Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [412]
Young Will Wilson was his cousin.
A distant cousin to be sure. When old Walter’s brother had refused to join the rest of the motley family collection that formed a labour gang for that cunning survivor of the Black Death, he had probably saved his own little family from ruthless exploitation. But while Walter’s descendants had risen to these new heights of affluence, his brother’s family had remained poor peasants ever since. Over a century had passed: four, five generations. But Robert Forest had silently suspected, and secretly verified, the connection as soon as he had taken over the estate. It was not a connection he wished to remember.
All through his childhood, Will had often noticed how sourly Forest looked at him if he chanced to pass the cottage, but since Robert Forest never smiled, he had not attached great significance to it.
And if ever he asked his father about the Forest family, his father had looked at the ground and told him only:
“They were rich merchants; now they’re gentlemen. Nothing like us.”
For although he too had been aware of the connection, Will’s father, guessing Forest’s likely feelings, was wise enough never to mention it.
“Why does he glare at our cottage?” the boy asked. “I’ve seen him.”
“Just his way,” his father had answered. “Show him respect, Will, and it’ll be enough.”
It had not been.
To Will however, the Forests were distant figures. Robert’s wife and two children, a boy and a girl a little older than Will, were seldom seen away from the manor house. On Sundays, they usually worshipped at their little private chapel rather than the small and half derelict church in Avonsford. But occasionally he could see them and would always wonder at how quiet and reserved the two children looked as they walked behind their grey-haired mother, still handsome but so severe that she frightened him.
“She wasn’t always like that,” his father did once admit to him. “I remember when she was a merry young girl called Lizzie Curtis.” He grimaced. “He at the manor, Robert Forest, changed that.”
Will had not fully understood what this meant until one day, when he had to help his father mend the entrance to the dovecote, he saw her walking alone in the walled garden and noticed that when her husband entered the place and came up to her unexpectedly, she instinctively flinched back from him in fear. He kept his distance from the lord of the manor as much as he could after that.
It was the previous month that Forest had turned him out. The way it happened had filled him with amazement.
Though his neighbours had left, he had been staying in the little cottage because he had nowhere else to go. The steward knew he was there, of course, but if he saw him about the place, ignored him as completely as if he had been a dead man. Will guessed that matters would soon come to a head.
The men came one morning: a gang of ten – four from the estate and six hired from the town. In a single day they knocked down the four cottages. They took no notice of him at all as he stood quietly with his few possessions, watching them at work. At the end of the day, his little cottage was rubble. He slept in a hayloft in the southern pan of the village that night. His neighbours there had not been quick to offer him food: he did not blame them – they had their own families to look after. Eventually however he had been given some wheatcakes. The next day he watched as the men came once more, this time with carts, and carried away any stones or other materials that could be re-used. Again he stayed in the hayloft. The third morning, the men brought heavy ploughs from all over the estate and four teams of oxen. All day they ploughed up the ground where the cottages had been, and the common land around it. In the evening, when they had done, it was hard for him to believe that the place which had been his home had so completely vanished under the naked, raw brown earth. The day after that, they began to plant the hawthorn hedge that would surround Forest’s new five acre field.
This was the