‘Oh, fie, Mr Grockleton,’ said Mrs Grockleton again, but this time with some asperity.

Yet Mr Grockleton had a reason for these fears – something he knew, which she did not. Unfortunately, he could not tell her what it was.

 

It might have been supposed that in Georgian England the age of miracles was passed. Yet at the very moment when Mrs Grockleton was chiding her husband for his lack of faith in Lymington – that is to say, at eleven o’clock that spring morning – a few miles away on the Beaulieu estate a miracle of sorts was in progress. It was happening at the busy place on the Beaulieu River known as Buckler’s Hard.

There, in the bright morning sunlight, a man had become invisible.

The Hard – the name meant a sloping shore road where boats could be drawn up – had a lovely setting. As the river made a westward loop, broad banks created gentle slopes, almost two hundred yards long, down to the water. Situated some two miles downstream from the old abbey and the same distance upstream from the Solent water, it was a peaceful place, sheltered from the prevailing sea breezes. Once, long ago in the days of the monks, a furious prior with hands like claws had nearly come to blows with some fishermen at the river bend above. But his shouts had been one of the few to disturb the habitual silence of the sheltered curve and the reedy marshes opposite. The abbey had been dissolved, the monks departed; Armada, Civil War, Cromwell, the merry monarch, all had come and gone; but nobody had troubled about the quiet place. Until about seventy years earlier.

The reason was sugar.

Of all the opportunities for amassing wealth in the eighteenth century, nothing could approach the fortunes to be made in sugar. The sugar merchants’ lobby in Parliament was powerful. The richest man in England, who had purchased a noble estate west of Sarum, was heir to a sugar fortune. The Morants who had bought Brockenhurst and other New Forest estates were a sugar dynasty, too.

The old Beaulieu Abbey lands had passed by marriage from the Wriothesley into the Montagu family and the Duke of Montagu, like many of England’s great eighteenth-century aristocrats, was an entrepreneur. Although the ruined abbey was not a place where he spent much time, he knew that the Solent’s double high tide, extending up Beaulieu river, made it apt for navigation and that he still possessed all the old abbey’s river rights. ‘If the crown will grant me a charter to found a settlement in the West Indies,’ he decided, ‘I could not only start a sugar plantation, but I could bring the sugar back to my own port at Beaulieu.’ While the river banks were mostly mud, at the sheltered curve they were gravel, perfect for building upon. Soon a plan for a small but elegant harbour town had been prepared. ‘We shall call it Montagu Town,’ the duke declared.

That, alas, was as far as it got. A private flotilla was sent to the West Indies with settlers, livestock, even prefabricated houses. It cost the duke ten thousand pounds. The settlement was planted. But the French kicked them out. Nothing more could be done. At Montagu Town the banks had been cleared and smoothed, and the outline of the main street down to the river had been laid down; but that was all. The site reverted, for twenty more years, to silence.

But it was ready for commercial use and, just before mid-century, with the duke’s active encouragement, a use was found.

The British Empire was growing. Conflicts with the rival powers of France and Spain could not be avoided. Britain’s army was negligible but its navy ruled the seas; whenever a conflict threatened, therefore, more ships had to be built and quite often nowadays the building of the hull was farmed out to private contractors. The cleared site on the Beaulieu River was a perfect location. For naval ships there was the timber of the king’s New Forest close by; for merchant shipping there were oak trees in the private estates all around. An ironworks, established at the old monastic fishery of Sowley Pond, supplied any necessary iron. Buckler’s Hard became a shipbuilding yard.

It was never large but often busy. Merchant ships were needed all the time. The naval building came in bursts, each time there was a conflict somewhere: a European dynastic dispute affecting the colonies; the American War of Independence; and now, after the dangerous business of the French Revolution, a threat to every established monarchy in Europe, Britain found itself at war again with France.

On each side of the broad, grassy street that led down to the water, a row of red-brick cottages stood. Behind them lay garden allotments, and further scattered cottages and barns. At the water’s edge, set at an angle to the bank, were five slipways where the ships were built. Down the centre street and on sites all around were huge stacks of timber of various shapes and sizes. The men who worked on the ships were mostly quartered a mile or two away, either in lodgings up at Beaulieu village itself, or over at the western edge of the Montagu estate, at a new, straggling settlement of cottages known as Beaulieu Rails. At Buckler’s Hard itself there was the master builder’s house, a blacksmith’s shop, a store, two little inns, a cobbler’s and cottages for the most senior shipwrights.

Work had started early that bright spring morning. A cheerful column of smoke was rising from the blacksmith’s forge. Mr Henry Adams, the owner of the business, eighty years old but still supervising, had just come out of his master builder’s house; his two sons were at his side; shipwrights were busy at the waterside; men were carrying timber; a cart was standing in front of the Ship Inn.

Yet as Puckle arrived, hours late for work, from Beaulieu Rails, and walked down the street, nobody saw him. The men at the sawpit looked, but they didn’t see him. The women by the village pump didn’t see him. The cobbler, the innkeepers, the timber carriers, the shipwrights – why, even old Mr Adams with eyes like gimlets and his two sharp sons – not one of these good and worthy people saw Puckle as he walked past them. He was completely invisible.

The miracle was made greater yet by the fact that, by the time he stepped on to the vessel under construction at the water’s edge, there wasn’t a single person in the yard who couldn’t have sworn, had you asked them, that Abraham Puckle had been there all morning.

‘That’s the best one, Fanny,’ said the Reverend William Gilpin with approval; and the heiress to the Albion estate smiled with pleasure, as she put the drawing back into her sketching book, because she thought so too.

They were sitting by the window of the library in the vicarage – a big Georgian house with a large beech tree just opposite its front door.

The vicar of Boldre was a handsome old man. A little corpulent, but powerfully built, he and the heiress of Albion House were very fond of each other. The reasons for loving the distinguished clergyman were too obvious to need explanation. His for loving Fanny, whom he had christened himself, were numerous: she was kind and thoughtful for others; she was also lively, intelligent and really drew quite well. He enjoyed her company. Her fair hair had a reddish tint; her eyes were strikingly blue; her complexion was excellent. Had he been, say, thirty years younger and not already happily married – he admitted it frankly, at least to himself – he’d have tried to marry Fanny Albion.

The drawing she had done was a New Forest view, looking across from Beaulieu Heath, past Oakley, to a distant prospect of the Isle of Wight and the hazy sea. It was altogether admirable: the near ground, which in truth had only a shallow undulation, had been judiciously raised at one point and a solitary stricken oak had been added. A small brick kiln nearby had, quite rightly, been expunged. The heath and woodland had a controlled but natural wildness, the sea a pleasant mystery. It was – and this was the highest term of praise he could use – it was picturesque.

If there was one thing – upon earth, that is – that the Reverend William Gilpin believed in, it was the importance of the picturesque. His published Observations on the subject had made him famous and was much admired. He had travelled all over Europe in search of the picturesque – to the mountains of Switzerland, the valleys of Italy, the rivers of France – and he had found it. In England, he assured his readers, there were landscapes entirely picturesque. The Lake District in the north was the best area, but there were many others. And his readers were ready to discover them.

The Georgian era was an age of order. The great classical country mansions of the aristocracy, the leaders of taste, had shown the triumph of rational man over nature; their broad parks, designed by Capability Brown, with sweeping lawns and carefully placed woods, had demonstrated how man – at least if he were in possession of a handsome fortune – could tutor nature into a state of graciousness. But as the Age of Reason swept on, people found its dictates a little too ordered, too severe; they looked for more variety. So now the successor to Brown, the genius Repton, had started adding flower gardens and pleasant walks to Brown’s bare parks. People began to see in the natural countryside not a dangerous chaos, but the kindly hand of God. In short, they went for walks outside the park in search of the picturesque, as Gilpin said they should.

He was quite clear about how to recognize the picturesque. It was all a question of choice. The Avon valley, being flat and cultivated, did not appeal to him. For similar reasons the ordered slopes of the Isle of Wight, although admirable as a blue mass in the distance, were, if one actually took the ferry across for a closer inspection, quite intolerable. Open heath, however wild, he found dull; but where there was variety, a contrast of wood and heath, of high ground and low ground – where, in a word, the Almighty had shown good judgement in showing His hand – there the Reverend William Gilpin could smile at his pupil and say, in his deep, sonorous voice: ‘Now that, Fanny, is picturesque.’

But pleased as he was by the drawing she had just shown him, this was nothing to the excitement he felt when, having put it away, she stared meditatively out of the window for a moment or two and then enquired: ‘Have you ever considered whether we should build a ruin at Albion House?’

For if there was one thing in the whole of God’s creation that Mr Gilpin loved above even the countryside it was a ruin.

England had plenty of ruins. There were the castles, of course; but better still, thanks to the break with Rome of which Mr Gilpin’s Church of England was the heir, there were all the ruined monasteries and priories. Near the New Forest were Christchurch and Romsey; across Southampton water a small Cistercian house called Netley, whose waterside ruins certainly qualified as picturesque. And then, of course, there was Beaulieu Abbey itself, whose ruins, despite two centuries of being plundered for stone, were still extensive.

Ruins were part of the natural landscape: they seemed to grow out of the soil. They were places of quiet reflection, mysterious yet safe. They were utterly picturesque. A man who owned a ruin owned its antiquity. For if the hand of time had reduced the buildings of these invisible ancestors, nature had joined in and he was the inheritor of the product. Lost ancestors were appeased; time, death, dissolution – even these former enemies became part of his estate. Often as not, he would build his own mansion close beside it. Thus, for the gentle English classes in the late Age of Enlightenment, even chaos and old night could be set, like a sundial, in a garden.

And if, by chance, no ruin stood nearby, then, in an age when good fortune could accomplish anything, you built one!

Some people favoured classical ruins, as if their classical houses were really built upon the site of some Roman imperial palace. Others favoured the Gothic, as the mock medieval was called, which charmingly echoed the taste for Gothic horror novels that were one of the fashionable amusements just then. There was only one problem.

‘To build a ruin, Fanny,’ the vicar cautioned her seriously, ‘is a great expense.’ One needed stone in large quantities, expert masons to carve it, a good antiquarian to design it, a landscape artist. Then the stone needed treating to give it a mouldering appearance; then time, for mosses and ivy and lichens to grow in appropriate places. ‘Don’t attempt the thing, Fanny,’ he warned, ‘if you haven’t thirty thousand pounds to spend.’ It was cheaper to build a fine new house. ‘But there is something else I have often thought you could do, to the house itself when it becomes yours,’ he added cheerfully; for it could properly be admitted that, since old Mr Albion was now nearing his ninetieth year, the time of Fanny becoming mistress of the estate could not be far off.

‘What’s that?’

‘Why, you could make it into a Gothic house. You should turn it into Albion Castle. The situation’, he added persuasively, ‘is perfect.’

It was certainly a very pretty idea. In a journey over to Bristol the previous year, Fanny had seen the thing admirably done. An essentially Georgian house could be remodelled, adding a few embellishments here and there, placing mock battlements round its roof, inserting Gothic tracery in the windows and plaster moulding like fan vaulting in the ceilings of some of the rooms. The result was highly agreeable – a picturesque blend of the Roman and Gothic, which especially appealed to families who wished their house to suggest both medieval ancestry and classical taste, or to echo the atmosphere of some of the grandest aristocratic families whose houses were built around the remains of the abbeys they had acquired in Tudor times. These mock fortresses, however small, were often called castles – which also sounded rather grand. Albion House, with its intimate setting in a clearing among the oaks in the middle of the ancient Forest, would make a charming little castle.

‘It could be done,’ Fanny agreed. ‘Indeed, I really think it should.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘I do not think, though,’ she continued slowly, ‘that I should care to attempt such a thing alone. I should want the guiding hand’ – she smiled a little mischievously – ‘or at least the willing co-operation of a husband. Do you not agree?’

William Gilpin bowed his broad, greying head, inwardly cursed fate for making him so old and ventured: ‘Have you anyone in mind, Fanny?’

She should, God knew, have no shortage of suitors. Because of her father’s age and infirmity Fanny had not, by her own choice, made any attempts to show herself in society. But she was not in the least bashful. She was very cheerful. She knew perfectly well, at the age of nineteen, that although not a great heiress, her inheritance would recommend her wherever she went. It was an age when every young man and woman who claimed or aspired to gentility carried their incomes like a price tag round their necks. Every hostess knew the money value of each of her guests. It was probably a more mercenary period in English history than any before or since. And luckily for her, she was well placed in the system.

Whom ought she to marry? There was no single candidate whom neighbourly relations or family interest obliged her to consider. The greatest family in the Forest was that of the old Duke of Montagu, but the Beaulieu estate was split between the families of his two daughters now, who both lived far away; only the steward actually resided at the old abbey ruin. Next, in Fanny’s own estimation, were the most ancient landed families like the Albions. There were still several in the Forest: the Compton family still had Minstead; just north of them a family named Eyre had reputedly been in the region since Norman times; on the eastern side of the Forest, the Mill family, who had done so well in Tudor times when Beaulieu Abbey was dissolved, had a large estate. Then there were the old Lymington families – which really meant the Burrards. And finally came the relative newcomers to the Forest area. There were many of these now, who had come in during the past two generations. They had built splendid classical mansions all the way along the coast from Southampton to Christchurch. Some had high titles; others came from gentry families, having made fortunes in the city or in trade, as had the Morants in sugar, or the Drummonds, from a noble Scottish family, who had become bankers to the king and financed his war in America. Nearly all these newcomers were very rich indeed.

Great mercantile families have often shown a predilection for the sea – no doubt because, for most of human history, trade has always been carried by water. And so it was, during the eighteenth century, that the New Forest had acquired this new layer to its ancient identity – as a pleasant coastline wilderness where the rich could build their mansions and enjoy the sea. It was a view of the world which the old Forest folk, for all their occasional shoreline activities, never entirely understood; and Fanny, coming as she did from the Forest interior, was, despite her genteel education, closer in spirit to the Prides than she was to some of the new landowners. But still, it could not be denied, marriage among them might be considered a desirable outcome. And even if, secretly, she yearned for something else, she didn’t like to say so and didn’t know what it was.

‘No one at present,’ she told the clergyman.

‘You are going to visit your cousin Totton at Oxford soon, I believe?’

‘Next week.’ Edward Totton was just about to come down from the university, and she and his sister Louisa were going to pay him a visit there for a few days. It was an expedition she had been greatly looking forward to.

‘Why, then, I’m sure some poor professor with a taste for the Gothic will impress you with his merits,’ her friend said playfully. ‘And now,’ he added, ‘I must go to my little school. We have a special duty to perform there today. As it lies on your way home, shall we walk together?’

Samuel Grockleton moved cautiously down Lymington High Street.

The size and shape of the town was almost the same as it had been in medieval times, even if nearly all the houses lining the broad slope had Georgian façades now, some arranged as shops with bow windows.

He passed the entrance of the Angel Inn. Mr Isaac Seagull, proprietor, standing in the door, gave him a bow and a smile. He glanced across the street. The landlady of the Nag’s Head, dead opposite, also outside, was smiling too.

‘Good morning, Mr Grockleton.’

He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it a bit.

He noticed the wooden sign of the Nag’s Head swing, just an inch or two, with a faint creak in the sea breeze. Was it a mere chance, or had people stopped all down the street? His feet alone were ringing on the cobblestones; the rest of the town had paused to watch him: a hundred masks, like painted figures in a carnival, or mummers at Hallowe’en. And behind those masks, so polite and smiling?

He knew. The long tail of his black coat, his starched cravat, his white knee-breeches, all suddenly felt as though they had turned to solid mortar, trapping him as securely as if he had been put in the stocks. His high, broad-rimmed hat seemed to be made of lead as he forced himself to raise it to a lady in front of the little bookshop. He knew what the friendly faces meant. They were all in on it.

There had been a run the night before and he was the Customs officer.

Customs and Excise. There had always been taxes to pay for the shipping and landing of goods. And traders had always tried to avoid them. The owlers of Lymington had shipped wool out of England illegally for centuries. But it was not the exports that were the main concern now. It was the goods coming in. And there lay the huge problem.

It was the scale of the business. As Britain’s commercial empire grew the tide of imports swelled at an ever increasing rate. Silks and laces, pearls and calicoes, wines, fruits, tobacco and snuff, coffee and chocolate, sugar and spices – the list was huge. Fifteen hundred different items were liable to Customs duties now. And greatest of all were the two items without which, it would seem, Englishmen would lose all their vigour and their island would probably sink beneath the waves. Tea: if drinking coffee and chocolate was fashionable, everyone, from highest to lowest, drank tea. And brandy.

Brandy was the elixir of life. Its uses were manifold. It protected against the plague, cured fever, colic, dropsy. It stimulated the heart, cleaned wounds and kept you young. If you were frozen, brandy warmed you. Why, if the surgeon had to saw off your leg, he’d give you a pint of brandy first before he hit you over the head. Or, of course, you could always drink it for pleasure. And on every drop of brandy you bought, Customs were due. But nobody wanted to pay.

‘It is unreasonable that people curse the Customs,’ Grockleton would observe plaintively to his wife, ‘when it is the Customs money that pays for the Navy vessels to protect the very trade which brings them the goods they desire.’

‘I am sure there is nothing rational about it,’ she would agree.

But however unreasonable – and Grockleton was perfectly right – everyone tried to avoid paying; smuggling was widespread. It was the job of the Customs officials to stop it. Customs officers were not popular.

The chief official for the whole region, the collector, was based at Southampton. The next most senior man was Grockleton at Lymington. Then there was another officer, rather less senior, in charge along the coast at Christchurch. In theory, the Customs officers had quite impressive forces at their disposal. There were sea vessels – swift cutters, usually – to intercept the smugglers’ boats. There were riding officers, one every four miles, to patrol the coast. There were tide-waiters to check incoming ships, gaugers to inspect barrels, weighers, searchers – the titles changed as the Customs men thought of new ways to regulate the trade. The senior men like Grockleton were almost always posted in from outside, so as to be free of local ties; quite often they had just retired from some other branch of government service. Salaries were modest, but the officer was granted a handsome share of any contraband that was intercepted: a good inducement to be vigilant, one might have thought, yet to Grockleton’s certain knowledge, the supervisor at Christchurch had told his riding officers not to patrol and not to report anything they did happen to see.

Not all the Customs men were so cowardly, though. Over on the Isle of Wight, the Customs officer William Arnold had won the grudging respect of the whole region by the way he had gone about the job. With little support from the government, he had paid out of his own pocket for a swift cutter to patrol the local waters; and very effective it had been. If the other towns had had such cutters, the smugglers along the coast might have had a hard time of it. There were other ways to catch them, though, and whatever Grockleton’s faults may have been, he had a strong sense of duty and he had courage.

That was why, if his plan worked, he was soon going to be the most hated man in the county.

He continued down the street towards the quay. People were moving about now, but they were still watching him. He could imagine the looks behind his back, but he did not turn to see. At the bottom of the street just off to one side was the Customs house which was his official place of business.

He was just in sight of it when he happened to see the Frenchman. The Frenchman, also, bowed and smiled politely. But for a different reason. He and his compatriots were in Lymington as guests of His Britannic Majesty. It was his duty to be polite, therefore, even to a Customs official.

The count – for as well as commanding a regiment, he was also an aristocrat – was certainly a most agreeable man and a great favourite with Mrs Grockleton whom he treated as if she were a duchess. Several of his relations having met their deaths by the guillotine in the recent French Revolution, he carried, at least in Mrs Grockleton’s eyes, a certain aura of tragic romance about him. With his fellow aristocrats and troops quartered in Lymington, and some other émigré French forces taking refuge in England, he was anxious to go and fight against the new revolutionary regime in France at the first opportunity.

‘Soon, Monsieur le Comte.’ Mrs Grockleton would sigh. ‘Soon, we shall see better times, I trust.’ That England during the last hundred years had been engaged in, or close to, hostilities with royalist France for most of the time was a fact which, faced with the charming French aristocrat, she had now entirely forgotten.

There was nothing very surprising, therefore, if, seeing the Frenchman, the Customs officer should have reached into his coat pocket, drawn out a letter and handed it to him with the words, overheard by a passer-by: ‘A letter from my wife, Count.’ Then he passed on towards the Customs house.

Only a little while later, in the privacy of his lodgings, did the count open the letter and read its contents with an expression of horror. ‘Mon Dieu,’ he murmured, ‘what shall I do now?’

 

From the Reverend William Gilpin’s front door the lane ran straight between the hedgerows of small fields until it met another track at right angles. Down the lane, in pleasant sunlight, came Gilpin wearing a large clerical hat and carrying a stick, and Fanny in a long coat and cape. The two friends enjoyed the pleasant walk. Their object was the small building on the left just before the end of the lane.

Gilpin’s school was a somewhat different establishment from Mrs Grockleton’s academy, yet possibly just as useful. The Boldre parish never having had a school before, Gilpin had founded it not long after his arrival there and the little seat of learning had such charm that you might almost have called it picturesque.

The whole building was hardly forty feet long and built in the shape of a ‘T’. The long central section was a single high room, twenty-five feet long. The cross section was divided into two low storeys, with accommodation for a teacher and a classroom for the girls. The end of the central section facing the lane was charmingly shaped like a classical façade with a triangular pediment. This jolly little structure was perched on a tiny plot of ground. Below it the track led down towards the river and the bridge at Boldre. On the eastern side it led towards the old medieval vaccary, long since a hamlet, of Pilley.

‘Who sold you the plot of land for the school?’ Fanny had once asked him. She knew the ownership of almost every inch of land around there, but could not place that particular piece.

‘I stole it,’ the vicar had replied amiably, ‘from the King’s Forest. They made me pay a small fine later.’

The purpose of the vicar’s encroachment was simple enough: to take twenty boys and twenty girls from families in the Boldre parish hamlets, and teach them to read and write and cipher, as basic mathematics was then termed. For reading, naturally, they used the Bible, on which they were tested twice a week. Every Sunday, they put on the smart green coats with which the school provided them and paraded to Boldre church. This last feature also provided the vicar with a useful incentive. He knew his parishioners. If now and then a child was needed to help its parents in the field, no questions were asked about a day’s absence; but the strong woollen and cotton clothes the school provided free along with the green coats were a powerful inducement for a country family. And if any of the parents expressed doubts about the value of so much learning for their daughter he could assure them: ‘As writing and arithmetic are less necessary to girls, we spend more time on practical things – knitting and spinning and needlework.’ Beyond this level of education the parish school did not venture. To go further might, everyone agreed, have been to make the village children discontented with their lot.

‘Is it difficult’, Fanny now asked as they reached the gate of the school, ‘for these children to learn to read and write?’

Gilpin gave her a sidelong glance. ‘Because they are simple country folk, Fanny?’ He shook his head. ‘God did not create people with such disadvantages. I can assure you that a young Pride will learn just as quickly as you or I. The limits to his learning will be determined by what he sees – quite correctly, I may say – as being of use to him. Whoa, Sir,’ he suddenly exclaimed, as a small ten-year-old boy with a mass of curly black hair came rushing out of the schoolroom door and tried to get past them. ‘As for this young man.’ Gilpin smiled as he expertly caught the fleeing child and scooped him up. ‘This child, Fanny, would be a fine classical scholar had he been born in another condition – wouldn’t you, you rascal?’ he added affectionately as he held the boy securely.

Nathaniel Furzey had been a great find of Gilpin’s. He didn’t come from Boldre parish at all, but from up at Minstead; but the child was so precociously intelligent that Gilpin had wanted him for the Boldre school. Supposing that the Oakley Furzeys might have some family connection with the Minstead branch, he had enquired if they would take the child in during the school term, but the Oakley Furzeys weren’t interested. The Prides of Oakley however who, even a century after the Alice Lisle affair, still scarcely spoke to their Furzey neighbours, had no objection to housing this child from the Minstead family; their own boy, Andrew, attended the school. And so each morning Gilpin could look out of his window with pleasure to see Andrew Pride and curly-haired Nathaniel Furzey going along the lane towards his school.

‘I assume from your flight’, the vicar said cheerfully to his prisoner, ‘that the doctor is already here.’ He turned to Fanny. ‘This boy does not trust doctors. I told you he was intelligent.’

The doctor from whom Nathaniel Furzey was running was no less a person than Dr Smithson, the fashionable physician from Lymington, whom Gilpin had summoned at his own expense. He was standing in the main schoolroom with the children obediently waiting in line before him. The treatment he was administering was a vaccination.

Only eight years had passed since there had been a minor but troubling outbreak of smallpox in the Forest. Although it would be another two years before Dr Jenner would be able to test his cowpox vaccine, vaccination with minute quantities of the smallpox virus itself had been used recently with success. This, therefore, was what Gilpin had arranged for his pupils.

But even with Gilpin there, as the other children obediently went forward, young Nathaniel would have none of it. Standing beside the vicar, who held his hand, he shook his head slowly but with evident determination. ‘He’s going to put up a fight, I think,’ murmured Gilpin. ‘I’m not sure what to do.’

It was Fanny, in the end, who solved the problem. ‘If I do it, Nathaniel,’ she suddenly asked, ‘will you?’ Nathaniel Furzey considered. His dark eyes rested first on her, then the doctor, then on her again. ‘I’ll go first,’ she offered. Slowly he nodded.

Taking off her cape, she offered her bare arm while all the children watched; and moments later, his eyes fixed solemnly upon her, young Nathaniel underwent the ordeal too.

‘Well done, Fanny,’ said Gilpin quietly and, indeed, she felt rather proud of herself.

She could tell that she was in high favour when, after the vaccinations were all done and the doctor thanked, Gilpin announced that he would accompany her on her way home as far as Boldre church.

There were two ways to approach the church from the school: one was to descend to the river and then climb up to the church again; the other was to take a track through the hamlet of Pilley that led across the top edge of the little valley and round to the knoll. They took the latter and, since it was nearly a mile, they had time to talk of various things along the way.

The church was coming in sight when the vicar casually remarked: ‘I noticed today, Fanny, when you were being vaccinated, that you are wearing a silver chain round your neck. I have seen you do so before, yet upon each occasion I have also noticed that whatever hangs from it is hidden under your dress. What is this pendant, I wonder?’

By way of answer, with a smile she pulled it out. ‘It’s nothing to look at,’ she said, ‘so I keep it hidden. But I like to wear it sometimes.’

Gilpin stared at the pendant curiously.

It was a strange little object, a wooden crucifix, quite black with age. Looking carefully, he could just make out some antique carving on it; but of what kind or what date it was impossible to say. Whatever kind the carving was, the pendant was a simple wooden cross and the vicar approved of it. ‘You performed a Christian act this morning,’ he said warmly, ‘and I am equally glad to see that you choose to wear this simple cross – for you must know that to me it is worth far more than any gold or silver ornament.’ She could not help blushing for pleasure at such praise. ‘But tell me, Fanny,’ he continued, ‘where does it come from?’

She had only been seven years old at the time, but she remembered it well. Her mother had taken her to the house. She supposed it was in Lymington. She wasn’t sure, but her mother had seemed to be cross about something.

The old lady had been sitting by the fire. She had appeared very old to Fanny – over eighty probably – all wrapped in shawls; but with a comfortable air: a nice, friendly old face and very bright blue eyes.

‘Bring the child here, then, Mary,’ she had told Fanny’s mother. There had been a trace of impatience in her voice. ‘Do you know who I am, child?’ she had asked.

‘No.’ Fanny had no idea. She saw the old woman glance at her mother and shake her head.

‘I’m your grandmother, child.’

‘My grandmother!’ She had felt a thrill of excitement. She had never met such a person before. Her father had been so old when he married that his own mother had died well before Fanny’s birth. As for her mother, she had always supposed it was the same. She turned to her now. ‘You never told me I had a grandmother,’ she said reproachfully.

‘Well, you have!’ the old lady exclaimed sharply.

They had had a lovely talk after that. Fanny couldn’t remember much of what they said. Her grandmother had spoken of the past and her own parents, and other family long departed. Their names had meant nothing to Fanny, but she had taken away a vague but unforgettable impression of sea breezes, ships, vague adventure: as though she had opened a hidden window and seen, smelled, tasted a world she had never known before – and never would again, for she was not taken to see the old lady any more. The woodland world of Albion House had enclosed her for many years after that. The house at Lymington and her long-lost grandmother had receded into her memory like a single childhood day, spent by the sea.

Only one tangible evidence of that meeting remained. Just before they left, her grandmother had taken the little wooden cross from around her neck and given it to her. ‘This is for you, child,’ she said, ‘to remember your grandmother. My mother gave it to me and it had been in her family for I don’t know how long. Since before the Spanish Armada, they say.’ She had taken her hand. ‘Now if I give you this, will you promise to keep it?’

‘Yes, Grandmother,’ she had said. ‘I promise.’

‘Good. Now give your old grandmother, whom you never saw before, a kiss.’

‘I shall come again, now I know you, and you must come to see us,’ Fanny had said happily.

‘Just you keep that cross,’ the old lady replied.

She had been very surprised by how angry her mother had been when they got out into the street again. ‘Fancy giving a child that dirty old thing,’ she had exclaimed, looking at the little cross with disgust. ‘We’ll throw it away as soon as we get home.’

‘No!’ Fanny had cried, with unexpected passion. ‘It’s mine. My grandmother gave it me. I promised to keep it. I promised.’

She had hidden the cross, so that no one should steal it. A year later her mother had died. As for her grandmother, she supposed she must have died too. There was no more mention of her at Albion House. But she had always kept the cross.

‘And who was your grandmother?’ Gilpin now enquired.

‘My mother was a Miss Totton, as you know,’ Fanny replied. ‘So she must have been old Mrs Totton. I know she was Mr Totton’s second wife. His first, from whom my Totton cousins descend, was a cousin of the Burrards. So I should imagine she was one of those old Lymington families, connected with the sea.’

‘Undoubtedly,’ agreed Gilpin. ‘One of the Buttons, perhaps.’ He nodded. ‘It’s probably in the Lymington parish register, you know, if they married there.’

‘Why yes. I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose it is.’ She smiled. ‘Would you help me look, one day?’

Dusk: the two figures came independently, from opposite directions. No one would have guessed that they would meet at a prearranged place.

Charles Louis Marie, Comte d’Hector, general, aristocrat, as valiant a man as any of the legendary Three Musketeers, took good care to saunter up the High Street as casually as if he were enjoying an evening stroll. His trusted companion came down a back lane in a similar manner.

The Frenchman was an elegant sight. While most men were now wearing their hair naturally, he and his fellow émigrés wore the short powdered wigs of the French royal court. A silk coat and knee-breeches completed his attire, as though to say: ‘We not only deplore the Revolution in our country; we decline even to recognize its existence.’

Whatever one thought of the old royal regime in France, the French Revolution of 1789 had turned into a desperately bloody affair. The initial experiments in republican democracy had given way to the guillotine, for the aristocracy and the royal family, and more recently, in the awful Terror, to the wholesale execution of thousands accused as enemies of the Revolution. Aristocrats and their followers, like the French community at Lymington, had fled if they could. All Europe had watched, horrified. The continental powers had prepared for war. Nobody knew where this turmoil across the sea might lead. Even in quiet Lymington, which seldom took much notice of anything that did not concern it, the French conflict was made real by the presence of the émigrés in their midst.

There were about a dozen gentlemen like the count in Lymington, several with their families, mostly lodging with the better local tradesmen. There were also three bodies of troops – four hundred soldiers at the town’s small barracks, another four hundred artillerymen at the malt-house in New Street, and a further six hundred men of the French Royal Navy who had been quartered out in the farm buildings near Buckland. The men were, as was only to be expected, a considerable nuisance to the community, but were suffered on account of the gallant officers who led them. The count had caused eight of his men to be soundly whipped at the corner of Church Street the day before to make it clear to the people of Lymington that indiscipline would not be tolerated, and the entire cadre of officers had gone out of their way to make themselves agreeable both to the ladies of the town and to their husbands. For the time being, at least, they were still welcome guests. But the count was under no illusions. Put a foot wrong and life in Lymington could be made very unpleasant.

The packet Grockleton had given him that morning, therefore, had been very frightening indeed. Not the letter from Mrs Grockleton, inviting him and two fellow officers to dinner the following week, but the other message, slipped discreetly inside it by her husband after he had taken it from her. If the message meant what the Frenchman suspected, then it concerned a business that might take very careful handling; and this was why, as a precaution, the count had selected one companion to join him, as a witness, at this evening’s secret rendezvous.

‘I am not yet telling any of the other officers, mon ami,’ he had explained. ‘I am only telling you because I can rely not only upon your advice but upon your absolute discretion.’

It was almost dark as he turned off the High Street near the church.

Of all the many inventions English builders had discovered in the last century or so, none was more charming than a particular kind of boundary construction often used in gardens.

The crinkle-crankle wall, they called it. Instead of running in a straight line like an ordinary brick wall, it was wavy, curving back and forth like a series of love seats. Most often these walls were to be found in the counties of East Anglia; but for some reason – perhaps an East Anglian builder had come to dwell in the town – there were a number in Lymington. They were mostly built quite high: some you could just look over, some not. The curves were big enough, usually, for a couple of men to stand in so that, if you were looking along the wall, you would not see them. And it was for precisely this reason that Samuel Grockleton had asked the French count to come at dusk, down the lane behind his garden, which was bounded by a crinkle-crankle wall.

Grockleton waited quietly until he heard the light tap, made with a coin, on the other side. He had scraped away some of the mortar on the outside of the wall between two of the bricks. When he pulled a brick out from his side, there was a neat little slit through which one could talk. He tapped the place, then spoke. ‘Is that you, Count?’

‘Yes, mon ami. I came as you asked.’

‘Were you followed?’

‘No.’

‘This precaution is necessary. Did you know that my house is watched?’

‘It does not surprise me. It is natural, given your position.’

‘Even when you come to dinner, I cannot risk being seen in private conversation with you. Tongues would wag.’

‘I do not doubt it.’

‘Quite. I am instructed to say, Count, that His Britannic Majesty’s government has need of your help.’ This was not quite true. No one had actually instructed him to say so because, knowing only too well the inefficiency, and quite likely the corruption, of official channels, Grockleton had decided to act on his own initiative without official approval. Of course, if he succeeded they would approve, so it all came to the same thing.

‘My dear friend, I am at your government’s service.’

‘Then let me tell you, Count,’ he began, ‘exactly what I need.’

It was not only, as both men knew, a question of smuggling brandy and other goods. As well as the huge illicit trade there was traffic in gold and in information. The patriotism of a later age was not much developed yet and certainly not along the southern coast. British naval officers fought in the hope of prize money from captured ships; their men fought because they had been kidnapped by the press gangs and taken to sea. Even a commander as loved as Nelson dared not let his men ashore at an English port – for if he did, he’d never see most of them again. So would the smugglers of southern England buy brandy, trade gold, sell information to their country’s enemies? They would. They did.

But above all, for the dwellers by the New Forest coast, it was a question of simple trade in contraband. And they were so well organized, in such large bands, that not all the riding officers together could have stopped one of their great night-time caravans. In order to do that you needed troops.

It had been tried. Detachments of dragoons and other regiments had been quartered at Lymington from time to time. There were plans for building a new barracks over at Christchurch. The cavalry were never locally recruited, of course; that would be useless. But even so, they were not always keen to take on the smuggling bands. In the last ten years there had been two pitched battles. On each occasion a number of troopers had been killed. And since the troopers were in sympathy with the smugglers anyway, it was not a popular assignment.

‘My chances of intercepting contraband with English troops’, Grockleton informed the Frenchman, ‘are not good.’

But what about French troops? The idea had come to him a week ago and it might turn out to be a stroke of genius. The French troops had no local ties, no sympathies with the smugglers, nothing. They were bored, looking for something to do. There were, altogether, more than a thousand of them. And they were only there on the sufferance of the British government. If he could make a major interception using them it would not only earn him the grateful thanks of the government; his share of the confiscated loot would make him a modest fortune. He might be unpopular but he could probably retire.

If, on the other hand, the Frenchman failed to support him he could let it be known in London at once. The king himself would hear and be seriously displeased.

All of this, without needing to be told, the Frenchman perfectly understood. ‘It will have to be done with total secrecy,’ he replied when he had heard Grockleton’s plan.

‘Certainly.’

‘I dare not tell my men even upon the day. A parade, some excuse to assemble under arms will be needed, and then …’

‘My feelings exactly. I may have your co-operation, then?’

‘Totally. It goes without saying. I am His Britannic Majesty’s to command.’

‘Then, Sir, I thank you,’ said Grockleton and pushed his brick back into place.

For a moment or two the count and his colleague walked along the lane in silence.

‘Well, mon ami,’ the count said at last, ‘you heard all that?’ The other nodded. ‘It puts us,’ the count went on, ‘you know, in a difficult position. Do you think I did right?’

‘I do. You have no choice.’

‘I’m glad you agree. Not a word of this must be known, I need hardly remind you.’

‘You may trust me.’

‘Of course. Now, as we came, let us return, by separate ways.’

Night had come to Albion House and, as she had so often in her young life, Fanny was sitting in the parlour with two old people. In the fireplace the cindery logs produced only an occasional flicker of flame; the candles threw a gentle glow on to the dark oak panelling. Fanny might have ambitious plans for remodelling the house one day into a classical Gothic folly but, for the present, the old parlour had hardly changed since the days of good Queen Bess.

It was very quiet. Sometimes she would read to the old people, but tonight they had preferred to sit still in their chairs, enjoying the silence of the house, which was broken only by the soft tick of the long-case clock in the hall and, more occasionally, by the tiny rustle of a falling cinder in the fire. At last, her father spoke: ‘I can’t see why she is going all the way to Oxford.’

This was greeted with a silence during which the clock quietly sounded another forty ticks.

‘Of course she should.’ Her aunt Adelaide.

Fanny knew better than to interrupt. Not yet, anyway. Only twenty ticks now intervened.

‘How long shall you be gone, Fanny?’ A hint of reproach, of sadness, bravely borne.

‘Only six days, Father, including the journey.’

‘Quite right,’ said Adelaide firmly. ‘We shall miss you, but you are right to go away to see your cousin.’

‘She’s going to see Oxford. It seems a long way.’ They had come full circle. A greying cinder fell.

Francis Albion was eighty-eight years old. People said he had stayed alive so long to see his daughter grown up and it was probably true. Then people said that he wanted to see her safely married. But since any mention of that subject seemed to fill him with dismay, this clearly could not be the case. And there were even those who wondered if, having grown so used to being alive for such a prodigiously long time, Mr Albion might not be doing it for himself.

The fact was that Francis Albion had never expected to have a child at all. The last of Peter and Betty Albion’s children, who had expected his elder brother to continue the family line, he had been a wanderer much of his life. A lawyer in London, an agent in France, a merchant for a while in America, he had always made enough to live as a gentleman, but not enough to marry. By the age of forty, when the death of his brother left him heir to the Albion estate, he was a confirmed bachelor with no desire to settle. His sister Adelaide had kept Albion House going alone for another twenty years before he had finally returned, as he put it, to take up his family obligations in the Forest.

These were not onerous and he made sure they were profitable to him. They soon included the position of gentleman keeper of one of the walks, as the minor divisions of the Forest were now called. His discharge of this responsibility was typical. Even by the genial standards of the eighteenth century the administration of the New Forest had become notoriously lax. When the crown, in one of its occasional attempts to sort the old place out, had held a royal commission some years before, the commissioners, having pointed out that the woodward of the Forest had kept no accounts for eighteen years, also noted rather sourly that when they inspected the coppice in Mr Albion’s walk, where the king’s timber was supposed to be grown, they had found it used as a huge rabbit warren, with not a single tree to be found in the whole inclosure.

Having assured the commissioners that something would be done, Francis Albion’s only comment to his sister was: ‘I had a thousand rabbits out of there last year and I’ll have another thousand next.’

What then, at the age of sixty-five, had induced Mr Albion to marry Miss Totton of Lymington, thirty years his junior?

Some said it was love. Others that, after his sister Adelaide had suffered a severe cold, it had occurred to Albion that she might not always be there to look after him. Whatever the reason, Mr Albion proposed and Miss Totton accepted, and came to live at Albion House.

It was strange, really, that Miss Totton had not married long before. She was pleasant-looking, respectable; she wasn’t poor. Perhaps she had been crossed in love when young. Whatever the reason, at the age of thirty-five, she had obviously decided that marriage into the Albions, even as a nurse, was preferable to her present situation. Her half-brother, as head of the Totton family, was pleased with the Albion connection, and Adelaide seemed genuinely glad to see her brother married. She kept to her own wing of the house and the two women had got on well.

The marriage had been rather successful. Miss Totton had not expected much, but marriage seemed to have given Francis Albion a new lease of life. Even so, it came as quite a shock to him when, in his sixty-eighth year, his wife informed him that she was pregnant.

‘Such things can happen, Francis,’ she told him with a smile. They called the baby Frances, after her father; and, as was the fashion of the time, she was always known as Fanny.

There were no more children. Fanny was therefore the heiress. Old Mr Albion was happy because he had a daughter, which caused some pleasant admiration at his age. Fanny’s mother was happy: not only had she a child to love, but to be the mother of the next owner of Albion House was a much finer thing than to be the married nurse to an elderly gentleman. Adelaide was happy because she, too, had a child to love. Mr Totton of Lymington was delighted, because now his children, who were the same age, had a close cousin who was heiress to one of the local estates. Why, even Fanny herself was happy, being rich and loved. And so she should have been. For all she had to do, in such happy circumstances, was to live up to everyone else’s desires.

Fanny had been ten when her mother died. The family had been shocked, not only on account of their grief, but with concern for the future of the child.

‘What shall we do now?’ Francis Albion had cried to his sister.

‘Live a long time,’ she had sternly replied.

They had both done so. Fanny had not been orphaned; if Francis and Adelaide had been more like grandparents, Fanny had nonetheless had a happy home. If her father, as he grew into old age, was somewhat timid and plaintive, her own youthful spirits and the frequent company of her Totton cousins easily overcame this influence. And if her Aunt Adelaide tended to repeat herself, Fanny could, all the same, enjoy the intelligence that was still there, as sharp as ever.

And then there was Mrs Pride.

Mrs Pride. Were all housekeepers known as Mrs, regardless of whether they had been married? Fanny had never met a housekeeper who wasn’t. It was a term of respect, a recognition that, within their own domain, they were mistress of the house. And there was absolutely no question about who ran Albion House. Mrs Pride did.

She was a very handsome woman: tall, her grey hair swept elegantly back, her walk stately; any man would guess at once that she must have a magnificent body. The only reason she had not married, in all likelihood, was that she preferred running a manor house to the much harder life she would have had as the wife of a farmer or forest smallholder, or even a Lymington shopkeeper.

She was always deferential. If the sheets needed renewing she would get permission from Adelaide to attend to it. When it was time for the spring clean she would enquire what date would be convenient. If a chimney looked about to fall down, even, she would politely ask Francis what he would like her to do about it. She knew every nook and cranny, every rafter, every store, every expenditure. Mrs Pride was, in truth, the mistress of Albion House; the Albions only lived there.

To Fanny she became a second, silent mother. For years Fanny did not know it. If she decided to go for a walk and Fanny went with her, Mrs Pride might want to sit a while so that Fanny could play in the water at the ford. When she happened to see sketching materials in Lymington she took the liberty of buying them, just in case Adelaide might wish to give them to Fanny. She remarked on Fanny’s drawing prowess to the vicar after church and meekly supposed that there would be tutors visiting the house to give her lessons in other accomplishments too – at which Mr Gilpin took the hint at once and saw that these things were attended to. And so quiet and effective was she that, at almost fifteen, Fanny still thought that she was just the loving, friendly figure who saw that she was clothed and fed, and who seemed always glad of a little company when she sat in her little parlour in the early evening for a pot of tea and some delicious brandy cakes.

Fanny glanced across at her father. He had closed his eyes, after these last remarks. It was strange, in a way, this timidity of his, when one considered his life. Sometimes, even now, he would tell her about his travels, describing the gorgeous French court of Louis XV, or the busy port of Boston, or the plantations of Carolina. He still recalled every great event.

‘I remember the excitement in London, back in forty-five,’ he would say, ‘when the Scots tried to march south under Bonnie Prince Charlie.’ Every victory of the British on the high seas or out in India seemed to have a story to go with it, and when she was a child he used to relate these to her vividly, so that, without knowing it, she had learned much of the history of her times from him.

She was sad to see his decline, but glad that she was there to be at his side in these final years.

‘Perhaps’ – her Aunt Adelaide’s voice broke into the silence, now – ‘you will meet a handsome beau at Oxford.’

‘Perhaps.’ Fanny laughed. ‘Mr Gilpin told me today I should fall in love with a poor professor.’

‘I don’t think that’s what a Miss Albion would do, is it, Fanny?’

‘No, Aunt Adelaide, I don’t think it is.’

She loved her aunt’s aristocratic old face. She hoped she would look like that one day too. It seemed to her that Adelaide could not have had a very happy life, but she never complained. If Mrs Pride ran the house in the practical sense, her aunt Adelaide was still its family guardian – the guardian angel, really.

It was evenings like this, when her father was dozing or had retired to bed, and she and Adelaide were sitting quietly together, that Fanny treasured most. The old house so silent; the shadows, like familiar ghosts, always in the same places on the panelling in the candlelight – at such times, her aunt would begin to talk. And she started to do so now.

Fanny smiled. Her aunt told the same stories over again, yet she was always happy to hear them. It was probably because, although her father’s stories were interesting, they concerned only his own life; whereas Adelaide spoke about a more distant past – her mother Betty, her grandmother Alice, the story of the Albion inheritance going back centuries. Fanny’s own inheritance. Yet the wonderful thing was that when her aunt Adelaide told it, all these things seemed to have happened only yesterday.

‘My mother was born just after the Restoration of King Charles II,’ Adelaide could say. That was more than a hundred and thirty years ago. Yet Betty Lisle was a living memory. Adelaide had shared this house with her for forty years. ‘That’s her favourite chair, where you sit now,’ her aunt would say. Or, one afternoon in the garden: ‘I remember the day my mother planted that rose tree. It was sunny, just like this …’ The very house itself seemed to become like a living person too. ‘The brick skin of the house was put on when grandmother was a girl by her father. But he left the timbers and this old panelling’, she would add, with a nod to the wall, ‘just as it was in Queen Elizabeth’s day. Of course’ – and here followed a vivid personal description of the terrifying figure in red and black – ‘it was from this room, on a night like this, that old Lady Albion went out to try to raise the county to join the Spanish Armada.’

How could anyone fail to love such family history? But – here was the real difference between her aunt’s and her father’s stories – Adelaide’s were told with such feeling for the people she spoke about. She would tell Fanny how this one had known hardship, or that one lost a child and grieved, so that the ghostly figures peopling the house became like friends whose joys and sadnesses one shared and whom, were such a thing possible, one wanted to sustain and comfort.

‘I try to keep things as they were for my dear mother and father,’ Adelaide liked to say. And even if I do decide to add some Gothic features, thought Fanny, I too will continue as loyal guardian of the family shrine.

There was only one story, though, which used to move Aunt Adelaide to tears and that was the tale of her grandmother, Alice Lisle.

It was ironic, really, that Monmouth’s rebellion and the execution of Alice Lisle should have come when they did. For within three years of Monmouth’s attempt to seize the throne for the Protestant cause, King James II had so infuriated the English Parliament with his promotion of Roman Catholicism that they were ready to throw him out; and when, at this crucial point, his Catholic wife unexpectedly gave birth to a healthy son and heir, they did. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 effectively ended the civil and religious dispute that had been going on since the Stuarts came to the English throne. It was practically bloodless. The English didn’t want Catholic rule and they got their way. James and his baby son were out. His Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William took over instead. Had Monmouth been alive then, Parliament might have chosen him but, like so many Stuarts, he had been vain and impetuous. So William and Mary it was. After them, the other Protestant daughter Anne. And after Anne, a grandson of one of Charles I’s sisters, the Protestant King George, head of the German House of Hanover whose grandson George III was still reigning now.

Kings ruled through Parliament these days. Neither they nor their heirs were allowed to marry Catholics. Catholics and dissenters might practise their religion, but they could not attend university or hold any public office. Eighteenth-century England would not be quite what Alice Lisle might have wanted, but to a large extent the cause for which both she and her husband had been murdered had now been won.

Ironic politically, but the personal tragedy remained, like a tree that continues growing, almost the same, despite a change in yearly weather. A century had passed, but the Forest had not forgotten Alice. And in Albion House she was still a living memory.

Aunt Adelaide might have been born twenty years after those terrible events, but she knew them from her parents, and relations like her old aunt Tryphena, and local figures like Jim Pride, who had all been there at the time. Through their eyes and their descriptions, she had witnessed the arrest, the shameful trial and the execution. She still shuddered whenever she passed Moyles Court or the Great Hall at Winchester. Moyles Court had passed out of the family, now, but Albion House had been Alice’s true home, the place she had loved, and her presence abided.

Yet perhaps Alice might have faded back, with time, to join those other shadows in the evening candlelight. If it had not been for Betty.

For the first year after her mother’s execution, Betty had retreated back to Albion House and remained there in a state of shock. When Peter wrote to her she replied vaguely; when he came to see her she sent him away. She couldn’t see him. She didn’t quite know why, but everything seemed impossible. He persevered, though, for three long years and at last she came out of her depression enough to marry him.

Was their marriage happy? As she grew older, Adelaide sometimes wondered if it had been. There had been several children who died young; her elder brother who had later married and died without any heirs; then herself and lastly Francis. Peter had often been away in London while Betty remained alone at Albion House. By the time Adelaide was ten she had realized her mother must be rather lonely. A few years later, when he was not quite sixty, Peter had died in London; of overwork, it was said. He had been planning to spend more time in the country.

After that, with Francis sent to stay with an Oxfordshire vicar for his schooling and then away studying law, Betty had slowly contracted into the house, like a creature retreating into its shell. She would go out to visit neighbours, of course, or to shop in Lymington. But the house became her life, where Adelaide kept her company and, as that life stretched on down the years, the shadows of the house gradually gathered, enfolding them. The chief shadow was Alice.

‘To think that I was here with Peter that terrible night,’ Betty would sometimes cry with self-reproach. And pointing out that she could hardly have done anything, and might have been arrested, did no good. ‘We should never have gone to Moyles Court anyway.’ True, perhaps, but useless. ‘She only left London because of Peter.’ Also true – Tryphena had told her – but equally useless to worry about now.

Adelaide was a sensible and quite a cheerful young woman. Her mind was strong. But hearing these litanies year after year raised around her a sense of life’s tragedy and her mother’s pain that was like a cloud.

With this tragic cloud came another – black, like thunder, rolling across the sky. The name of this dark shadow was Penruddock.

There were no Penruddocks in the Forest now. The Penruddocks of Hale had departed early in the century. The Penruddocks of Compton Chamberlayne were still there; but that was thirty-five miles away, over the horizon, in another county. Adelaide didn’t know any Penruddocks in person, therefore. But she knew what to think of them.

‘All royalists, of course,’ Betty would say. ‘But treacherous with it. When I think how my mother had actually tried to help them when they were in trouble. And this was their thanks.’

The treachery of the Furzeys had never been fully understood by the Albions, as it had by the Prides. And even if it had, it would only have earned them a bleak contempt. But the cruelty of another gentry family was a very different matter.

‘Sneaking around the house with his filthy troops all night. Trying to break down the door. Letting his men steal mother’s linen. And then shoving her on the back of a trooper’s horse in just her nightdress. An old woman like that. Shameful!’ Betty would cry, her eyes flashing suddenly with rage and scorn. ‘Evil!’

Adelaide had a clear picture of Colonel Penruddock, with his saturnine face and cruel, vengeful nature. Such a crime between families could never be forgiven; nor, she believed, should it. ‘That family’, she therefore told Fanny, in her turn, ‘are wicked, evil people. Never have anything to do with them.’

She had said so once again that evening and Fanny had just assured her with a smile that she certainly wouldn’t, when they both turned, Fanny in some alarm, at a terrible sound. It was a cough, a rasping, wheezing cough, followed by a gasp. It came from old Francis Albion. He seemed to be struggling for breath. Fanny went pale. She rose; hurried to his side. ‘Should we send for the doctor?’ she whispered. ‘Father seems to be …’

‘No, we should not.’ Adelaide did not move from her chair.

Francis had opened his eyes now, but they were staring up into his head in the most alarming way. He had gone pale. The cough began again.

‘Aunt Adelaide,’ Fanny cried, ‘he’s …’

‘No, he is not!’ said her aunt with some asperity. ‘Stop pretending to die, Francis,’ she cried. ‘Stop it at once.’ She turned crossly to Fanny. ‘Don’t you see, child, he’s trying to prevent you going to Oxford?’

‘Aunt Adelaide! What a thing to say of poor papa.’ Her father was gasping for air now. ‘Of course I wouldn’t go if he is unwell.’

‘Fiddlesticks,’ said Adelaide. But the awful sound went on.

Isaac Seagull, landlord of the Angel Inn, let the damp breeze play on his face as he gazed over Pennington Marshes.

He was a tall, wiry man, as tall as Grockleton if he stood straight. But usually Isaac Seagull stood with his round head stooped forward. His hair, still all black, was worn in a plait down his back. His face, as chinless as his Seagull ancestors, was usually cheerful; but at present it was serious. Isaac Seagull had something on his mind.

The organization of smuggling in the New Forest area was a large and complex affair. First of all there were the ships that supplied the goods. These came from various ports across the sea, but the busiest were those of Dunkirk, which picked up Holland trade, Roscoff in Brittany, and the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. The main transports were called luggers, which varied in size but had broad, shallow draughts and huge capacity. They usually came across in armed convoys. When it was necessary to avoid the few Customs vessels sent against them the luggers could either turn into the wind and row away, or dash into the mudflats where the revenue vessels couldn’t follow them. Sometimes the smugglers also used swift clippers, which could outrun almost anything.

The man in charge of the ship, or convoy, was the captain. But then, when the shipment came to shore it had to be met by a huge caravan that was to transport and distribute the goods. The organizer of this operation was the lander.

Isaac Seagull was the lander for the New Forest.

But behind the lander and the captain was another, more shadowy figure. The man who put up the money for the whole operation, who could buy the goods, pay for a clipper: the entrepreneur. This was the venturer.

Who was he? Nobody knew. Or if they did, they said nothing. The parish clerk at Lymington church kept all the books, so he must have known. A local bailiff took contributions from any of the farmers or merchants who wanted to invest in the enterprise; so he probably knew. The scale of operations was so large, sometimes, that it could only have been someone with very deep pockets, one of the local aristocrats, a member of the gentry.

Grockleton believed it was Mr Luttrell. Owner of a fine house called Eaglehurst, down past Mr Drummond’s Cadland estate, at the junction of the Solent water and the Southampton inlet, Mr Luttrell had built a tower, which gave him a view of the whole Solent water and the Isle of Wight. That brandy shipments of some kind came to Luttrell’s Tower was not in doubt, but this could be just some minor dealing for his own account. Was Luttrell really the secret figure, the venturer behind the whole huge New Forest coastal trade? Perhaps it wasn’t even a single gentleman at all. Perhaps it was all of them.

Whether or not they were actual participants, two things could be said not only of the gentry, but of every inhabitant of the south coast of England at this period. The first was that, aristocrat or peasant, clergyman, magistrate or poacher, they were all at the very least the knowing recipients of illegal merchandise. The second was that nobody saw anything. Two kegs of brandy might be delivered to the Lymington magistrate’s next-door neighbour, yet he was quite unaware of it. The pulpit might be full of brandy bottles but the vicar found plenty of room for his feet as he preached. Three hundred packhorses might wind along the edge of his lordship’s park; his lordship never woke. Why, even Mr Drummond, His Majesty’s personal banker, living in plain sight of Luttrell’s Tower, never saw a thing. Nothing at all.

Why, for nearly a century, did the entire population of England’s southern counties cheerfully connive at breaking the law? Because they did not like paying taxes? Nobody does. Were they all criminals?

Even the wisest legislators sometimes forget that, for the most part, government is just a business like any other. The entire population down to the humblest cottager now drank tea. The tax imposed on tea was so high that ordinary folk could not afford to pay it. Therefore they must either do without or find contraband. As much for this reason, probably, as any other, the smuggling business was not perceived as anything more than technically illegal. No one actually thought it was wrong. The law, in this instance, had no repute. Why, it was not even called smuggling. Free Trade was the name by which the enterprise was known; Free Traders were smugglers.

The case with brandy, and the many other goods shipped, was similar; but here a related factor came into play. The high level of duty actually created a potential profit margin: there was an inducement for a smuggling business to develop.

The obvious solution, one might have thought, would be to reduce the level of Customs duty. Ordinary folk might have had their tea and the smuggling trade become unprofitable. The Customs receipts would very likely have gone up. But this, it seems, never occurred to anyone – unless, of course, it had, and not every legislator wished to end the business.

The structure of the Free Trade was conventional. Profits on different commodities varied but on best brandy, the most favoured line, they ran roughly as follows.

A keg of brandy retailed in London, tax included, at about thirty-two shillings. Its cost price in France was half that. Selling at a discount of about thirty per cent off full retail price therefore left the Free Trader with a gross margin of around thirty per cent and the certainty that all his stock would be sold instantly for cash. After paying for the carriage of goods and other expenses, his profit would have been around ten per cent of his sales; so by making several runs a year he could earn a healthy return on capital employed.

Thanks to Isaac Seagull the lander, the distribution network was excellent. No cargo he had run had ever been intercepted.

Why then, as he gazed out over the marshes should he betray by a twitch in his mouth that he was worried?

The venturer had some big plans for the coming year – very big. Nothing must go wrong. His job, as lander, was to make sure that nothing did.

So what could go wrong? Some time next year, if the reports were correct, there would be detachments of dragoons arriving at the new barracks at Christchurch. What would that mean? It was too early to know how many were coming, but it would be wise to get the biggest shipments through before they arrived.

Then there were events in France to consider. So far, the Revolution, the execution of the king, the reign of the Terror had all come to Paris. War had even been declared. But that had not stopped the big wine merchants of France concluding ambitious deals with the venturer. That was the venturer’s problem, of course, not his. It exercised his agile mind, though, all the same.

Assuming the shipments could all be made before the new dragoons arrived, what else was there to consider?

Grockleton. Some Customs officers could be paid off, but they let you know soon enough if that was their game, and Grockleton hadn’t. Isaac’s feelings were mixed. Letting yourself be paid off was probably the most rational course, he supposed, but he quite respected a man who was prepared to fight. If he had a chance, that is. But could Grockleton really believe he had a chance?

Seagull could think of only one instance of the Lymington Customs men scoring a success and that had been five years ago, just before Grockleton came. A breakaway group of Free Traders had started operating out of a cave known as Ambrose Hole, in the river valley just north of Lymington. He’d known who they were, of course, and stopped using them for the smuggling run because they wouldn’t obey orders. They’d taken to robbing people on the turnpike roads; then they’d killed several people. Everyone had had enough by then. The Free Traders were armed, but they scarcely ever used violence unless a convoy was attacked. Killing wasn’t their style. The magistrate, the mayor, even he himself had all agreed it had to stop. So Seagull had told the Customs officer where they were, troops called in, the gang raided. They’d found a lot of stolen goods in the cave. And thirty bodies too; buried in a shaft. He had been shocked by that.

The Customs officers and the troops had claimed that as a success. Seagull hadn’t minded; it did no harm.

But Grockleton was still there. He had a determined look about him. He might be watched every hour, but he clearly could not be discounted. Isaac Seagull never discounted danger: that was why he was good at his job.

And now, as he considered the problem of Grockleton and what to do about him, another thought came into his mind.

What if Grockleton had a spy? A good one. Someone in the Free Traders. That was a further possibility. It might seem unlikely, but it had to be considered. An informer would be killed if caught of course. That was something the Free Traders would do. But still …

Isaac Seagull’s mouth twitched. He was thinking.

Nathaniel Furzey liked living with the Prides in Oakley. They were a pleasant, lively family. He and Andrew Pride were fast friends. Andrew’s father, besides keeping a small herd of cows, had a timber business, buying timber at a good price from the woodward and selling it on. Piles of his timber were stacked by the edge of Oakley green.

The first few weeks he had lived there he had been on his best behaviour. But before long, his natural high spirits had come out, and he had been getting into cheerful mischief ever since.

The fact was that curly-haired young Nathaniel Furzey was quickly bored. The schoolwork at Mr Gilpin’s came so easily to him that he had usually finished when the rest of the children were only halfway through. Sometimes Mr Gilpin himself would come by and read with him. The vicar had even been tempted, once, to teach him a little Latin, but realized that Nathaniel was picking it up so fast that he had stopped the exercise quickly before it went too far.

‘What do you think I should do?’ Gilpin had asked a fellow cleric. ‘I’m not talking of natural intelligence. Young Andrew Pride has quite as much of that as any of the boys you’d find at the schools in Salisbury or Winchester. I’m speaking of a rare bird, a natural scholar, a fellow who could spend a life at Oxford or Cambridge.’ He sighed. ‘I dare say Sir Harry Burrard or the Albions would pay for it if I asked them to send him away to school – if the parents agreed of course. But …’

‘You’d take him away from his family, his friends, the Forest,’ his friend had answered. ‘And if it didn’t work …’

‘Stranded like a boat on a sandbank.’

‘I think so.’

‘It’s easier in towns. If he lived in Winchester, or London …’ Gilpin mused. ‘I suppose the whole nation’s like that, though. Trees growing deep in the forests. Wonderful trees dropping thousands of acorns. One in a million is carved into a piece of fine furniture. Nature’s waste.’

‘True, Gilpin. But also England’s stock. Always plenty of it.’

So the vicar had left young Nathaniel in the little village school, after which he would doubtless grow up to enjoy a quiet Forest life. In the meantime he was mischievous.

One of the chief delights that occupied his active mind was that of playing practical jokes. Andrew liked these too, but even he was awestruck sometimes by the ingenuity of some of the jokes that Nathaniel devised. His most recent had concerned the Furzeys.

Although he had the same name as the Oakley Furzeys, Nathaniel soon came to share the Prides’ view of their neighbours. Even setting aside the dark memory of their betrayal of Alice Lisle, it seemed to the Prides that Caleb Furzey was a bit slow in the head. What intrigued Nathaniel, however, was Caleb’s imagination. For it was full of fear and superstition.

‘I always carries some salt with me,’ he assured the boy, ‘to throw over my shoulder.’ Burley he was afraid to enter, ‘on account of the witches’. He wouldn’t go up to Minstead church because he said it was haunted; and once, by mistake, he had gone round Brockenhurst church widdershins – though few Forest folk would have cared to do that – and had lived in fear for weeks. But any evil sign would set him off. If he saw a solitary magpie, he spoke to it at once; he walked carefully round ladders; and if he saw a jet-black cat with no white marking he’d be off as fast as he could. ‘Black cat: witch’s cat,’ he’d declare.

So Nathaniel had found a black cat. It was dead when he found it and it wasn’t really black, because it had some white hair under its chin. But when he’d discovered a man who knew how to stuff animals, and when he’d applied some black dye to the white patch, he reckoned the cat looked pretty good. Then he and Andrew Pride went to work.

There was nowhere that black cat didn’t appear. Walking along a forest path, Caleb would suddenly see it confronting him, turn away in horror and never see the string that jerked it quickly into the bushes. With luck he’d take another path and the boys would be able to set up an ambush there too. Next day, he’d see it at his window. Nathaniel was an artist, though. Days would pass and Caleb would think himself safe before, suddenly, the cat would appear in some new and improbable place to terrify him. Soon the whole of Oakley was out looking for the mysterious feline. It was Andrew’s father who guessed the truth, cuffed the two boys and gave the stuffed cat a discreet and decent burial. Nothing more was said about it after that and the two boys certainly never knew that when the timber merchant had told his wife about it privately the two adults had laughed until they cried.

There were other things to interest Nathaniel at Oakley, however. He had seen the Free Traders’ packhorses up at Minstead from time to time; but you couldn’t help noticing a lot more activity down at the coast near Oakley. Several times he had been aware that Andrew’s father had disappeared for the night, returning at dawn looking cheerful, leading his pony and dumping a little sack of tea on the kitchen table without a word.

One morning three riding officers had arrived at Oakley and started inspecting Pride’s pile of timber by the green. Pride had watched them with mild interest as they started dismantling it. They found this hard work; they took all morning. At noon Grockleton rode up and saw they had found nothing.

‘I hope your officers are going to put my timber back the way it was, Mr Grockleton,’ Pride remarked.

‘I don’t believe they will, Mr Pride,’ the other replied with equal coolness.

Pride and the family had restacked the timber after they had gone. No word was spoken. That was the game.

Nathaniel encountered Grockleton himself one day, however. It was about two weeks after he had been given the smallpox vaccination. He and Andrew Pride had just come out of school and, instead of turning, as they usually would, to go past Mr Gilpin’s house back to Oakley, they were walking the other way, towards Boldre church.

Their destination that day was Albion House, where Pride’s aunt was the housekeeper. Andrew had been told to pay this formidable lady a visit after school and Nathaniel had been delighted to go with him. This was the house where the young lady lived, who had persuaded him to have the vaccination. It was a big house, too, Andrew had told him: a manor house. He had never been in such a house before.

They were just going along the lane to the church when they heard the horse behind them and turned to see the tall Customs Officer riding up. As he came abreast he looked down and asked them politely where they were going.

Apart from his claw-like hands, Grockleton could make himself pleasant enough when he wasn’t looking for contraband. Hearing their destination was Albion House, he pulled a sealed letter from his coat and asked with a smile: ‘Would you boys like to earn tuppence?’

‘We each would, Sir,’ said Nathaniel, quick as a flash.

Grockleton hesitated a second, then chuckled. ‘Very well, then. This is a letter from my wife to old Mr Albion. Will you deliver it?’

‘Oh, yes, Sir,’ they both cried eagerly.

‘Then you will save me the journey.’ He reached for the money, and as he did so casually remarked: ‘Now you must see it’s delivered at once. You know how to deliver letters, I suppose?’

‘I will deliver a letter anywhere in the Forest, Sir,’ said Nathaniel firmly, ‘for tuppence.’

‘Good. Here you are then.’

He gave them the money and watched them go off. But for some reason, as if a thought had just struck him, Grockleton did not move at once but remained where he was for fully a minute, staring after them. And when Nathaniel glanced back, he saw that Grockleton was staring at him, particularly, in deep thought.

Now why, he wondered, should Mr Grockleton be doing that?

Oxford! Oxford at last. There it was, ahead of them, its spires and domes rising out of a faint morning mist that hung over the broad green meadows and the gentle river that wound past the colleges. Oxford on the River Isis, as the Thames is called on this stretch of its long journey. It was useless to pretend they were not excited.

‘And to think, Fanny, my sweetest, dearest friend,’ cried her cousin Louisa. ‘To think that we nearly did not set out at all!’

How very pretty Louisa looked today, Fanny thought with pleasure. She had always admired Louisa’s dark hair and lustrous brown eyes, and this morning her cousin was looking particularly animated. How pleasant it was, she considered, that her closest cousin should also be her best friend.

Their journey had almost been cancelled due to ill health. Not that of old Francis Albion, who had been scolded by his sister from death’s door back to his usual state, but unexpectedly by Louisa’s mother, Mrs Totton, who was to have accompanied them and who had fallen and sprained her leg so painfully that she really didn’t think she could travel. So they certainly wouldn’t have been able to go, if it hadn’t been for Mr Gilpin.

‘My wife thinks I have been sitting in Boldre for too long,’ he assured the grateful Tottons just as firmly as if it had been true. ‘She positively insists I accompany you. Remember, I was up at Oxford myself, so to visit it again is nothing but a pleasure to me.’

With the vicar as their companion there could be no doubt of the girls’ safety. ‘Indeed,’ as Fanny reminded Louisa, ‘it is really a great honour for us to travel with such a distinguished man.’ And so, in high spirits they had set off in the Albions’ best carriage to Winchester and thence up the old road that led, due north, the forty miles to Oxford.

By mid-morning they were installed in one of the city’s best inns, the Blue Boar in Cornhill, the girls sharing one room, Mr Gilpin taking another. And promptly at noon Edward Totton called for them.

Having embraced his sister and his cousin, bowed and expressed his honour that Mr Gilpin should have accompanied them and seeing that they were all eager to explore the city, Edward suggested they should make a tour forthwith.

What a delight the city was. With its broad, cobbled main streets, and its curious medieval lanes, ancient Gothic churches side by side with splendid neoclassical façades, the university had been quietly growing there for more than five centuries. Its streets were busy with all kinds of people. Tradesmen and farmers from the countryside around mixed with clerics and poor scholars, rich young men with powdered hair, stern professors in academic gowns and visitors like themselves. Here they would pass a stately gateway and porter’s lodge, like the entrance to a palace, and look into the huge cobbled quadrangle behind; there, down an alley, they would peep into some dark little yard that appeared to have been forgotten since medieval monks had used it four hundred years before.

Edward was very cheerful, the girls in high spirits; but Fanny did not fail to notice, with admiration, the role that Mr Gilpin assumed. He accompanied them in the most companionable way, but said little. Occasionally – when they came to the Bodleian Library, for instance, or the classical perfection of Sir Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre – he would step forward and point out quietly, in his deep voice, a few of each building’s finer points. Not to do so, after all, would have been failing in his duty. When they visited his own college, Queen’s, he naturally took them round. But apart from these occasions he seemed to prefer to bring up the rear, letting Edward conduct the tour and not even allowing a hint of a frown to cross his distinguished brow when Edward got things wrong. Indeed, he seemed to be enjoying himself just as much as they were, as he poked his head into familiar old nooks and crannies with a delighted ‘Aha’, to find them just as they had been fifty years before. They visited mighty Balliol College, stately Christchurch, pleasant Oriel and, at towards three o’clock, came to Edward’s own college, which was Merton.

‘We say we are the oldest college,’ he informed them.

‘Disputed.’ Gilpin chuckled.

‘The first to be built, at least,’ Edward responded with a smile. ‘In 1264. We are very proud of ourselves. The Master of the college is known as the Warden.’

Merton was certainly delightful. Its quadrangles were not large and grand, but more intimate and suggestive of its antiquity. Its chapel, however, was a very imposing affair, at the west end of which were a number of monuments and memorials. They had paused in front of a rather fine one to a Warden, Robert Wintle, who had died some decades before, and Gilpin had just begun to say, ‘A fine scholar, I remember Robert Wintle well,’ when Edward interrupted him with a happy cry: ‘Ah, here he is! I told him he’d find us at Merton.’

And to their great surprise, Mr Gilpin and the two young ladies saw an elegantly dressed man, a few years older and somewhat taller than Edward, with a pale, aristocratic face and a good head of dark hair, which had been blown a little carelessly by the breeze. Seeing Edward, he nodded and smiled, then made Gilpin and the ladies a brief, formal bow.

‘I said nothing, because I had no idea if he would come,’ said Edward. ‘He often doesn’t,’ he added. ‘This is Mr Martell.’

The introductions were quickly performed, Mr Martell bowing again, with grave politeness to Gilpin and each of the girls, though it was hard to tell whether he was really interested.

‘Martell was in his final year when I came up to Oxford,’ Edward explained. ‘He was very kind to me. He used to talk to me.’ He laughed. ‘He doesn’t talk to everyone, you know.’

Fanny glanced at Martell to see if he was going to deny this. He didn’t.

‘You are of the Dorset family of Martell, perhaps?’ Gilpin enquired.

‘I am, Sir,’ Martell replied. ‘I know nothing about the Gilpin family, I confess.’

‘My family has Scaleby Castle, near Carlisle,’ Gilpin said firmly. Fanny had never heard him say this before and looked at her old friend with new interest.

‘Indeed, Sir? You will know Lord Laversdale, perhaps.’

‘All my life. His land marches with ours.’ This having been duly noted, Gilpin glanced towards Fanny and continued more easily: ‘You know of the Albion estate in the New Forest, I dare say?’

‘I know of it, although I have never had the pleasure of seeing it,’ said Mr Martell, again with a slight bow towards Fanny. There was, she thought, a faint tinge of warmth in his manner now, but it might just have been a trick of the light in the chapel.

‘Let’s go outside,’ said Edward Totton.

One of the delights of Merton College was its setting: for its buildings backed on to the open green space of Merton Field beyond which, across the Broad Walk, lay the lovely expanse of Christchurch Meadow and the river.

They made a pleasant group as they set out into this Arcadian scene, the two girls in their long, simple dresses, Mr Gilpin in his clerical hat, the two men in their tail coats and breeches and striped silk stockings. As they were leaving the college, Edward had kept up a lively discourse, explaining how his friend came to be staying in the vicinity, what a noted sportsman he had been at Oxford, and a scholar too, it seemed. But as they started across Merton Field, his supply of conversation seemed temporarily to have dried up, and as neither Fanny nor Louisa wished to lead the conversation with the stranger, and Mr Martell himself showed no inclination to say anything, Mr Gilpin stepped in, walking beside Martell while the other three followed, listening, just behind.

‘Have you taken up any career, Mr Martell?’ he enquired.

‘Not yet, Sir.’

‘You considered it?’

‘I did. At Oxford I considered entering the Church, but the responsibilities of my position decided me against it.’

‘A man may be the owner of a large estate and be a clergyman too,’ Gilpin pointed out. ‘My grandfather was.’

‘Certainly, Sir. But shortly after I completed my studies at Oxford a kinsman of my father’s died, leaving me a large estate in Kent: this in addition to the estates in Dorset, which will be mine on the death of my father. The two lie a hundred miles apart; unless I relinquish one – which would betray a trust laid upon me – I conceive that it would be impossible to carry out my duties as a clergyman as well. I could, of course, engage a perpetual curate, but if I do that there seems little point in taking holy orders.’

‘I see,’ said Mr Gilpin.

‘I think, perhaps,’ continued Mr Martell, ‘of entering politics.’

‘He’s looking for a seat,’ Edward now interrupted from behind. ‘I’ve told him he should talk to Harry Burrard. He decides who the members for Lymington will be.’ He laughed. ‘I think Martell should represent us, Mr Gilpin. What do you think?’

But whether the vicar of Boldre meant to reply would never be known, for Fanny suddenly cried: ‘Oh, look, Mr Gilpin! A ruin.’

The object at which she was pointing was a small bridge over the river, some way off to their right. If not exactly a ruin, it was certainly in a very dilapidated state, with its arches visibly crumbling. It looked most unsafe.

‘Folly Bridge,’ said Mr Gilpin, who seemed glad to change the subject. ‘Now then, Edward, can you tell me the date of it? No? Mr Martell? No also. Well, it is believed to date from the late eleventh century, about the time of King William Rufus. If so, it is much older than the university.’

This information having been received with respect, Fanny decided she could properly address the stranger. ‘Do you care for ruins, Mr Martell?’

He turned and looked at her. ‘I am aware’ – he inclined his head momentarily towards Gilpin – ‘having read Mr Gilpin’s Observations with great profit, of the picturesque nature of ruins; certainly there is much to admire in, and much to learn from, the ruins of antiquity. But I admit, Miss Albion, that I prefer the vigour of a living building to the decadence of its remains.’

‘Yet there are some people who build ruins,’ she offered.

‘I had a friend who did. But I consider it preposterous all the same.’

‘Oh.’ Thinking of her own plans she could not help blushing. ‘Why?’

‘I should not care to spend so great a sum upon an object so useless. I see no sense in it.’

‘Come, Sir.’ Gilpin came to her defence. ‘Your argument surely has this weakness: you might say the same of any work of art. A painting of a ruin, then, should not be made either.’

‘I grant the justice of what you say, Sir,’ replied Martell, ‘and yet find I am not satisfied. It is, I think, a question of degree. The painter, no matter how great his labour, expends only his time, paint, canvas. Yet for the cost of even a small ruin a man might build a score of cottages that could be both useful and pleasing to the eye.’ He paused. Did he, perhaps, resent being obliged to speak for so long? ‘There is this further, Sir. A mansion is what it is, namely a house; a painting is a painting. But a constructed ruin pretends to be something it is not. It is false. The sentiments, the reveries it is intended to provoke are also false.’

‘You do not care for the Gothic fashion in building, then?’ asked Fanny.

‘Taking a good house and adding Gothic ornaments to it to make it look like something else? Certainly not, Miss Albion. I abominate that fashion.’

‘Ha,’ said Mr Gilpin.

They went across, all the same, to inspect Folly Bridge, then walked along the river bank a little way. Edward had started to chatter again. It was very pleasant. By the time they had done this, Mr Gilpin and the two girls felt ready to return to the Blue Boar Inn to dine and rest. Edward and Mr Martell accompanied them to the inn and it was agreed that Edward should join them again the next morning to continue their investigation of Oxford. Mr Martell, it seemed, had other engagements. For their final day, however, Edward proposed that they should venture out to the village of Woodstock and visit the huge country mansion of Blenheim Palace, which lay in a magnificent park nearby.

‘The duke is away at present,’ said Edward, ‘but one can visit the house upon application, which I have already made.’

‘Capital!’ cried Gilpin. ‘The duke has some paintings by Rubens which must not be missed.’

‘Martell,’ asked Edward, ‘you will accompany us, perhaps?’ His friend seeming to hesitate, he asked: ‘Have you visited Blenheim?’

‘I have stayed there once or twice,’ Martell replied quietly.

‘Oh God, Martell,’ Edward cried, not at all abashed, ‘I should have guessed you would know the duke. So come now, will you keep these ladies company – or do you only go to Blenheim when the owner is there to receive you?’

To Fanny’s astonishment Martell merely shook his head, half smiling, at this sally. It seemed he did not mind Edward’s puppyish teasing. ‘I should be delighted to accompany you,’ he said with a slight bow; although whether he really wanted to Fanny could not guess.

Mr Martell left them after this and so the two girls dined with Edward and Mr Gilpin. Fanny decided that this was preferable, really, since it relieved them of the necessity of conversing with a man who had no great desire for their company. She did ask Mr Gilpin for his opinion of Edward’s friend, though.

‘His intellect’, Gilpin said cautiously, ‘is strong, although perhaps too rigid. But I should need to know him better.’ Which, while interesting, wasn’t quite what she’d meant.

‘He’s damnably rich,’ said Edward. ‘I can tell you that.’

Later, in their room, she had asked Louisa what she thought. She always enjoyed discussing things with Louisa. Her cousin and she were very close, perhaps because they were so different. They both had a good eye and enjoyed painting; but while Fanny would take time to seek some particular effect of the light or weather on the landscape, Louisa after a while would content herself with a few quick dashes of colour and say she was done. Or sometimes, when Mr Gilpin was instructing, she would make some flippant addition to the scene and, as the distinguished artist passed, point to it and ask: ‘Do you like my rabbit, Mr Gilpin? It has floppy ears.’

But as it was done in a cheerful way and was so in tune with her character, he would just smile and say, ‘Yes, Louisa’ and not take offence.

Louisa had a talent for mimicry – her imitation of Mr Grockleton was beyond praise – but she was not malicious. She read books, as much as she wanted to; she spoke enough French to amuse the French officers in Lymington. With her lovely eyes and dark-haired good looks, Louisa had long ago concluded that her role as a pretty daughter of Lymington’s richest merchant suited her ambitions very well. And if she could have been cleverer or more hard-working if she wished, then she must have concluded that it was not in her self-interest. ‘What do I think of Mr Martell, Fanny? Why that he is a great catch and he knows it.’

This was clearly true.

‘But what of his character and his opinions?’

‘Why, Fanny, I hardly know. It was you who spoke to him.’ Fanny had not thought of it, but she realized now that, unusually, Louisa had kept almost silent through their walk with Mr Martell. ‘I did observe one thing, Fanny,’ her pretty cousin continued with a smile.

‘Tell me what, Louisa?’

‘That you liked him.’ And now Louisa burst into a laugh.

‘I? Oh, no, Louisa. I do not think so. Why do you think such a thing?’

But Louisa refused to discuss the matter further and instead went and sat in a chair by the window and, taking up a book, started to make a little drawing for herself upon the flyleaf. She busied herself in this way, refusing all conversation for some time, while Fanny began to prepare herself for bed, until finally she called Fanny over and, quietly handing her the book, let her look at the drawing by the fading light.

It was of a rutting stag: a great red deer, on the twilit forest heath, his head with its magnificent antlers thrown back about to emit his roar. It really was a very good likeness of the creature and well observed. With this one alteration: the face was that of Mr Martell.

‘It is as well we are not to see him tomorrow,’ said Fanny, ‘as I should be afraid of laughing.’

They did not see Mr Martell, or even think of him, the next day, which passed delightfully. But the following morning he was at the door of the inn, wearing a brown coat and riding breeches, and a tall brown hat to match. While they rode in the carriage, he mounted a magnificent bay, explaining that, as the day was fine and his horse had now been stabled for two days, he thought it best to give it some exercise. While this made perfect sense, Fanny could not help but reflect that it also meant that he was spared the need of talking to them on the journey.

With Mr Martell riding easily beside the carriage, the journey nonetheless passed very pleasantly. Of the Oxfordshire countryside Mr Gilpin had a poor opinion. ‘It is too flat. I can describe it’, he told them, ‘only as a cultivated dreariness.’ But if the landscape was sadly wanting in the picturesque, its history was more encouraging. At Woodstock, the vicar reminded them, a medieval English king had kept his lady love, the fair Rosamund. So jealous of this lady was the queen that she wanted to poison her. And so, it was said, the king built a maze around her house, and only he knew the way in. ‘A pleasant story, even if untrue,’ as the vicar remarked. With these and other tales he regaled them until they reached the park gates of the great palace of Blenheim.

John Churchill had been a genial fellow, with only a poor squire’s fortune at the court of the merry monarch, with whom he had shared a mistress. But he was also a formidable soldier. Having won a string of brilliant victories for Queen Anne, he was made Duke of Marlborough and rewarded, as successful generals were, with a great estate. As their carriage rolled along the drive this sunny morning, Fanny looked out eagerly to see the mansion. And soon enough, looking across a great sweep, she did.

It came as a shock. She felt a little intake of breath, a sense of cold fear. She was familiar with the mansions of the New Forest; she had visited the great house of Wilton up at Sarum; but she had never seen anything like this before.

The vast classical palace of Blenheim, named after the duke’s most famous victory over King Louis XIV of France, did not sit in the landscape: it spread across it like a cavalry charge in stone. Its baroque magnificence utterly dwarfed even the largest of England’s manor-mansions. It was not an English country house. It was a European palace, of a kind with the Louvre, or Versailles, or one of the great Austrian palaces that stretch across the horizon at Vienna – behind whose classical façades one may sense a spirit of almost oriental power, like that of the Russian tsars, or the Turkic khans of the endless steppe.

For even in England, in that age – when portraits of aristocrats depicted them in the poses of classical gods – the founder of the Churchill family was not to be housed like a mortal. It was a quarter of a mile from the kitchens to the dining room.

They toured the house first. The Duke of Marlborough’s marbled halls and galleries had a haughty grandeur she had never encountered before. This, she realized, was an aristocratic world quite outside and beyond her own. She felt a little overawed. She noticed that Mr Martell looked quite at home, though.

‘There is a connection between Blenheim and the New Forest,’ Mr Gilpin reminded them. ‘The last Duke of Montagu, whose family owns Beaulieu, married Marlborough’s daughter. So the lords of Beaulieu now are partly Churchills too.’

They admired the Rubens paintings. ‘The first family picture in England,’ announced Gilpin of one. Although of the picture of the Holy Family he roundly declared: ‘It is flat. It possesses little of the master’s fire. Except, Fanny, you may agree, in the old woman’s head.’ But despite all the wonders of the palace, Fanny was not sorry when Mr Gilpin finally led them out to survey the park.

The park at Blenheim was very large, one of the greatest that Capability Brown had ever undertaken. There were no small comforts like those favoured by Repton: no modest walks or flower beds, but great sweeps across which all Marlborough’s armies might have marched. God, it seemed to say, in framing nature, had only presumed to make a rough preparation, to be ordered and given meaning by the authority of an English duke. So it was that the park at Blenheim, with its broad arrangement of stream and lake, belts of woodland and endless open vistas, rolled away towards a conquered horizon.

‘Every advantage has been taken, which could add variety to grandeur,’ declared Gilpin as they began their promenade.

They all chatted together quite easily by now. As she walked with Mr Gilpin behind the other three, she saw that even Louisa was saying a few words to Mr Martell, about the scenery or the weather no doubt; and if Mr Martell did not say much, he seemed to be replying, at least. One could not deny, whatever one’s opinion of him, that Mr Martell looked very handsome in this setting.

At one point, when a particularly fine vista, cunningly contrived by the genius of Brown, opened out before them, Gilpin cried out: ‘There. As grand a burst, I should term it, as art ever displayed. Picturesque. A scene, Fanny, for you to sketch. You would do it admirably.’

Mr Martell turned. ‘You draw, Miss Albion?’

‘A little.’ Fanny replied.

‘Do you draw, Mr Martell?’ Louisa asked; but he did not turn back to her.

‘Badly, I fear. But I have the highest admiration for those who do.’ And looking, now, straight at Fanny, he smiled.

‘My cousin Louisa draws quite as well as I do, Mr Martell,’ said Fanny with a slight blush.

‘I do not doubt it,’ he said politely and faced round again to resume his conversation.

Having walked some distance, they turned to look back at the palace of the Churchills and, by way of making conversation, she asked what was the origin of the family.

‘Royalists in the Civil War, certainly,’ said Gilpin. ‘A West Country family. Not one of the oldest or noblest, though, I think.’

‘Not like you, Martell,’ Edward laughed. ‘He’s a Norman. The Martells came with William the Conqueror, didn’t they?’

‘So’, replied Martell with a slight smile, ‘I have always been told.’

‘There you are,’ said Edward cheerfully. ‘No drop of lowly blood pollutes his veins; no contact with trade has ever blotted his escutcheon. Confess it, Martell. It’s very good of you to talk to us.’

Martell greeted this with an amused shake of the head.

Fanny was a little surprised to hear Edward raise the subject in this way when, as a Totton and undoubtedly still in trade, it might have seemed to place him at a disadvantage. But watching Martell’s amused reaction, she realized there was an element of calculation in her cousin’s boyish candour. With his own mother, she realized, belonging to a minor gentry family, his links to the Burrards – his close relationship, come to that, with herself, an Albion – young Edward Totton was already within the circle of relationship of the gentry. His oblique reference to his own family being in trade was therefore a subtle invitation to the aristocrat to tell him it didn’t matter.

‘I amaze myself sometimes,’ Martell finally remarked, rising very creditably to the occasion, ‘that I talk to anyone at all.’

At which Edward grinned and Louisa laughed; and Fanny, if the truth were told, could not help being secretly pleased that she was an Albion.

They walked back to their carriage after that, the two girls together with Mr Gilpin, Edward and his friend talking to each other. Everyone seemed in high spirits, except for Mr Gilpin, who had fallen rather silent.

Before they got into their carriage, however, it was time to bid farewell to Mr Martell, who had to ride on to another house in the neighbourhood.

‘But we are not parting for very long,’ Edward announced, ‘for Martell has agreed to come and stay with us, in Lymington. Quite soon, he says. It’s all agreed.’

This was a surprise indeed: yet not, Fanny had to confess, entirely unwelcome. After all, if he were at the Tottons’ house, she should not be obliged to see him more than she wished.

So they all said goodbye and watched him ride off, and then returned to Oxford for their final dinner before their departure with Mr Gilpin, whom they did not forget, at dinner, all to thank.

Fanny found as, with the help of the inn’s maid, she packed her clothes, that she was in a very cheerful mood.

She was somewhat taken aback, therefore, when Louisa suddenly declared: ‘Are you sure, Fanny, that you do not like Mr Martell.’

‘I? I do not think so Louisa. Not really.’

‘Oh,’ returned Louisa, giving her a strange little look. ‘Well, I do.’

Puckle set out soon after dawn. Nobody took any special notice. You didn’t ask where Puckle was going. He was a man of secrets.

Only a handful of the men who worked at Buckler’s Hard actually lived there; and although there was a village just outside the gateway to Beaulieu Abbey, not many of the labourers and carpenters lodged there either, since neither the owners of Beaulieu nor the villagers wanted them.

The reason was simple. If a labourer lived in Beaulieu parish and fell sick or grew old, he might become a charge on the Poor Rate, which meant that the parish, by law, would have to support him, his widow, possibly even his children. Naturally, therefore, all over England, parishes did their best to unload their poor upon their neighbours, sometimes going to great trouble to discover the distant birthplace of some poor person, for instance, in order that the charges could be levied there.

The solution for the Buckler’s Hard workers had consisted of a new settlement. Down the western boundary of the Beaulieu estate, along the edge of the open heath, a straggle of cottages had sprung up. Technically they had no right to be there, for each plot was actually an encroachment upon the king’s forest, but although there had been some talk of their removal, nothing had been done. As the settlement lay along the estate’s boundary, it was known as Beaulieu Rails, although sometimes called East Boldre. It was only two miles or so from the shipyard, so the workers had no further to walk than if they’d lived at Beaulieu village.

But they were off the parish.

Puckle had lived at Beaulieu Rails for many years, but would still go over to the western side of the Forest once in a while, where most of his relations lived, so when he set out across the heath that Sunday morning his neighbours assumed he was going there. They might have been surprised, therefore, when, across the heath, he instead made his way northwards through the woods, past Lyndhurst and even Minstead. It was mid-morning when he came along the edge of the trees to the meeting place, which he had selected both for its distance from his home and because, from there, it would be easy to retire into the deeper seclusion of the woods nearby. As he drew close, he noted with satisfaction that the place was deserted.

The Rufus tree was gone. Its hollowed old hulk had finally rotted down into a stump which had disintegrated half a century earlier. In its place, however, a stone had been erected to commemorate the historic site. For although its miraculous winter greening was still remembered by some, it was the tree’s false reputation, as the site of King William Rufus’s death, that was now enshrined in stone. Nor was this all: even Purkiss and his cart had now become a matter of historical record.

At the stone, Puckle stopped and looked around. A short distance away stood the old tree’s two sons. One had been pollarded, the other had not. Puckle’s expert eye took in both at once. The pollard oak would not make good ship’s timber, for the pollarding process made for weaker joints; but the other, he noticed, had been marked for felling any time. And it was from behind this tree that a figure now emerged, to whom he nodded.

Grockleton was on time.

He walked over and joined the Customs man under the oak, where they stood together. Puckle glanced around again.

‘We are alone,’ said Grockleton. ‘I’ve been watching.’

‘That’s all right, then.’

Grockleton waited a moment, to see if the Forest man was going to open the conversation; but as it seemed not, he began: ‘You think you can help me?’

‘Maybe.’

‘How?’

‘I might tell you things.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘I has my reasons.’

The scene Grockleton had witnessed was still vivid in his mind. What this fellow had done to annoy the landlord of the Angel Inn he had not discovered, but it had clearly been more than a question of brawling or drunkenness. Indeed, Puckle had appeared to be quite cool and sober at the time. But whatever it was that had caused Isaac Seagull to drag him to the entrance of the Angel and, quite literally, kick him into the High Street in front of him, Grockleton would never forget the look this fellow had given Seagull as he picked himself up. It wasn’t drunken anger: it was pure, undying hatred. Customs officer although he was, Grockleton had never received a look like that. He hoped he never did.

Shortly afterwards he had ridden after the Forest man as he went home and, passing him on a deserted stretch of the lane, remarked quietly that he would pay well if there was anything Puckle ever wished to tell him. It was just a hunch, of course, but it was the job of a Customs officer to make such approaches.

He hadn’t really expected anything to come of it; but two days later Puckle had made contact. And now they were talking.

‘What sort of things could you tell me? Things about Isaac Seagull?’

He couldn’t be sure that the landlord of the Angel was actively involved in the smuggling. Normally speaking, you could assume that the landlord of any inn received contraband, but he had long suspected that Seagull might be doing far more.

‘He’s a devil,’ Puckle said bitterly.

‘I had the impression you quarrelled.’

‘We have.’ Puckle paused. ‘’Tain’t only that, though.’ He looked down. ‘You heard about when they raided Ambrose Hole a few years back?’

‘Of course.’ Although the raid on the gang of highway-men had taken place just before his arrival in Lymington, Grockleton could not fail to be aware of it.

The other man now spat with disgust. ‘Two of them taken was my family. An’ you know who gave them away? Isaac damned Seagull. He knows I know, too.’ This was cause for hatred indeed. Grockleton listened carefully. ‘He treats me like a dog all the same,’ Puckle continued with heartfelt bitterness, ‘because he reckons I’m afraid of him.’

‘Are you afraid of him?’

Puckle said nothing, as though unwilling to admit it. His gnarled face reminded Grockleton of a stunted oak, just as Seagull’s made him think of a jaunty lugger, with a sail run up before the breeze.

‘Yes,’ the forest man said quietly at last, ‘I fear him.’ And then, looking straight at Grockleton: ‘So should any man.’

Grockleton understood. Violence between the smugglers and the Customs men was rare, but it could happen. Once or twice, if he had given them too much trouble, a riding officer might get a knock on the door and a bullet in the head. His claw-like hand clenched, but he gave no other sign. He was quite a brave man.

‘So what do you want?’ Puckle asked.

‘To intercept a big run. On shore. What else?’

‘You haven’t the men to do it.’

‘That’s my business.’

Puckle looked thoughtful. ‘You’d have to pay me a lot of money,’ he said.

‘A share of what we take.’ They both knew this could be a small fortune.

‘You’d take Isaac Seagull?’

‘So long as he’s there, yes.’

‘Kill him,’ Puckle said quietly.

‘They’d have to shoot at us.’

‘They will. I’ll need money before. Plenty. And a fast horse.’ Seeing Grockleton look doubtful he continued: ‘What d’you think they’ll do to me if they find out?’

‘They might not.’

‘They would. I’ll have to leave the Forest. Go away. A long way.’

Grockleton tried to imagine Puckle outside the Forest. It wasn’t easy. People did leave, of course. Not often, but it happened. And with plenty of money … He tried to imagine Puckle with money and couldn’t do that either, but then he sighed to himself. People changed when they acquired wealth, even a man like this. Who knew what he would become with money in some other place? Puckle was mysterious. ‘Fifty pounds,’ he said. ‘The rest later. We can arrange for you to collect your share in Winchester, London, wherever you like.’

He saw Puckle react, then try to hide it. The sum had impressed him. Good.

‘Won’t be for a while, yet,’ Puckle said. ‘You know that.’

Grockleton nodded. The big smuggling runs were usually done in winter when the nights were long.

‘One thing,’ the Forest man went on, looking thoughtful. ‘I’d need a way of getting word to you. Can’t be seen near you myself.’

‘I know. I’ve thought about that already. I may have a solution.’

‘Oh. What’s that, then?’

‘A boy,’ said Grockleton.

It was some weeks before Mr Martell came to Lymington, but when he did, he chose his time carefully.

On a fine summer morning he rode down the turnpike into the town. He was feeling optimistic. He had preferred to ride ahead, leaving his manservant to follow in the chaise with his dressing case and portmanteau. As he rode past the turnpike’s tollgate at the entrance to the borough, he realized that he had never been here before.

He had no doubt that he would have a pleasant visit and an interesting one, too. He liked young Edward Totton. They might not have a lot in common, but he had always liked the younger man’s cheerful spirit and the fact that Totton wasn’t frightened of him, which many people were. He actually quite enjoyed his stern reputation: it protected him from those who would have liked to take advantage of him; but it amused him when a young fellow like Totton refused to be abashed. Besides, in this case it was actually he who was intending to make use of Edward Totton.

Mr Wyndham Martell was in an enviable position: he didn’t have to please anyone. Master of a large estate, heir to another, a graduate of Oxford, of good character: in the society in which he lived there was no man, unless such a person were impertinent, to find fault with him. If he was courteous – and in his somewhat reserved way he was – this was because he would have despised himself for being anything else. The only danger to his enviable estate might have been if he were a gambler or a debauchee and Martell, whose natural inclinations were towards the pleasures of the intellect, was far too proud to be either. He had enough personal vanity to present himself well; he had concluded, quite reasonably, that for a man in his position to be without vanity would be an affectation. He intended, for himself and for his family name, to make a figure in the world and he could afford to do it on his own terms. That is to say, he had decided to enter public life as that phenomenon, so rare in the politics of any age, an independent man who cannot be bought. And if this should be adduced as evidence that his pride was really quite above the usual, why then, so it must have been.

His real reason for coming to see young Edward Totton, besides his kindly feelings towards the young man, was that Lymington, which lay conveniently between his two estates, returned two Members of Parliament.

‘And I think that at the next election’, he had informed his father, ‘I might like to be one of them.’

Why had the modest borough of Lymington two Members of Parliament? The short answer was that good Queen Bess had granted them a few years before the Armada when she wanted some extra political support. Did two Members for such a small place seem excessive nowadays? Not very, when you considered that Old Sarum, the so-called pocket borough on the deserted castle hill above Salisbury, returned two Members – and had practically no inhabitants at all.

The system of elections evolved in the borough of Lymington was actually typical of many of England’s towns in that Age of Reason and, it must be said, it had the merits of safety, convenience and economy. Indeed, its electors considered it a model for all times and places.

Elections in some boroughs, alas, were not so well managed. Scurrilous pamphlets about the candidates provoked bad feeling. There was expense, for electors had to be bribed; there was trouble, when electors for another candidate had to be made drunk and then locked up; there could be still more trouble if they got out. Even a limited democracy, it was agreed by all parties, was a dangerous thing and nothing showed it more clearly than the drunken brawling of an election. They ordered this matter better, however, in Lymington.

The two Members of Parliament were chosen by the town’s burgesses, of whom there were about forty; and the burgesses, in theory anyway, had been elected by the modest tradesmen and other obliging freeholders of the borough. Who were elected to the position of burgess? Sound men, worthy men, trustworthy men: friends of the mayor or whoever had the responsibility of running the town. Quite often the burgesses of Lymington actually lived there; but the quest for good men might lead much further afield. Twenty years ago when Burrard, as mayor, had decided to create thirty-nine new burgesses, he had only chosen three from the town itself; his search for other loyal men had taken him all over England. Why, he had even gone to the trouble of finding one gentleman who lived in Jamaica!

There were hardly ever disputes between the burgesses as to which Members they should elect. Until twenty years before, the Burrards had shared the control of the borough with the Duke of Bolton, who had large interests in the county, and there had been a slight disagreement once over whether the duke’s friend Mr Morant should or should not be given a seat at one election. But since then the duke had ceded the borough entirely to Burrard, so that even that possibility for disagreement had happily vanished.

But how were things managed, it might be asked, when an election came? How were the burgesses who might live two hundred miles away – let alone the good gentleman in Jamaica – to get to Lymington to record their votes? Even this had been taken care of, by a simple expedient. Elections were not contested. There were no rival candidates. If there were but two gentlemen standing for the two seats available, then the trouble and expense of an election poll were clearly superfluous. All that was necessary was for a proposer and seconder to appear before the mayor upon the appointed day and the thing was done. So easy were these arrangements that it was agreed that there was no need even for the candidates themselves to appear, thereby saving them what might have been a tiresome journey.

Thus, in the eighteenth century, were the Members for Lymington chosen. Whether a different method would have produced better representatives cannot be known; but this at least is certain: the burgesses, and the Burrards, were entirely satisfied.

Martell’s father would have preferred his son to stand for a county seat as these tended to be Tory, whereas Lymington, like most trading towns, was solidly for the Whig party. Traditionally the Tory party was for the king, the Whig for the post-1688 Parliament which, although loyal, believed in keeping the royal power in check. Country squires were often Tory, merchants usually Whig. But these differences were not always real. Many of the greatest landowners were Whigs; often as not, one’s party depended upon family alliances. Even the king would sometimes prefer a Whig leader to a Tory. The interests and beliefs of Sir Harry Burrard, baronet, and the gentlemen burgesses of Lymington were unlikely to differ from aristocratic Mr Martell’s in any significant way.

Indeed, there were only two things about Mr Martell’s behaviour this morning that would have struck his contemporaries as odd. If Martell wanted a Lymington seat, why the devil go there when he could easily write to Burrard or meet him in London? And stranger still, why was Martell deliberately going to Lymington when he knew – for he had made careful enquiries – that the baronet would be away?

To ask such questions, however, was not to know Wyndham Martell.

He was always thorough. At Oxford, unlike many young bloods, he had chosen to work quite hard. He had already made the most careful study of the estate he had been left and started a series of improvements. Had he been a clergyman, no matter how high his social position, he would certainly have paid attention to the welfare of every parishioner. So if he thought of applying for a Lymington seat, he meant first, like a good general, to reconnoitre the place thoroughly.

Of course, he knew it was possible that Sir Harry Burrard might not care for such intrusive behaviour. There was a well-known case where a borough patron, afraid that a candidate might charm his own burgesses away from him, had only agreed to give him the seat on the condition, set out in writing, that once elected the said Member swore never to set foot in the constituency he represented. Even in the eighteenth century this was thought a trifle eccentric. But without going so far as this, Burrard might not approve of his sniffing around his borough, so he had decided to do it discreetly by visiting young Totton. One thing was sure though, by the end of a week he’d know a good deal about it and make up his own mind whether, and upon what terms, he wished to take the business further.

In the meantime, apart from Edward, there were two pleasant young women to pass the time with. Louisa Totton was a good-looking, lively girl. As for Miss Albion, while not quite so pretty, he thought her agreeable.

‘You must admit,’ Edward Totton remarked quietly to his sister, as they waited for their guest to emerge from the house, ‘I bring you only the best.’

Mr Wyndham Martell was the third eligible bachelor he had brought to the house in the space of a year. One had been a young fellow – too young, really, but heir to a large estate – who was still at Oxford with him. Another young blood he had brought with the promise of attending the local races had shown a strong interest in Louisa – so strong that when he got a little drunk she had to fight him off and he was asked to leave. Still, even these encounters had added to her small store of knowledge of human nature and the outside world; and her attitude to these encounters – although she would not have used such words – might best be expressed as: keep them coming.

Martell, however, was quite another story. Martell, as her brother put it, was ‘serious business’. He supposed she might be rather afraid of the stern landowner.

‘I’ve watched him,’ she replied. ‘He’s proud – after all, he has so much to be proud about. But he likes to be amused.’

‘So do you mean to amuse him?’

‘No,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But I shall let him suppose that I might.’ She glanced at the door of the house. ‘Here he comes.’

Martell was in an excellent humour. He had not been quite sure what the Tottons’ household would be like, for he had never stayed with a member of the provincial merchant class before. So far he had been agreeably surprised. The house was a handsome Georgian place with a sweep of drive and a view to the sea. It was about the size of a good rectory, the sort of home that might belong to the younger brother of the landowner, an admiral, or someone of that sort. Mrs Totton turned out to be a handsome woman of his own class, related to several families he knew. As for Mr Totton the merchant, they had only had time to speak a few words, but he seemed both sensible and easy, entirely a gentleman. If young Edward Totton had any idea that his position in society was lacking in some way, Martell considered, he should be told not to be silly, and not to insult his parents.

‘We’ll make a tour of the town first,’ said Edward as Wyndham Martell joined them. And it being a fine day, they decided to walk.

They made a leisurely progress into Lymington and down the High Street. Martell admired the shops – Swateridge the watchmakers, Sheppard the gunsmith, Wheeler’s china store – and the numerous signs of the place’s prosperous gentility. He insisted on spending some time in the bookseller’s. He noted the brass plate on the fashionable doctor’s house and that Mr St Barbe the merchant had even started a High Street bank. He learned that the postal service came down the swift turnpike road from London four days a week, arriving at the Angel Inn; as did the diligence, as the stage coach was called, from Southampton – that fifteen-mile journey being covered in as little as two and a half hours. He was impressed.

They went down to the quay, where there were several small vessels tied up, then round by the salterns before returning to the house with a good appetite for dinner.

Mr Totton and his wife kept an excellent table. The meal began with a light pea soup and bread, followed by a fish course; this was then removed to make way for the first main course, which consisted of dishes of sirloin of beef, turkey in prune sauce, stewed venison and fried celery. The men drank claret; Louisa, who usually drank currant wine at home, joined her mother today with champagne.

The conversation was light and sociable. Mrs Totton spoke of the ancient forest deer, the king’s recent visit, of places he should see and told stories about them. Louisa, her large eyes, it seemed to Martell, hinting at reserves of humour behind her demure countenance, gave a good account of some of the plays to be seen at the playhouse and how they were acted.

Edward told him about the racecourse that was now laid out above Lyndhurst. ‘And we don’t only race horses, Martell,’ he remarked. One amusing local gentleman, it seemed, had a racing ox which he rode himself and challenged all comers to compete in a similar manner.

By the time the second course was served – potato pudding, anchovy toast, syllabubs, jugged pigeon and tarts – Martell could reasonably conclude that the seaside town below the ancient forest was probably one of the most pleasant to represent in all England.

The tablecloth had been removed, however, the jellies, nuts, pyramids of sweetmeats and plates of cheese set out, port appeared for the men and cherry brandy for the ladies, before Martell remembered to ask after Fanny Albion.

‘Poor, dear Fanny,’ cried Louisa. ‘She has, I declare, the disposition of a saint.’

There was, it seemed, small likelihood of her appearing. ‘Although you may be sure’, said Edward, ‘that we shall try to coax her out.’ Her aunt Adelaide’s lifelong friend having fallen sick in Winchester, the intrepid old lady had insisted upon getting in her carriage and going over to stay there, despite her own advanced age, leaving Fanny and Mrs Pride in charge of old Mr Albion. Before leaving, she had given her brother strict instructions not to be ill until she came back – instructions he had already disregarded. And if the nature of his present malady remained unclear, this was only because it was too advanced, he told them, to be identified. So Fanny was stuck at home with him and didn’t feel she could get out.

‘Perhaps we should call upon your cousin,’ Martell suggested.

‘I’ll suggest it,’ said Edward, ‘but I think she’ll say no.’

Shortly after this the ladies retired and Martell was able, over the port, to question Mr Totton about the business of the town. As he had expected, Totton was thoroughly well-informed.

‘Salt, of course, has been one of our main trades here for centuries. As in other towns, you’ll find that most of the larger merchants have several businesses and salt is usually one of them. St Barbe, for instance, deals in groceries, salt and coal. The coal, by the way, fuels the furnaces in the salterns. Salt, remember, is not only used to preserve fish and meat; it’s a medicine against scurvy – vital for the Navy, therefore – it’s used in curing leather, as a flux in glass–making and metal smelting, a glaze in pottery.’

‘There are cheaper ways of making salt than from the sea, I believe.’

‘Yes. In the long run Lymington’s salterns will be threatened. But that’s a long way off yet.’

‘You export timber?’

‘Some. Less than before. The Navy and other shipbuilding seems to take most of our local supplies. The port is busy, though. Coal comes in from Newcastle. There are various merchantmen sailing to London, Hamburg, Waterford and Cork in Ireland, even Jamaica.’

‘And the local industries?’

‘Apart from those mentioned, most of the parishes have clay, so there are a number of brickworks. That’s why you’ll find some handsome brick barns in the area nowadays. Brockenhurst’s got the biggest works. Then there’s a rope factory at Beaulieu Abbey. Rope for the Navy, of course. Some of the Forest people drift into Southampton too. Apart from the port, there are some very big coachbuilding works there now.’

‘But our greatest hope for the future’, Edward interposed with a smile, ‘lies in quite another direction. We are going to become a fashionable resort, a second Bath.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Totton laughed. ‘If Mrs Grockleton has her way. You have not met Mrs Grockleton yet, Mr Martell?’

Martell confessed that he hadn’t.

‘We are going to take tea with her,’ Edward chuckled. ‘Tomorrow.’

The next morning was occupied by a visit to Hurst Castle. Although the day was bright, a fresh breeze was coming across Pennington Marshes, causing the little windpumps by the salterns to click loudly. Mrs Beeston’s bathing house, which was situated near one of the windpumps by the beach, was deserted. In the channel between the fortress and the Isle of Wight the running waves were flecked with foam, while out in the sea beyond the waters were churning green. There was a rich, salty smell in the air. Louisa, her face a little flushed and wet with spray, looked uncommonly well as the wind blew her dark hair; and Martell, too, was conscious of his own strong heartbeat as they walked rapidly, laughing together, over the wild coastal marshes.

They were halfway back when they met the count. He was walking alone, looking sad.

Martell had already remarked upon the presence of French troops in the town and Edward had explained about them. He introduced the count to Martell, who addressed him in excellent French, and it was not long before the Frenchman, discovering a fellow aristocrat, was anxious to make a friend.

‘You are one of us,’ he cried, taking Martell’s hand in both of his. ‘How charming that we should have found each other in this wild place.’ Although whether this referred to the marsh or to Lymington was not quite clear. He asked about Martell’s estate, his Norman ancestry, insisted that they were related, therefore, through the line of Martell-St Cyr – of which Martell blandly assured him he was entirely unaware – and enquired whether he liked to hunt, receiving an affirmative.

‘At home we hunt boar,’ he said wistfully. ‘I wish, my friend, that I could invite you to join us, but unfortunately if I go home at present’ – he gave a shrug – ‘they will cut off my head. Have you fishing also, perhaps?’ Martell assured him that he had some excellent fishing. ‘I like to fish,’ said the count.

As this elicited only a polite bow and a brief silence, Edward cut in to inform the Frenchman that they were going to take tea with Mrs Grockleton and that they must return home.

‘A remarkable woman,’ the count replied. ‘I must bid you au revoir, then, my dear friend,’ he said to Martell. ‘I love to fish,’ he added hopefully; but his English friends were moving on and so he continued, sadly, towards the windpumps by the sea.

‘As you see, Mr Martell,’ said Mrs Grockleton at three o’clock that afternoon as, brushed and sedately dressed, they took tea in her drawing room, ‘there are great possibilities for Lymington.’

Mr Martell assured her that he found the town admirable.

‘Oh, Mr Martell, you are too obliging, I’m sure. There is so much to be done.’

‘No doubt, Madam, you will transform the landscape just as Capability Brown would make a park.’

‘I, Sir?’ She almost blushed at what she took to be flattery. ‘I can do nothing, although I hope I may encourage. It is the situation of the place, and its residents, and its royal patrons who will effect the transformation. And it will come. I think I see it clearly.’

‘The sea is bracing, Madam,’ said Martell, noncommittally.

‘The sea? To be sure the sea is bracing,’ cried Mrs Grockleton. ‘But have you seen those ugly windpumps, those furnaces, those salterns? They will have to go, Mr Martell. Would any person of fashion wish to bathe under the gaze of a windpump?’

The question seemed unanswerable; but considering that the leading merchants of the town, including his hosts, were in the salt trade, Martell felt bound to disagree. ‘Perhaps a suitable bathing place may still be found,’ he suggested.

Whether Mrs Grockleton would have allowed this he did not learn since at this moment the master of the house appeared.

Martell had been told what to expect in Samuel Grockleton and he saw that Edward’s description had been accurate; although to insist upon referring to the Customs officer as ‘The Claw’ was, perhaps, a little cruel. He had no sooner sat down and accepted his wife’s offer of tea when the maid who was assisting Mrs Grockleton tripped and upset the cup of hot tea on his leg.

‘Alack-a-day!’ cried Mrs Grockleton. ‘You have scalded my poor husband. Oh, Mr Grockleton.’ But that gentleman, though he winced, got up and, with admirable presence of mind, took a vase of flowers from a table and poured the cold water over his leg. ‘What are you about, my dear husband?’ she demanded a little crossly now.

‘Cooling the scald,’ he replied grimly and sat down again. ‘I may as well have that walnut cake, Mrs Grockleton,’ he now observed.

Martell, who rather admired this blunt good sense, decided to engage his host in conversation at once, so asked him frankly if he considered the trade in smuggling to be large in the Forest.

‘The same as Dorset, Sir,’ the Customs Officer replied.

Since Martell knew perfectly well that from Sarum westwards, across the whole of Dorset and the West Country, there was probably not a single bottle of brandy on which duty had been paid, he contented himself with a nod of the head. ‘Can the trade ever be stopped?’ he enquired.

‘On land, I should say not,’ Grockleton answered. ‘For the simple reason that it would take too many officers. But one day it can and will be severely limited by sea patrols. As in all our nation’s affairs, Sir, the sea is the key. Our land forces are generally of small use.’

‘Ships to intercept the goods at sea? They’d have to be swift, and well armed.’

‘And well manned, Sir, too.’

‘You’d use naval captains?’

‘No, Sir. Retired smugglers.’

‘Brigands in royal service?’

‘By all means. It always worked before. Sir Francis Drake and his like in the days of good Queen Bess, Sir, were all pirates.’

‘Mr Grockleton, fie,’ cried his wife. ‘What are you saying?’

‘No more than the truth,’ he replied drily. ‘You will all forgive me, now,’ he observed, getting up, ‘if I go to change,’ and with a bow he was gone.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Grockleton, obviously disappointed by her husband. ‘What will you think of us, Mr Martell?’

Rather than answer, Martell calmly observed that he understood her academy had enjoyed a growing success.

‘Why indeed, Mr Martell, I truly think it has. Tell Mr Martell, Louisa, about our little academy.’

So turning her large eyes in his direction, Louisa gave some account of the art classes and the other scholastic attainments of the academy in a way that neither made light of them nor took them too seriously.

‘In particular,’ Mrs Grockleton added, ‘I myself instruct the girls in French. I make them read the finest authors, too, I assure you. Last year we read …’ Her mind failed to supply the name.

‘Racine?’ offered Louisa.

‘Racine, to be sure, Racine it was,’ and she beamed at her erstwhile pupil for her cleverness. ‘You speak French perfectly, no doubt, Mr Martell?’

It was at this moment that Martell decided he’d really had enough of Mrs Grockleton. He looked at her blankly for a moment.

‘Vous parlez français, Mr Martell? You speak French?’

‘I, Madam? Not a word.’

‘Well, you greatly astonish me. In polite society … Did Edward not say you spoke with the count?’

‘Indeed, Madam. But not in French. We spoke in Latin.’

‘Latin?’

‘Certainly. You teach the young ladies to speak Latin I am sure.’

‘Why no, Mr Martell, I do not.’

‘I am sorry to hear it. In the politest circles … The horrors of the Revolution, Mrs Grockleton, have given many an aversion to the language. In my opinion it will soon be Latin, and Latin alone, that is spoken in the courts of Europe. As it was formerly,’ he added with a scholarly air.

‘Well.’ Mrs Grockleton, for once, looked flummoxed. ‘I had not supposed …’ she began. And then, gradually, a light dawned in her broad face. She raised a finger. ‘Methinks, Mr Martell,’ she said with a knowing smile, ‘methinks you are teasing me.’

‘I, Madam?’

‘Methinks.’ There was just a hint of warning in her eyes now, enough to make even the aristocrat realize that her academy was not built without some ruthless cunning on her part. ‘Methinks that I am mocked.’

Unless he wanted enemies in Lymington it was time to bail out fast. ‘I confess’, he said with a smile, ‘that I speak some French, but not enough, I suspect, Madam, to impress you; so I hardly like to admit it. As for my jest about Latin.’ He looked at her seriously now. ‘After the horrors we have just seen in Paris, I do indeed wonder if French will continue as the chosen language of society.’

This seemed to pass. Mrs Grockleton made noises about the fate of the French aristocracy that almost made it sound as though she were one of them. It was agreed that the sooner the gallant count and his loyal troops in Lymington could return to France and restore order the better.

From here on, Mrs Grockleton was back in her element. The necessity for a new theatre, new Assembly Rooms and very likely new citizens were all warmly agreed to, so that she felt no hesitation in announcing, as they were about to leave: ‘I am intending to give a ball in the Assembly Rooms before long. I do hope, Mr Martell, that you will not disappoint us by refusing your company.’

And given all that had passed, Martell found it difficult not to respond that, if he were anywhere in the vicinity he would be delighted to attend – a form of words that normally would have committed him to nothing, were it not for the fact that he had a curious, uncomfortable feeling that, somehow, she would contrive things so that he was there.

‘Well,’ whispered Edward, as soon as they were out in the street, ‘what did you think of her?’

‘Give me “The Claw” any day,’ murmured Martell.

No further mention had been made of Fanny Albion, nor was it at dinner that evening.

The next day in the morning they took the carriage to call upon Mr Gilpin, who received them in the Boldre vicarage very cordially. They found him in his library, amusing himself by giving mathematical problems to a curly-haired boy from his parish school who, he informed them, was named Nathaniel Furzey.

The vicar was happy to show Martell his library, which had some fine volumes in it, and to let them see some of the recent sketches he had done of New Forest scenes.

‘From time to time I have a small auction of them,’ he explained to Martell, ‘and men like Sir Harry Burrard pay foolish prices for them because they know the money goes to endow the school and some other charities with which I concern myself. The life of a clergyman’ – he gave Martell a sidelong look – ‘is quite rewarding.’

There was no question that Mr Gilpin’s vicarage, which was three storeys tall and capacious, was a very handsome residence for any gentleman, and from the gardens behind he could display an admirable view across to the Isle of Wight. The breeze of the day before had remained about the same, but banks of grey clouds were starting to pass over the Solent water now which, with their silver linings, gave the scene an atmospheric heaviness, a contrast of shafts of light and areas of darkness that was certainly picturesque. It was as they were surveying this natural picture that Martell happened to ask after Fanny.

‘She is at Albion House now,’ Gilpin remarked. ‘Which reminds me’, he added thoughtfully, ‘that I have something to tell her. But that can wait.’ He looked at Edward. ‘Were you intending to call on her?’

Edward, after only a second’s hesitation, said that they were uncertain whether she would wish it at present.

Gilpin sighed. ‘I should think she must be lonely now,’ he remarked. Then, calling the curly-haired boy to him: ‘Nathaniel, you know the way to Albion House. Run up there and enquire, from me, whether Miss Albion will receive Mr Martell and her cousins.’

Some refreshments were brought and, answering numerous questions put to him about the area, he entertained them very well for something more than half an hour, when young Nathaniel returned.

‘I am to say yes, Sir,’ he reported.

It was not quite what he had expected. He could not say exactly why: perhaps it was the closeness of the trees as they turned in at the gate from the lane; or possibly it was the advancing grey clouds which, just as they had come down from old Boldre church, passed with their shining edges overhead, drawing behind them a shadow. All Martell knew was that, as the carriage approached the corner of the narrow drive, the sky above was sunless, and he felt strangely dull and ill at ease.

Then they turned the corner and came in sight of Albion House.

It was only the light, he told himself; it was only the grey glow pressing through the clouds that made the house so sombre. How old it seemed with its bare gables; how closely the green circle around it was hemmed in by the trees. Its brick skin was dark as a bloodstain. Its wrinkled roof told of the old Tudor skeleton of timbers within. The windows stared out so blankly that you might have supposed the place was empty and dwelt in now only by the spirits who would remain there year by year as the house fell slowly into ruin, until it crumbled away so that even their habitation was gone.

They came to the entrance. A tall woman was standing at the door. ‘Mrs Pride, the housekeeper,’ said Edward quietly. There was, Martell thought, a guarded, anxious look in her eyes.

The last few days had not been easy for Fanny. Her father had been very poorly. Several times he had been petulant; once, which was unusual, he had even had a fit of temper. She had sat with him most of the time in his room the day before and today, although he had taken some tea and some broth, and a glass of claret, it seemed unlikely that he would leave the big wing chair beside his bed where he was sitting, wrapped in a shawl.

So it had come as a shock to her when Mrs Pride had come to tell her, half an hour ago, that the young Tottons and Mr Martell were about to call.

‘But we are not in a state to receive them,’ she cried. ‘As for Father … Oh, Mrs Pride, you should have asked me first. You should not have told them to come.’ But once Mrs Pride had apologized and said she supposed Miss Albion would have wished it, there was nothing to be done. ‘We shall have to make the best of it,’ she said.

Yet to her great surprise, when she went to tell her father about the unwanted visit and promised to send them all away as soon as she decently could, old Mr Albion seemed to make a miraculous recovery. Although somewhat querulous, he insisted that she bring him a looking-glass and a clean cravat, scissors, hairbrush, pomade. In no time he had everybody running in every direction so that it was all Fanny could do to slip away and make a few small preparations in her own appearance.

She was standing on the staircase looking down into the hall as they came through the door with the grey daylight behind them. Edward entered first, then Louisa and Mr Martell just behind her. They paused for a moment before they noticed her. Edward looked around and, just before the big door was closed behind them, Louisa half turned to Mr Martell to say something and she saw her lightly touch his arm.

How pale she looked in the shadows of the staircase, Martell thought, as Fanny advanced towards them. In her long dress she seemed like some ghostly figure in a drama from antiquity. He saw at once the signs of strain in her face.

She led them quietly into the old panelled parlour, apologized for the fact that she was not better prepared to greet them, and asked politely after his health and his family. There seemed to be a slight constraint in her manner as she did so, however, and Martell wondered if perhaps she would have preferred it if he had not come.

However, they made polite conversation; Louisa gave a lively account of their tea with Mrs Grockleton, which brought a smile, if a rather weak one, to her face. And when Louisa produced a perfect imitation of Mr Grockleton pouring the vase of water over himself and then replacing the flowers, Fanny too joined in their laughter.

‘You could go on the stage, Miss Totton,’ Martell declared with an amused shake of the head and a warm glance in her direction. ‘Your cousin, Miss Albion,’ he observed, ‘is a most amusing companion.’

‘I am delighted you have discovered it,’ said Fanny, but she looked tired.

The light-hearted conversation came to a sudden end, however, with the entrance into the room of old Mr Albion. With one hand he leaned on a silver-topped stick; the other arm was supported by Mrs Pride. His silk breeches and waistcoat and cravat were in perfect order; his snow-white hair was neatly brushed; his several days’ growth of beard was not shaved but trimmed close. His eyes, old though they might be, were the most startling blue that Martell had ever seen. His coat hung loosely; he was thin and frail; but as he moved slowly across the room to an upright chair, he seemed to have discovered an almost fierce old dignity with which to meet his guests.

As is often done when a very aged person is in a room, people took turns to come and speak to him. Martell, as the visitor, went first. After the usual compliments, which were well enough received, he remarked that they had all enjoyed his daughter’s company in Oxford that spring. It was hard to be sure, but this seemed to please the old man less. Martell then remarked that he was come recently from Dorset and was planning to proceed to Kent, since this sort of geographical information usually opened up a conversational response of some kind.

‘Dorset?’ Mr Albion enquired, then looked thoughtful. ‘I’m afraid’, he confessed regretfully, ‘I never liked it much.’

‘Too many long hills, Sir?’ Martell offered.

‘I never leave here now.’

‘I understand you travelled to America,’ Martell attempted, still in hope.

The old blue eyes looked up at him sharply. ‘Yes. That’s right.’ Mr Albion now appeared to be considering something and Martell supposed he might be about to make some reflection upon the subject. But after a few moments it seemed that if he had been going to, he had thought better of it, for his eyes wandered to Louisa instead and, raising his silver-topped stick he pointed to her. ‘Very pretty, isn’t she?’

‘Indeed, Sir.’

Mr Albion seemed rather to have lost interest in Martell now for he pointed at Louisa again. ‘You’re looking very pretty today,’ he addressed her.

She bobbed a curtsy and, smiling, took this as a cue to come to his side, where she knelt down very charmingly by his arm.

‘Are you comfortable down there?’ the old man asked.

‘I’m always comfortable’, she said, ‘when I come to talk to you.’

It being plain that the old man had no further use for his company, Martell withdrew while Fanny went to make sure there was nothing her father needed.

‘I feel sorry for Miss Albion,’ he murmured to Edward. ‘Where did you intend we should go tomorrow?’

‘To Beaulieu, if the weather’s fine,’ said Edward.

‘Could we not ask your cousin to accompany us?’ Martell suggested. ‘It must be grim for her being in this house with her father all the time.’

Edward agreed and thought the plan a good one. ‘I shall do my best,’ he promised.

After this, Fanny returned and Martell had the opportunity to talk to her for several minutes. She seemed to recover her former cheerfulness somewhat and they enjoyed a little of the pleasant conversational intimacy they had experienced at Oxford, but as well as appearing rather older, there was, he thought, a hint of sadness, even tragedy in her person, now that he saw her in the setting of her home. She must get away from here, he decided. Someone must save her from this. But he could quite see that such an escape would not be easy. Perhaps the visit to Beaulieu might raise her spirits. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Edward approaching the old man. Young Totton’s affable manner, he supposed, would do the trick nicely.

‘I think, Sir,’ Edward addressed Mr Albion with a charming smile, ‘that Louisa and I shall beg you, if the weather is fine, to let us steal our cousin Fanny from you for an hour or two tomorrow.’

‘Oh?’ Mr Albion looked up quite sharply. ‘What for?’

‘We mean to visit Beaulieu.’

For a second, not even that, a tiny shadow might have appeared on Louisa’s face, but in an instant it was gone. ‘Oh, yes!’ she cried. ‘Do let Fanny join us. We shall not, I’m sure,’ she declared, ‘be gone for more than half the day.’ And she gave Mr Albion a smile that really should have melted him, had he not looked away.

‘Beaulieu?’ They might have announced an intention to travel up to Scotland. ‘Beaulieu? That’s a long way.’

No one quite liked to point out that it was scarcely more than four miles from where they were, but Edward, to his credit and with a pleasant laugh, remarked: ‘Scarcely further than we have come to see you today. We’ll be there and back in no time.’

Mr Albion looked doubtful. ‘With my sister away and in my state of health …’ He shook his head, frowning. ‘There’s no one else to take care of matters …’

‘You have Mrs Pride, Sir,’ said Edward.

But this interference in his domestic arrangements did not suit Mr Albion at all. ‘Mrs Pride has nothing to do with it,’ he snapped.

‘I think’, Fanny interposed gently, not wanting to see her father upset, ‘that it would be better, Edward, if I remained here.’

‘There,’ Mr Albion said crossly, yet with a triumphant gleam in his eye. ‘She doesn’t even want to go.’

This was so outrageous that Martell, who was not used to being crossed himself, could scarcely remain in passive silence. ‘You will permit me to observe, Sir,’ he said quietly but firmly, ‘that a brief excursion might benefit Miss Albion.’

Had this intervention done any good? For a second or two, as Mr Albion sat, his head momentarily sunk down in his cravat, in total silence, it was impossible to tell. But then, suddenly, it became all too clear. The old man’s head shot up on its stalk so that he suddenly looked like an enraged old turkey. The neck might be withered but the startling blue eyes were blazing. ‘And you will permit me to observe, Sir,’ he shouted, ‘that my daughter’s health is none of your concern. I am not aware, Sir, that the arrangement of this house has passed into your hands. To the best of my knowledge, Sir’ – and now he raised his silver-topped stick and drove it down into the floor with all his force, to accentuate each word – ‘I – am – still – master – of – this – house!’

‘I had no doubt of it, Sir,’ answered Martell, flushing, ‘and I had no wish to offend you, Sir, but merely …’

Mr Albion, however, was no longer of a mind to listen. He was white with rage. ‘You do offend me. And you will oblige me, Sir’ – he spat out the words with venom – ‘if you make your observations in some other place. You will oblige me, Sir’ – he seemed to be struggling to rise from his chair now, grasping the arm with one hand and the stick with the other – ‘if you will leave this house!’ This last word was almost a shriek as, unable to get up, he fell back into the chair and began a gasping cough.

Fanny, now white herself and obviously fearing her father was about to have an apoplexy, gave Martell an imploring look and, with some hesitation – in case Mr Albion really was having a fit and Fanny in need of assistance – he backed into the hall, followed by Edward and Louisa. Mrs Pride, by now, had already miraculously appeared and, having inspected her employer, signalled to the visitors that it was safe to retire.

Once outside, Edward shook his head with some amusement. ‘Not a great success, I fear, as a visit.’

‘No.’ Martell was still too surprised to say much. ‘That is the first time’, he remarked wryly, ‘that I have ever been thrown out of someone’s house. But I fear for poor Miss Albion.’

‘Poor, dear Fanny,’ said Louisa. ‘I shall go back there this afternoon, Edward, with mother.’

‘Well done, Louisa,’ her brother said approvingly.

‘They say there’s bad blood in the Albion family,’ continued Louisa sadly. ‘I suppose that’s what it is. Poor Fanny.’

An hour later, after she had helped Mr Albion to his room and sat with Fanny while she wept, Mrs Pride slipped out of the house and made her way across to Mr Gilpin’s.

The weather was perfect the following morning when Edward and Louisa set out with Mr Martell. Unfortunately, because Mrs Totton was already engaged, Louisa had been unable to go back to see her cousin; but she had sent Fanny a most loving letter, which the groom had taken across that very same afternoon, so her conscience was clear.

She really felt quite cheerful, therefore, as the carriage bowled up the turnpike towards Lyndhurst where they meant to pause briefly before crossing the heath. Mr Martell was in a conversational mood. It was very agreeable, of course, to be asked questions so attentively. Although always polite, she noticed that if Martell became interested in a subject he would pursue it, at least in his own mind, with a relentless thoroughness that she had not encountered before but which, she acknowledged to herself, was proper in a man.

‘I see, Mr Martell,’ she remarked upon one occasion, ‘that you insist upon knowing things.’ And this he acknowledged with a laugh.

‘I apologize, my dear Miss Totton, it’s my nature. Do you find it disagreeable?’

He had never addressed her as ‘dear Miss Totton’ before, nor asked her opinion of his character.

‘Not at all, Mr Martell,’ she said with a smile that had just a hint of seriousness in it. ‘To be truthful, no one in conversation ever asked me to think very much before. Yet when you issue such a challenge, I find it to my liking.’

‘Ah,’ he said, and seemed both pleased and thoughtful.

The village of Lyndhurst had changed very little since the Middle Ages. The forest court still met there. The King’s House, somewhat enlarged, with a big stable block opposite and extensive fenced gardens on the slope behind, was still essentially the royal manor and hunting lodge it had always been. There were two gentlemen’s houses in the near vicinity, one called Cuffnell’s, the other Mount-royal; but Lyndhurst’s scattering of cottages only really amounted to a hamlet. The status of the place was signalled rather by the fine church which, replacing the ancient royal chapel, had been erected on Lyndhurst’s highest piece of ground beside the King’s House and could be seen like a beacon for several miles around.

They paused only briefly at the King’s House before going to look at the racetrack. This was an informal affair, laid out on a large expanse of New Forest lawn, north of Lyndhurst. There were no permanent stands: in the usual manner of the age, people watched the races from carriages and carts if they wanted a better view.

‘One of the attractions here’, Edward explained, ‘is the New Forest pony races. You’d be amazed how fast they can run and they’re wonderfully sure-footed. You must come back for a race meeting, Martell.’ And something about the look on Martell’s face told Louisa that he probably would.

They set out for Beaulieu now. The lane to the old abbey, which ran south-east across open heath, left Lyndhurst from just below the racetrack. In so doing, it passed by two most curious sights, which immediately engaged Martell’s attention. The first was a great, grassy mound.

‘It’s known’, Edward explained, ‘as Bolton’s Bench.’

It was the great Hampshire magnate the Duke of Bolton who, early in the century, had decided to take the little mound where once old Cola the Huntsman had directed operations and raise it into a great mound that overlooked the whole of Lyndhurst. The duke was well known for these sweeping alterations to the landscape. Elsewhere in the Forest he had arbitrarily blazed a huge straight drive through miles of ancient woodland because he thought it would make a pleasing ride for himself and his friends. But what struck Martell even more than Bolton’s man-made hill was the great grassy earth wall that stretched across the landscape just beyond it.

‘That’s the Park Pale,’ said Edward. ‘They used it once for catching deer.’

The huge deer trap where Cola the Huntsman had once directed operations was still an awesome sight. Enlarged even further some five centuries before, its earthwork wall strode across the landscape for almost two miles, before making a mighty sweep round into the woods below Lyndhurst. In the clear morning sunshine the great empty ruin might have been some prehistoric inclosure in a genteel world; yet the deer of the Forest were still there, men still hunted; only the turnpike road nearby and the church on Lyndhurst rise had altered the place since medieval days. And who knew, as they gazed at the earthwork in silence, if suddenly a pale deer might not appear from beside the green hill of Bolton’s Bench and run out across the open ground?

It was at this moment that they heard a merry cry from behind them and turned to see a small open chaise coming round the track behind Bolton’s Bench; inside it sat the sturdy figure of Mr Gilpin, who was waving his hat cheerfully. Beside him was a curly-haired boy. And on the other side of the boy sat Fanny Albion.

‘Oh,’ said Louisa.

They all walked into the abbey together. Mr Gilpin was in high good humour.

He had been surprised by Mrs Pride the housekeeper’s call the day before, yet rather intrigued and delighted to do something to help Fanny. He quite agreed with her that Miss Albion needed to go out with her cousins, especially after the behaviour of old Francis Albion. But he pointed out to her that, if the old man continued in his present mood, it would scarcely be possible to extract Fanny.

But while Mrs Pride acknowledged that this was true, she also assured him: ‘Some days, Sir, Mr Albion sleeps right through the day and would not even know if Miss Albion were out.’

‘You think tomorrow might be such a day, do you?’ the vicar asked.

‘He was so excited this afternoon, Sir, I shouldn’t be surprised.’

‘I do believe’, the amused Mr Gilpin remarked to his wife, after Mrs Pride had gone, ‘that she’s going to drug him.’

‘Is that proper, my dear?’ his wife asked.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Gilpin.

So he had set off very cheerfully that morning in his light two-wheeled chaise. Calling at the school on the way, he had also collected the Furzey boy. He knew he shouldn’t, but the child had such a sparkling intelligence that it was almost impossible to resist the temptation to educate him.

Arriving at Albion House, he found Mr Albion sunk in a profound sleep and, tempted yet again, sent up a secret plea to God that the old man’s sleep might be eternal. Fanny, however, proved more of a problem. It was not so much the fear of leaving her father that worried her, but the prospect of encountering Mr Martell after what she felt had been her humiliation the day before.

‘My dear child,’ the vicar assured her, ‘there was no humiliation whatsoever. Although quite unjustified, I gather that for a man of his age, your father put up rather a fine display.’

‘But that Mr Martell should meet such a reception in our house …’

‘My dear Fanny,’ remarked Gilpin shrewdly, ‘Mr Martell has people fawning upon him wherever he goes. He will have relished the change. Besides,’ he added, ‘I don’t even know for certain that your cousins will have carried out their intention of going to Beaulieu at all. So you may have only me and young Furzey for company. Pray come along, for I have a letter to deliver up at Lyndhurst on the way.’

He insisted, now, upon walking beside the two Tottons, leaving Fanny and Mr Martell to follow.

If Fanny felt a sense of embarrassment after yesterday’s events, Mr Martell was able to dispel it. Indeed, he made a great joke of the business, said that he’d never been thrown out of a house before but no doubt would be many times in future. ‘Indeed, Miss Albion, your father reminded me very much of my own although, if we could set the two of them to fight each other, like two old knights in a tournament, I think your father might prevail.’

‘You are kind, Sir, for I do confess’, she owned, ‘that I felt mortified.’

Martell considered. It was not her mortification that he remembered from the day before. It was her pale form advancing across the hall, her air of inner sadness, even tragedy, his own desire, perhaps scarcely realized at the time, to protect her. Yet here she was, flushed with the ride in the morning air, warm flesh and blood, very much so. Two images in a single person, two aspects of a soul: interesting. He would see if he could not keep the tragic shade at bay.

‘Ah,’ he continued cheerfully, ‘if only we could all control our parents. But when they flash, you know, your father’s eyes are very fine.’ He glanced down at her, somewhat searchingly. ‘As indeed are yours, Miss Albion. You have your family’s wonderful blue eyes.’

What could she say, or do, but blush? He smiled. She had never seen him so warm.

‘I believe your family is very ancient in the Forest,’ he went on.

‘We say we are Saxon, Mr Martell, and that we had estates in the Forest before the Normans came.’

‘Dear heaven, Miss Albion, and we Normans came and stole from you? No wonder you throw us out of your houses!’

‘I think, Mr Martell’ – she laughed – ‘that you came and conquered us.’ And without especially meaning to, as she said the words ‘conquered us’, she looked up into his eyes.

‘Ah.’ He gazed straight back, as though the thought of conquest had suddenly struck him too, and their eyes remained looking into each other’s for several moments before he looked thoughtfully away. ‘We old families’, he said with a hint of intimacy that seemed like a comforting cloak around her shoulders, ‘perhaps dwell upon the past too much. And yet …’ He glanced in the direction of the Tottons in a way that suggested that, although fine enough people, there were things that a Martell or an Albion could never quite share with them. ‘I think we belong to the land in ways that others do not.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. It was how she felt too.

‘So.’ He turned to her with such easy playfulness that it was as if he had already put his arm round her. ‘Are we ruins, or are we merely picturesque, you and I?’

‘I am picturesque, Sir,’ she replied firmly. ‘But pray don’t tell me you’re a ruin.’

‘I promise you’, he said gently, ‘that I am not.’

The Beaulieu River being tidal, the tide was out as they crossed the bridge to the old gatehouse and the big pond on their left was almost empty of water, the reeds around the edge of this muddy expanse greeting them with a soothing rustle as they approached.

Although the abbey was long since ruined, it still preserved remarkably its ancient character. Nor was it all destroyed. The gatehouse and much of the inclosure wall was still there. The abbot’s residence had been restored and somewhat enlarged into a modest manor house. The cloister inclosure also remained, with the huge lay brothers’ domus still taking up one of its four sides. And while the great monastic church had been almost all dismantled, the monks’ refectory opposite had been converted into a handsome parish church. The present Montagu heiress was seldom there, having made another of the family’s brilliant marriages, this time to the descendant of Monmouth – for although Charles II’s unlucky natural son had lost his head when he rebelled in 1685, he had still, thanks to his wife, passed down huge estates to his descendants. And these were now united with those of Montagu. The family kept a kindly eye upon the place, however, and its grey stones retained their air of ancient peace.

‘So, Mr Martell.’ Louisa turned back to them as soon as they had passed the gatehouse. ‘Have we lost you to Fanny?’ She gave Martell a curious little look when she said this, as if there were something slightly odd about Fanny, but Martell smiled and took no notice.

‘I have been enjoying her conversation as much as I enjoy yours,’ he replied amiably. ‘Will you not join us?’ And so, with one young lady upon each arm, he proceeded into the precincts. They had not gone far before he suddenly remarked: ‘This abbey hath a pleasant seat; the air …’ He paused. Louisa looked blank.

Fanny laughed. ‘Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself,’ she continued. And, seeing Louisa still looking confused, she cried: ‘Why, Louisa, ’tis from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. We read it together with Mrs Grockleton. Only it is a castle, not an abbey, in the original.’

‘I had forgotten.’ Louisa flushed and frowned irritably.

‘But Mr Martell, you surely remember that after the king makes that remark he meets his death,’ Fanny reminded him. ‘Perhaps you had better be careful.’

‘Well, Miss Albion.’ Martell looked from Fanny to Louisa. ‘I believe I am safe, for neither of you looks to me like the fearsome Lady Macbeth.’

‘You haven’t seen me with a dagger,’ said Louisa with mock fierceness, trying to recover her position. It seemed to Fanny that it was perhaps herself, rather than Mr Martell, into whom Louisa might plunge a dagger just then and she decided to make sure there were no more embarrassments for her cousin.

She was on her guard, therefore, when, as they reached the abbot’s house, Martell casually enquired of Louisa what order of monks had inhabited the place in former times.

‘Order?’ Louisa shrugged. ‘They were just monks, I suppose.’ Hardly wishing to do so, she glanced towards Fanny.

‘I’m really not sure,’ said Fanny carefully, although in fact she knew perfectly well. ‘Didn’t they keep many sheep, Louisa? I should think they might have been Cistercian.’

‘So in that case’, said Martell, who had not been deceived by this protection of her cousin for a moment, ‘there would have been lay brothers and granges?’

‘Yes,’ Fanny confirmed. ‘Some of the big barns out at the granges still remain.’ And she indicated in the direction of St Leonards Grange. Martell nodded, interested.

Ahead of them Mr Gilpin had just paused to take note of some trees the Montagus had planted in straight lines, of which he was expressing his strong disapproval to Edward and the Furzey boy; and they were waiting for him to finish, when over the gatehouse, from the south quite unexpectedly, a redshank swept across the sky. It was such a lovely sight that they all paused to watch. And what, Fanny wondered, could have possessed Louisa to point to the slim, elegant wader and cry out: ‘Oh, look, a seagull.’

For a second Martell and Fanny assumed she must be joking, but at the same moment they both realized that she wasn’t. Fanny opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it. She and Martell looked at each other. And then – they didn’t mean to, they couldn’t help it – they both burst out laughing. Worse, scarcely thinking what he was doing, as he leaned away from Louisa towards her and she towards him, he took Fanny’s arm and squeezed it affectionately. So there they were, while Louisa looked on – there was no disguising it – sharing a joke like a pair of lovers and at her expense. Louisa’s face darkened.

‘Mr Gilpin!’ It was, no doubt, a providence that they should have been interrupted by a cry, at this moment, from the direction of the cloisters as a figure came hurrying forward. ‘We are honoured indeed.’ Mr Adams, the curate of Beaulieu – the resident clergyman, actually, since the man who nominally held that benefice never came there – was the eldest son of old Mr Adams who ran the shipyard at Buckler’s Hard. While his brothers had gone into the business, he had been educated at Oxford and then taken holy orders. After Gilpin had greeted him warmly and introduced everyone the friendly curate offered to conduct them round and took them at once into the abbot’s quarters – ‘For reasons which remain unclear, we nowadays call it the Palace House,’ he explained – and they admired its handsome vaulted rooms. Martell, ever polite, was giving his full attention to the clergyman, while Fanny was entirely content to fall a little behind with young Nathaniel Furzey, who so evidently considered her his personal friend.

From there they passed into the cloister and the curate led them towards the old monks’ refectory, which now served as his parish church. As Fanny knew it well, however, and young Nathaniel was getting a little restless, she told them she would wait outside with him while they went in. And so, as they disappeared, she found herself alone with him in the cloister.

If, in the abbey’s heyday, the cloisters had always been a pleasant place, in their ruin they had acquired a new and special charm. The north wall with its arched recesses was more or less intact. The other walls, clad with ivy, were in various states of crumbled ruin, with, here and there, a little arcade of empty arches remaining like a screen beyond which the foundations of former buildings, all grassed over, provided an intimate vista. Wisely, therefore, having no need to build themselves a ruin, the Montagus, laying out a lawn and placing small beds of plants by crumbling walls and broken pillars, had created a delightful garden where one could walk and enjoy the friendly company of the old Cistercian shades.

She let Nathaniel run about and, having taken a turn around the garden, looked for a place to sit. The sheltered arches of the monks’ carrels in the north wall looked inviting, screened from the breeze and catching the sun’s warm rays. She selected one near the centre, sitting on the stone seat and resting her back on the wall behind. It really was quite delightful. In front of her across the cloister the big end wall of the former refectory made a stone triangle in the blue sky. The others were all inside it. No sound issued. Nathaniel, too, had vanished somewhere. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the sun on her face.

Why did she feel so happy? She thought she understood. She was not so foolish, she told herself, as to believe that Mr Martell’s liking her – for she was sure he did – would necessarily lead to anything more than that. Mr Martell had, there was no question, the pick of almost any young lady in England. But it was very pleasant, all the same, to feel that he admired the things she had to offer: her family, her intelligence, her gentle humour. She had had no dealings with men before. Yet the first she had met, and one of the most eligible, clearly valued her and was attracted to her. It gave her a sense of confidence that was most agreeable. That, she thought, was why she was so happy and relaxed.

But even this was not quite all. No, the contentment she felt derived from something even simpler. Something she had just felt when she was walking and laughing with Mr Martell and it took her a few minutes to realize what it was.

She had felt so easy in his presence. That was the answer. She had never been so comfortable in her life. It gave her a strange feeling of lightness. It really seemed to her, just then, as if she had entered a world in which there was no more pain.

She smiled to herself and, for no particular reason, pulled out the wooden cross she often wore and felt the faint lines of its ancient carving. She sat there for some minutes, enjoying the peace of her surroundings.

After a little time Nathaniel came back and sat down contentedly beside her. ‘What is that?’ he asked, noticing the little cedarwood crucifix.

‘A cross. My grandmother gave it to me. It’s very old, I believe.’

He inspected it and nodded solemnly. ‘It looks old,’ he agreed and leaned back, testing the seat for comfort. Having satisfied himself, he let his eyes wander round the cloisters. ‘Do you like it here?’ he asked and, when she said she did: ‘I like it here too.’

They had sat together for another minute or two before Nathaniel pointed to a place on the wall just behind Fanny, causing her to turn and look. For a second she did not know what he had seen, but then she noticed it: a letter ‘A’ that someone had scratched in the stone. It was quite small, very neat and the script looked Gothic, as if it might have been carved long ago by some monk’s hand. She smiled. A letter ‘A’ left in the stone, a tiny record of a life, vanished, deep beneath the ground.

‘How surprised the monk who carved that would be – if monk it was – to see the two of us sitting in his cloister now,’ she remarked. ‘And not at all pleased, we may be sure,’ she added with a smile.

It was a pity, therefore, that Brother Adam could not have appeared to tell his descendants that, on the contrary, he was very pleased indeed.

A minute later Mr Gilpin emerged to tell them they were going to inspect the rope works and then go down to the shipbuilding yard at Buckler’s Hard.

Slowly, slowly, the great tree moved forward. Slowly the six mighty carthorses, harnessed one behind another, hauled on the chains, and the huge cart behind them creaked and lurched under its load. They were bringing a forest oak tree to the sea.

Puckle sighed. What had he done?

He had been right, the day he had met Grockleton, to spot the value of the spreading oak near the Rufus stone. Normally trees were felled in winter and transported in summer when the ground was hard. But for some reason Mr Adams had allowed this tree to be felled late. And so, while its pollarded brother had been left to live another century or two, this splendid son of the ancient, miraculous oak had felt the sharpened axes swing and thud into its side, biting their way into its two-hundred-year-old core until at last, in sight of the place where its magical old father had grown, it had toppled, and fallen and crashed down upon the moss and leaves of the forest floor. Then, with their saws and axes, the woodsmen had gone to work.

There were three parts to a fallen oak. First, the outer reaches, the lop and top, of no use to the shipyard and quickly cut away, along with the twigs that were carted for firewood. Then there was the main part of the tree, the mighty trunk, cut into huge sections to be used in the body of the ship; and then there were the all-important joints, known as knees, where the branches grew out from the trunk, which would form the supporting angles within the ship. There was also a fourth part, the bark, which some timber merchants would strip off and sell to the tanners. But Mr Adams would never allow this to be done, so the great oaks that came to Buckler’s Hard arrived with their bark still on.

Now, chained and spiked in place, the main section of the huge trunk, its widest or butt-end foremost, was being hauled across the Forest to the shipyard, where it would be seasoned for a year or two before use. To make the great stem and stern posts of a ship, a tree with a girth of at least ten feet was needed. A large tree like this one would provide about four loads, or tons of timber. A naval battleship would use over two thousand loads – about forty acres of oak trees. All the time, therefore, the woodsmen’s axes were at work, constantly felling, as the ancient oaks dropped from the canopy and the endless supply of timber made its way towards the sea like so many streamlets running off the Forest.

Now the tree had reached the end of its journey on land and Puckle, walking beside the lead horse, looked down into Buckler’s Hard.

What had he done? For some reason that particular morning, the terrible realization had come over him like a wave. As he gazed at the two little terraces of red-brick cottages he could have wept. He was going to have to leave all this: everything that he loved.

Buckler’s Hard had become his home. How many years had he worked here upon the wooden ships? How many years had he gone down the river to the quiet spot where the lugger brought casks of the finest brandy and brought the precious load up to the cobbler’s shop in Buckler’s Hard from whose secret cellar bottle upon bottle would be discreetly conveyed to the manors on the eastern side of the Forest? How many times had he walked by Mr Adams the master, or any of his other friends at the yard – or even young Mr Adams the curate of Beaulieu come to that – at some strange hour, and never been noticed?

For Mr Adams’s rule was simple. He was to see nothing. No contraband landed at the Hard. If the cobbler’s shop had a cellar, goods came and left after dark. If a bottle of finest brandy arrived at his door, he never asked how. And as long as these requirements were met, it was remarkable what he could fail to see. Whenever Puckle turned up late after one of the big runs on the other side of the Forest – and sometimes he missed an entire day – Mr Adams could always have sworn he was working in the yard all the time and paid him accordingly.

Puckle the trusted man; Puckle among friends; Puckle in the Forest. How could he leave?

He’d thought about it, of course, even told himself he could talk his way out of it. But it was no good. Some things you might get away with, but not this. There would be no forgiveness shown. Weeks, even months might pass, but you would pay the price.

If only, now, he could refuse. Could he? A vision of Grockleton’s claw-like hand and Isaac Seagull’s watchful face came up before him. No, it was too late. He could not refuse. Detaching himself from the haulage team, now, as other men came to take over, he made his way down towards the slipway. He always felt better when he was working on the ships.

Just before he reached it he noticed that Mr Adams was standing in front of his house, talking to a party of visitors.

Although two of his sons were there, it was old Mr Adams who fascinated Fanny. With his flint-like face, his old-fashioned white wig, his stiff, upright walk, at over eighty years of age he would still ride to London to get the contracts for the yard’s naval vessels. While clearly not best pleased to be interrupted by visitors, he was courteous enough as he showed them round.

But equally interesting, Fanny soon discovered, was the subtle change in Mr Martell. She had seen him as a proud aristocrat, a man of education and – she might as well admit it – a charming companion and no doubt lover. But as he went round with old Mr Adams she saw something else. His tall frame stooped forward just a little to catch everything the shipbuilder said; he asked sharp questions, to which the older man was soon answering with obvious respect. His handsome, saturnine face had grown concentrated and hard. This was the face of the powerful landowner, the Norman knight who knew his business and expected to be obeyed. To her surprise, she felt a little shudder pass through her body as she watched him. She had not realized he possessed such power.

The building of a great sea-going vessel, as the eighteenth century drew towards its close, was a remarkable business. Like so much industry at that time it was still a rural affair, small in scale and done by hand. Yet the little shipyard at the Forest’s edge was highly productive: as well as numerous merchant vessels, more than a tenth of all the new naval warships built had come from the Beaulieu River yard.

Taking them first to a large barn-like wooden building just above the slipways and beside the blacksmith’s, Mr Adams showed them a large, long space where a series of line patterns had been marked out on the floor. ‘This we call the mould loft,’ he explained. ‘We lay out the designs to scale on this floor; then we make wooden moulds so that we can check the shape of every inch of the ship as we build it.’

Then he walked them up to the huge sawpit. Two men were busily at work on a section of tree trunk, which they were sawing with a huge saw, the man holding the upper end standing up on the trunk, the man with the other end down in the pit.

‘The fellow on top is the master. He guides the saw,’ Mr Adams told them. ‘The man below is his junior. He has the harder work for he pulls the saw.’

‘Why is the man in the pit wearing such a big hat?’ asked Louisa.

‘Watch and you will see,’ answered Mr Adams with a wry look. And as the great saw swept downwards, the reason was all too clear as a cascade of sawdust fell down on the poor man’s head.

Inspired, it seemed, by the stern, practical mind of the aristocrat at his side, Mr Adams was becoming quite affable. He took them by several spots where individual men were at work on particular projects. One was shaping a huge rudder with a gouge and mallet; another was making holes in a timber post with an instrument like a huge two-handed corkscrew.

‘He makes a hole with the augur,’ the shipbuilder explained, ‘and then it will be fastened with one of these.’ He picked up a great wooden spike as long as his arm. ‘This is a wooden nail. We make them here. We always use the same wood for the nail as the timber it is to fasten, otherwise it will work loose and the ship will rot. Some of them are even bigger.’

‘Don’t you use any iron nails in the ship?’ asked Edward.

‘Yes, we do.’ A thought seemed to strike the old man.

‘You passed by the rope works up at Beaulieu, I believe? Well, the monks over at Sowley built a great fish pond in times past. And now it is used by an iron works. That’s where our nails come from.’ He smiled. ‘So even a monastery’ – he clearly meant, ‘even something so useless and popish as a monastery – may be changed, with time, to serve a useful purpose.’ And, clearly delighted with this reflection, he led them down towards the river.

There were three vessels of different sizes and stages of completion in the slipways.

Martell looked at them appraisingly. ‘I assume you try to build a smaller vessel alongside a larger, for reasons of economy,’ he remarked.

‘Precisely, Sir. You have it,’ Mr Adams responded. ‘The larger ship’, he explained to the others, ‘uses the larger timbers and the lesser ship the smaller, all from the same tree. Even so,’ he remarked to Martell, ‘there is huge wastage of wood, for only the inner part of the tree is hard enough to be used. We sell off all that we can, but …’ It was evident that any kind of waste was offensive to the shipbuilder.

‘Are they all New Forest oaks?’ asked Fanny.

‘No, Miss Albion. This’ – he indicated the surrounding Forest – ‘is our first timber yard. But we go further afield. Nor are ships made only of oak. The keel is made of elm, the ships’ wall planks are beech. For the masts and spars we use fir. Come, let me show you.’

On the largest slipway, a big man-of-war stood almost ready for launching.

‘That’s Cerberus,’ announced Mr Adams. ‘Thirty-two guns, almost eight hundred tons. The biggest battleships are only forty feet longer, although they have double the tonnage. She’ll launch in September and be towed along the coast to Portsmouth for fitting in the naval dockyards there. The smaller ship we have started work on beside her is a merchant ship, bound for the West Indies trade. She’ll complete next year. The little fellow in the third dock is a fifty-ton lighter for the Navy. As you see, we’ve just got the keel down, whereas for the merchant vessel we have the whole frame completed.’

‘Do you build the great battleships too?’ Fanny asked.

‘Yes, Miss Albion, but only once in a while. The biggest we built was Illustrious, five years ago. A seventy-four-gun monster. The finest ship I think we ever made was a sixty-four-gun called Agamemnon.’ He smiled. ‘The ’Am an’ Eggs, the sailors call her.’

‘And do you follow their progress after they leave the yard?’

‘We try to. Agamemnon, for instance, has just been placed under a new commander. A captain called Horatio Nelson.’ He shrugged. ‘Can’t say I’d ever heard of him.’ He glanced around. Nor had anyone else. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘would you like to enter Cerberus?’

Puckle was alone between decks. A moment ago there had been the sound of hammering from above as the last planks of the deck were being fastened; but now, for some reason, the noise had ceased and the ship had fallen silent.

How cavernous it seemed in the sudden quiet, with the light coming in through the empty squares of the gunports. There was nothing between the decks except the occasional supporting posts: no partitions, no guns, no galley equipment, no hammocks or ropes or casks. Everything beyond the empty shell of the ship would be fitted at Portsmouth. All he could see was wood: wooden deck, wooden walls, stretching away for a hundred feet, the grain of the timber visible in the soft light, the scent of the planking, and of the pitch used to seal it, sharp in his nostrils; and in the corners, where the deck heads met the hull, the angle brackets made of the knees of oak as though the decks above his head were not made of planks but a spreading canopy of branches forming natural layers within the silent echo of the ship.

Then he heard footsteps and down the ladder from the deck above came Mr Adams with the party of guests.

How curious the fellow looked, Martell thought, with his stooped shoulders, his shaggy brown hair and oaken face. One by one the party descended the ladder and looked at him.

Mr Adams came last and gave him a curt nod. ‘This man’s name is Puckle,’ he told them. ‘He’s been with us, it must be fifteen years.’

‘Seventeen, Sir,’ Puckle corrected.

‘Puckle.’ Edward laughed. ‘Funny name.’

‘It’s a good old Forest name,’ said Fanny at once, thinking her cousin sounded rude. ‘There have been Puckles in the Forest as long as Albions, I’m sure. Over at Burley mostly, isn’t it?’ she asked Puckle with a friendly smile.

‘That’s right.’ Puckle knew who the Albion girl was and she met with his approval. She belonged.

The Tottons were still gazing at Puckle with amusement, as though he were a curiosity. Martell was looking around, noting the way the deck and hull were joined. Mr Gilpin was apparently meditating.

‘Down here.’ Fanny hesitated because she wasn’t quite sure what she meant. ‘It has such a strange feeling.’ She looked at the others, who didn’t seem very interested, then turned to the Forest man. ‘Do you feel it?’ she asked, hearing as she did so, to her great irritation, Louisa giggle behind her.

Because he had just been feeling the same thing and because he liked her, for the first time in his life Puckle tried to put a complex idea into words. ‘It’s the trees,’ he said, with a nod towards the hull. He paused for a moment, wondering how to put it. ‘When we go, Miss, there isn’t much left, really. Not after a year or two in the ground, anyway.’

‘There is your immortal soul, man,’ Gilpin interrupted his reverie to remark firmly. ‘Pray do not forget that.’

‘I won’t, Vicar,’ Puckle concurred politely, if not, perhaps, with great conviction. ‘Only trees,’ he said to Fanny, ‘not having souls they say, when they’re cut down, they get another life’ and he waved all around him now. ‘Sometimes, down here,’ he added, with simple feeling for the mystery of the thing, ‘I feel as if I was inside a tree.’ He smiled at her, eager, yet a little embarrassed. ‘Funny, really. Stupid, I expect; but a man like me doesn’t know much.’

‘I don’t think it’s foolish at all,’ said Fanny warmly. But she got no further, for Mr Gilpin indicated with a cough that he and Mr Adams had had enough and a few moments later she found herself out in the bright sunlight again.

Louisa had started to laugh. ‘I do declare,’ she cried, ‘that strange fellow looked exactly like a tree himself. Did you not think so, Mr Martell?’

‘Perhaps,’ he agreed with a smile.

‘Yet I liked what he said.’ Fanny turned to the landowner hopefully.

‘I agree, Miss Albion,’ he replied. ‘His theology may be deficient, but these peasants have a kind of wisdom, in their way.’

‘It is hard to believe,’ Louisa maintained, ‘that such a creature is a man at all. I believe he is a troll or goblin of some kind. I’m sure he lives under the ground.’

‘As a Christian, I may not agree,’ Martell laughed. ‘Although I know what you mean, my dear Miss Totton.’

It was time to depart now. The Tottons with Mr Martell would take the lane that led across by Sowley to Lymington; Mr Gilpin wished to take another track that would bring them across the heath towards the ford above Albion House.

Before they parted, however, Mr Martell came to Fanny’s side. ‘My stay here will shortly end, Miss Albion,’ he said quietly, ‘but I fully expect to return. I hope when I do I shall find you here and that I may call upon you.’

‘By all means, Mr Martell. Although I fear I cannot answer for my father, it seems.’

‘I can assure you, Miss Albion’ – he looked her straight in the eye – ‘I am quite prepared to brave his wrath.’

She inclined her head to hide her pleasure. ‘Then come by all means, Sir,’ she softly said.

Minutes later, with young Nathaniel tucked beside her, she was bowling across the wild heath with Mr Gilpin, her heart singing in the breeze.

Puckle stayed down in the ship for a while after the visitors had gone. Though he despised the Tottons, he had been glad to speak to Miss Fanny Albion. He had liked something in her blue eyes. But after her departure, as he gazed sadly round the great wooden space, the thoughts that had troubled him returned with even more insistence than before.

In a few months’ time Miss Albion would still be here, in the Forest. But where would he be, cut adrift?

What had he done? What could he do about it?

The chaise had drawn up by Albion House, and Mr Gilpin had just handed Fanny down and was conducting her to the door, when he turned to her casually and remarked: ‘There is something, by the by, which I had been meaning to tell you, Fanny. Do you recall that we spoke of your grandmother and of her marriage?’

‘Why, yes, indeed,’ she answered brightly. ‘We were going to look it up, were we not?’

‘Indeed. And as I chanced, a little while ago, to be examining the parish register in Lymington I took the liberty of casting back to see what I could find.’

‘And did you find it?’ She felt quite eager.

‘Yes. I think so, anyway.’ He paused. ‘It may come as a surprise, perhaps a shock.’

‘Oh?’

‘Of course, such connections in any family, especially in the maternal line are quite commonplace, you know. Entirely normal. You would be surprised.’

‘Please tell me, Mr Gilpin.’

‘It would appear, Fanny, that Mr Totton, your mother’s father, as his second wife, married a certain Miss Seagull, of Lymington. The family is well known, as you may be aware, in the town.’

‘My grandmother, the old lady who gave me this’ – she fingered the wooden crucifix round her neck – ‘was born Miss Seagull?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh. Not of any gentle family, then. Hardly even respectable.’

‘I’m sure she was respectable herself, Fanny, or Mr Totton your grandfather would not have married her.’

‘Do you suppose’ – she frowned – ‘that Edward and Louisa know this?’

He smiled wryly. ‘I have always supposed that the Tottons were pleased by their connection to the Albions. That is all they think of.’

‘Perhaps the Seagulls …’

‘It is a long time ago, Fanny. I think you may assume that no one except ourselves has any knowledge of this at all. It is nothing my child, I assure you, of which you should be ashamed.’ This was the only time she had ever heard Mr Gilpin tell an obvious lie.

‘So what should I do?’

‘Do? Nothing. I only thought to tell you myself …’

‘To save me an embarrassing discovery, perhaps in front of some curious parish clerk.’ She nodded. ‘Thank you, Mr Gilpin.’

‘Put it out of your mind, Fanny. It has no significance.’

‘I shall. Goodbye. And thank you for taking me to Beaulieu.’

She did not go inside at once, but watched the chaise roll away round the corner of the drive. Then she went over to a bench under one of the trees and sat there, considering this new revelation for a while. She wondered what Mr Martell, without a blot upon his aristocratic escutcheon, would think of the fact that she was connected, and closely, to the lowly Seagulls of Lymington.

‘I have great hopes’, said Mrs Grockleton, well before the summer ended, ‘that our situation is about to improve. Indeed,’ she asserted, ‘I think I may say, Mr Grockleton, that I have never been more happy.’ This proposition filled her husband with some anxiety: for Mrs Grockleton’s happiness was a fearsome thing to behold. ‘And to think’, she went on, for she was very honest about such things, ‘that we have that clever girl Louisa to thank for all this.’

As Mr Grockleton couldn’t for the life of him think why he should be thanking Louisa Totton for anything in particular, but was too wise to say so, he gave her a look of enquiry that seemed also to signal agreement and she soon rattled on.

‘I shall always be quite persuaded that it was Louisa who decided Mr Martell to take such an interest in Lymington. Now it seems that he has spoken to Sir Harry Burrard about standing for Parliament.’

‘That may not be Louisa’s doing,’ Mr Grockleton observed.

‘Yes, yes, my dear. It is, I do assure you. And if proof were needed, Louisa and Edward are invited to visit him at his place in Dorset. They leave next week. There now! I tell you, Mr Grockleton, he means to marry her.’

‘It would not be unnatural, since the Tottons had him staying in their house, to return the hospitality,’ her husband pointed out.

‘Oh, Mr Grockleton, you do not see these things,’ she cried. ‘But I do. And surely you understand what this means for us?’

‘For us, Mrs Grockleton? I do not think I do.’