The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [114]
He tried not to worry about Jonathan. It wasn’t fair to the boy. And God knows he loved him. Since the death of his wife the previous year, young Jonathan was all he had.
As for Jonathan, looking at his father, he knew he disappointed him even if he did not quite know why. Some days he tried so hard to please him, but on others he forgot. If only his father would understand about the Seagulls.
It was the year his mother died that he had taken to wandering down to the quay alone. At the bottom end of the High Street, where the old burgage plots came to an end, there was a steep slope down to the water. It was a sharp drop in every sense. The old borough stopped at the top of it; so, as far as people like the Tottons were concerned, did respectability. Down that steep social slope clustered the untidy cottages of the fishermen. ‘And the other flotsam and jetsam,’ as his father put it, that drifted in from the sea or the Forest.
But to Jonathan it was a little heaven: the clinker boats with their heavy sails, the upturned boats on the quay, the seagull cries, the smell of tar and salt and drying seaweed, the piles of fish traps and nets – he loved to wander among all these. The Seagulls’ cottage – if you could call it that – lay at the seaward end. For it was not so much a cottage as a collection of articles, each more fascinating than the last, which had gathered themselves together into a cheerful heap. It must have happened by magic – perhaps the sea one stormy night had deposited them there – for it was impossible to imagine Alan Seagull going to such trouble to build anything that was not meant to float.
Perhaps, though, the Seagulls’ cottage would have floated. Along one wall the remains of a large rowing boat, hung lengthwise, its sides turned outwards, formed a sort of arbour where Seagull’s wife would often sit, nursing one of her younger children. The roof, which tracked this way and that, was made from all manner of planks, spars, areas of sailcloth, exhibiting here and there ridges and bumps that might be an oar, the keel of a boat, or an old chest. Smoke issued at one place from what looked like a lobster pot. Both roof and the outer plank walls were mostly black with tar. Here and there a tatty shutter suggested the existence of windows. By the doorway stood two large painted scallop shells. On the seaward side of the cottage a boat stood and fishing nets hung out to dry, with numerous floats. Beyond that lay a large area of reed beds, which sometimes smelled rank. In brief, to a boy it was a place of magical wonder.
Nor was the owner of this maritime hovel a pauper. Far from it: Alan Seagull owned his own vessel – a singlemasted, clinker-built craft, bigger than a fishing boat and with enough hold to carry small cargoes, not only along the coastal waters but even across to France. And although nothing was ever polished or showy, every part of that ship was in perfect working order. To the ship’s crew he was the master. Indeed, it was widely believed that Alan Seagull had a bit of money hidden away somewhere. Not like Totton, of course. But if ever he wanted something, it was noticed that he could always pay for it with cash. His family ate well.
Young Jonathan had often hung around the Seagull place, observing the seven or eight children who, like fish in an underwater grotto, would continually dart in and out of it. Watching them with their mother, he sensed a family warmth and happiness that had been missing from his own life. He was walking alone near their cottage one day, when one of them, a boy of about his age, had slipped after him and asked: ‘Do you want to play?’
Willie Seagull – he was such a funny little boy. He was so skinny you might have thought he was weak; but he was just wiry, and he was ready for anything. Jonathan, like the other sons of the better-off merchants, had to attend a small school run by a schoolmaster whom