The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [178]
She had been back to see him several times already. The first time she had walked by, seen the children and played with the little boy until he came. The next time she had come, knowing Puckle would be there. They had talked; she had sat and watched as he played with Tom, or quietly carved a piece of wood. She realized that she already knew every sinew in his hands.
She had felt his hand upon her arm and upon her shoulder; she longed, now, to feel it around her waist. She could not help it. Nor was this all. Strong though he was, when she watched his daughter preparing the food, or saw him rather helplessly set out to wash the children’s dirty clothes, he suddenly seemed vulnerable. He needs me, she thought.
Twice she had gone to where she knew he would be working in the woods and watched him from a distance, although he did not know it. Once, unexpectedly, she had seen him go by in his cart, along the track up from Lyndhurst. She had felt her heart jump, but stood quite still, just staring after him as he passed, unaware of her presence.
Obsession. She had to conceal it. Her family knew nothing of her walks to Burley since she had always made some excuse for her absence. Nick Pride, of course, had no idea of it. But what did it mean? Why was she suffering? Why was it, night and day, that she longed to be only there, in the woodman’s presence?
Each time she went to Burley she passed the Rufus tree and each time she came back, she would pause there, trying to make sense of her thoughts and prepare herself, before returning to her family and to Nick.
How aware one became of the forest sounds, resting under the great oak’s shade in the late afternoon. The woods were full of birds – chiff-chaffs and tits, redstarts and nuthatches – but their mating and nesting was all done now, their young were mostly grown and flying. Their song was muted and occasional, therefore, and only the cooing of the pigeons came regularly through the woods. It was the ceaseless sound of the wood crickets, the drone of myriad insects, the humming of the bees as they visited the honeysuckle scenting the forest air – this was the sleepy summer music Jane listened to, all around.
But the shady space in which she rested was not still. Far from it. For summer was the time when the vast, hidden population that the tree’s huge system had housed came out to make an appearance. The space under the tree was teeming with life.
It would have been impossible to say how many species there were – perhaps ten thousand; probably more. There were the ticks and mites, so small you could hardly see them, which had made their way from the ground up the swaying bracken so that they could be brushed off on to the bodies of passing warm-blooded animals, like humans, sucking the blood and causing the skin to itch. More irritating still were the horseflies, who had spent the winter as maggots by the oak tree’s roots and now attacked, clumsily but constantly. There were spiders and bugs by the hundred, crawling over the warm bark, caterpillars – blue, yellow, green, orange – making their fantastic, furry progress to feed upon the leaves; there were weevils and ladybirds and moths. Butterflies were rarer in the Forest, but the handsome red admiral could be seen and, high in the canopy, the gorgeous purple emperor would feed on the sugar-rich trails left by the tiny aphids as those minute insects made their way across the leaves.
Jane would remain for an hour under the tree. She would look at the bright caterpillars, or gaze out at the green shadows of the other oaks in the glade. Sometimes her thoughts would turn to the coming Armada and to young Nick up by his beacon; sometimes she would think of Puckle. Before she left, she would appear to be calm. But she was not.
Above her, the huge system of the great tree was in a high state of activity. It knew nothing of the Armada, or of Jane. The myriad leaves of its spreading