The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [125]
He is all I have, the merchant thought, and now I have lost him. Because of a dragon. Nor – so little did the poor man know of childhood – had he any idea what to do with Jonathan next.
It was a source of complete amazement to him therefore, the next day, when his son quite cheerfully asked him: ‘Will you take me to the salterns with you when you go there next time, Father?’
And anxious not to lose the chance of a reconciliation he answered quickly: ‘I’m going there this very afternoon.’
The unusual warmth of the last few days had changed to more typical April weather. Small white and grey clouds crossed the washed blue sky. The breeze was damp; occasional gusts brought a light spotting of rain, as Henry Totton and Jonathan, having walked to the church at the top of the High Street, turned left and descended the long lane that led down towards the sea.
The coastal strip below the borough was a bare and windswept place. From Lymington quay, the river’s small estuary continued south for about a mile until it emerged fully into the Solent. On the right side, below the small ridge on which the borough stood, and extending southwest for two and a half miles to the little inlet and hamlet of Keyhaven, lay the wide, watery flats of Pennington Marshes.
It was an empty-seeming place: green wastes of tufted marsh grass, little gorses soaked with salty mist, small thorn trees stunted and warped by the sea breeze dotted the landscape. Beyond, the long line of the Isle of Wight hovered across the Solent, its blue-green slopes turning into chalk cliffs away on the right. You might have thought the place was habitation only for the gulls and curlews and wild duck upon the marshes. But you would have been wrong.
For down near the shore a string of small buildings and a score or more of what looked like tiny windmills, their sails at present motionless, told a different story, reminding you that it was this marshland that provided the most important commodity the merchants of Lymington shipped: salt.
There had been salt pans there since Saxon times. The need for salt was huge. There was no other way of preserving flesh or fish. When the farmers killed their pigs and cattle in November, the meat had all to be salted so it could be used during the winter. If the king wanted venison from the Forest for his court or to feed his troops, it must be salted. England produced vast quantities and it all came from the sea.
Henry Totton owned a saltern on Pennington Marshes. They could see its boiling house and wind pumps as soon as they started along the gravelly path across the levels. It was one of a group down by the shoreline. It did not take them long to reach the place.
Jonathan liked the salterns; perhaps it was because of where they were, so close to the sea. The first thing needed for making salt was a large feeder pond, set just in from the shoreline, into which the sea water could flow at high tide. Jonathan loved to watch the sea come rippling in down the curving channels. He and Willie had once made a similar construction of their own when they were playing on a sandy beach along the coast.
The salt pans that came next were carefully built. They were, in fact, a huge single basin – shallow and dead level – divided into small ponds, about twenty feet square, by mud banks six inches high and just wide enough for a man to walk on. Water from the feeder pond was baled into these with wooden scoops; but they were only filled about three inches deep. From here, the salt-making began.
It was very simple. The water had to evaporate. This would only work in the summer and, the warmer the weather and hotter the sun, the more salt you could produce. The season usually began at the very end of April. In a good year it might last sixteen weeks. Once, in a very bad year, it had lasted only two.
The idea was not to leave the water to evaporate in a single pan.
‘Evaporation takes time, Jonathan,’ his father had told him long ago, ‘and we need a continuous