The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [194]
Albion’s own fortune remained modest, however, but that of his friends Thomas and Helena Gorges enjoyed a spectacular increase. For Queen Elizabeth looked kindly upon their request and granted them the hulk. By the time they had quietly emptied its contents, Sir Thomas Gorges and his wife the marchioness realized that they had one of the greatest fortunes in the south of England.
‘And now’, Helena joyfully declared, ‘you can build your house at Longford, Thomas.’
It was not until nearly two years later that Albion was invited to accompany them up to the big estate below Sarum. ‘The house isn’t quite finished yet, Clement,’ his host told him, ‘but I’d like you to see it.’
They had certainly chosen a beautiful site, Albion thought, as they came to the lush parkland down by the Avon. But what no one had prepared him for, and which caused him first to gasp and then to burst out laughing, was the design.
For there, in the tranquil peace of an inland Wiltshire valley, built on a huge scale, with handsome windows instead of embrasures, was a massive triangular fortress. ‘By all the saints, Thomas,’ he cried, ‘it’s Hurst!’
It was indeed. The great country house, which Gorges called Longford Castle, was an almost exact replica of the triangular coastal fortress by the Forest. In memory of the Spanish hulk and its cargo of silver he had even had carved, high over the entrance, a depiction of Neptune reclining cheerfully in a ship with his trident sloped over his shoulder, on each side of which was a caryatid, one with his face and the other with his wife’s carved upon them. You had to admire his cheerful humour.
‘Helena insists that Swedish castles are all triangular and that the carving depicts her Viking ancestors,’ he said with a wink.
Swedish castle or gunnery fort, whatever you thought it was, the great triangular mansion would long remain one of the most eccentric country houses in England.
And if perhaps thereafter, Albion felt an occasional pang of jealousy at his aristocratic friends’ good fortune, he had to confess that, thanks to Gorges and Helena, his loyalty was never questioned again. He was even able, with a good conscience, to expropriate a considerable quantity of Her Majesty’s timber in the course of his subsequent career.
Jane married Puckle.
Nick Pride was completely astonished and so was everyone else. ‘If I hadn’t been stuck up at Malwood at the beacon, it would never have happened,’ he said.
‘If she was going to do a thing like that,’ said his mother, ‘you’re better off without her.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Nick. ‘It’s like she was under a spell, I reckon.’ Which didn’t make much sense.
Jane’s parents weren’t too pleased about it either. In fact, when they got married Jane’s mother didn’t want to give her the little wooden cross she’d always promised her. But in the end, not wanting to quarrel with her, she did. And Jane wore it like a talisman.
The great Armada storm did not only change the lives of men; here and there it made small alterations in the greater life of the Forest too.
It was deep on a night, when the Spanish galleons were tossing helplessly in the northern seas, that the wind chose to race with a particular urgency through the glade by the miraculous Rufus tree. The branches of the great tree bent and shook. The myriad life forms in its crevices clung or crouched deeper into their shelters. Tiny organisms, minute particularities, flew off into the moving darkness of the wind, carried into chaos. All around, tall trees swayed, bent, oak leaves and acorns rattling in the furious tearing and buffeting of the wind, which howled and gusted and whooshed in the blackness.
But the roots of the miraculous tree were as wide as its branches and even though, on this wild Armada