The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [105]
The next week was a busy one in the Forest.
On two successive days, because of the insistence of the prior, the foresters had the hounds out. The steward was so bored by the business that he gave the whole responsibility to young Alban. The first day they drew in the woods near Pride’s and went all the way across almost to Burley. But there the scent became so confused that they did nothing but go round in circles. The next day they tried over towards Minstead. But mysteriously the scent seemed to lead straight to the house of the forester, who was not at all amused.
Half the Forest, either openly or secretly, was on the lookout. The foresters and their stewards rode about in groups. Cottages were visited, every woodsman stopped. It all came to nothing, but as Puckle remarked sadly to Luke one night: ‘It’s going to be difficult for you to come out.’
Mary waited for ten days before she set off to her appointment. During this time she did not see Brother Adam once. But he was seldom out of her thoughts.
What does a woman feel when she seduces a monk? She smiled now, a little, to think that even on that first afternoon, although she had been distressed and he protective, he was still unaware that it was she, really, who had seduced him. It was his innocence that she instinctively wanted, this strong, manly man who had never known a woman. And she, the peasant wife of a humble labourer, had it in her power to teach him to know life. He had taken a step, even half a step towards her. He had asked without even knowing he was asking – or certainly for what he was asking.
I have taken a man of God, a man forbidden, and I have made him blaze like the sun: at moments she had been almost heady with the sense of her womanly triumph. Not that she had let him see it. Not at first, anyway. She had brought him along, she thought with a smile, very nicely.
Was that all, then? Just a seduction? Oh, no. There was the reason that she had been drawn to him in the first place: his fineness, his intelligence; her sense that he had what she did not; her certainty that, even if she wasn’t quite sure what these things were, she wanted to have them.
At first, when they talked in the night, she would ask him: ‘What are you thinking?’ And he would reply something that he thought she would understand. But soon, when she made clear she wanted more, he would make an effort and try to explain his nightly musings. ‘There was a great philosopher, you see, called Abelard, and he thought …’ he might explain. Or he would speak of far-off lands, or great events, a world that was far beyond anything she had known, yet which, dimly, as though seeing light coming through a church window, she could discern. And he was in that other world. She knew it. ‘Your mind is in the stars,’ she once whispered, but not in mockery. And when another time, after he had told her some wonderful idea, she laughed – ‘And being inside me made you think of that?’ – she was, in truth, more pleased than she had ever been in her life.
But recently there had been more to worry about.
Her appointment with Luke, made when Puckle brought her the message, was in a quiet place in the woods north of Brockenhurst. She took care she was not followed.
He was already waiting for her there, by a huge old oak tree, thick with moss and ivy. She was glad to see he was looking well and he seemed quite cheerful. Yet the news he had was less so. ‘Puckle thinks I ought to leave the Forest. The prior’s never going to give up.’
‘After the Michaelmas court he might.’
‘No.’ Luke sighed. ‘You don’t know him.’
‘I still think