The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [111]
The bailiff had just rung a bell to close the market as, from the direction of the wharf, two figures appeared.
Even a glance, as the lean figure made his way up the street that warm April morning, and you felt you knew him. It was just the way he walked. It was so obvious he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought. The loose linen leggings he favoured flapped cheerfully on his calves, leaving his bare ankles exposed. On his feet he wore only sandals secured with leather thongs. His jerkin was made of ray – striped cloth – blue and yellow, none too clean. On his head was a leather cap he had stitched together himself.
Young Jonathan Totton could not remember ever seeing Alan Seagull without this item of headgear.
If Alan Seagull’s cheerful face took a short cut from his mouth to his chest, if his sparse black beard went from his mouth down to his Adam’s apple pretty much without pausing for such an ornament as a chin, you could be sure it was because he and his forebears had reckoned they could do perfectly well without one. And there was something about his cheerful, canny grin that told you they were right. ‘We’ve cut a corner, there,’ the Seagull smile seemed to say about their chin, ‘and we could probably cut a few more too, that you don’t need to know about.’
He smelled of tar and of fish, and of the salty sea. As he often did, he was humming a tune. Young Jonathan Totton was enchanted by him and, walking proudly beside the mariner, he had just reached the point on the sloping street where the squat little town hall stood when a voice, calm but authoritative, summoned him: ‘Jonathan. Come here.’
Regretfully, he left Seagull’s side and went over to the tall-gabled timbered house outside which his father was standing.
A moment later, with the older man’s hand resting on his shoulder, he found himself inside and listening to his father’s quiet voice. ‘I should prefer, Jonathan, that you should not spend so much time with that man.’
‘Why, Father?’
‘Because there is better company to keep in Lymington.’
Now that, Jonathan thought, was going to be a problem.
Lymington, lying as it did by the mouth of the river that ran down from Brockenhurst and Boldre to the sea, was geographically at the centre of the Forest’s coastline – although, strictly speaking, on its small wedge of coastal farmland and marsh, it had not been included in the legal jurisdiction of the Conqueror’s hunting forest.
It was a thriving little harbour town nowadays. From the cluster of boathouses, stores and fishermen’s cottages down by the small quay, the broad High Street ran up quite a steep slope fronted by two-storey timber-and-plaster houses with overhanging upper floors and gabled roofs. The town hall at the crest of the hill on the left-hand side, typical of its kind at that date, was built of stone and consisted of a small dark chamber surrounded by open arches in which various sellers offered their wares; above which, reached by an outside staircase, a spacious overhanging penthouse served as a courtroom for discussing the town’s affairs. In front of the town hall stood the town cross; across the street, the Angel Inn. About two hundred yards further along the crest of the slope, a church marked the end of the borough. There were two other streets, at right angles, a church, a market cross – for Lymington had the right to hold an annual three-day fair each September. There was a stocks and a tiny prison house for malefactors, a ducking-stool and whipping post. There was a town well: all this to serve a community of, perhaps, four hundred souls.
From the High Street you could look down over the wharf and the little estuary water