The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [197]
It had come as rather a surprise to her that a few months before, when discussing in a general way the men she might marry, her father had mentioned one name with particular favour: John Lisle.
They had met him at a gathering of a number of local gentry families in the Buttons’ fine house near Lymington. He was a few years older than she and recently a widower. He had children. He had struck her as a sensible, intelligent man, although perhaps a little too earnest. Her father had talked to him more than she had.
‘But Father,’ she had reminded him, ‘his family …’
‘An ancient family.’ The Lisles were indeed a family of some antiquity who had for a long time possessed lands on the Isle of Wight.
‘Yes, but his father …’ The whole county knew about John Lisle’s father. Inheriting a good estate, he had squandered both it and his reputation. His wife had left him; he had taken to drink; in the end, he had even been arrested for debt. ‘Isn’t there bad blood …?’
Bad blood: that expression so beloved of the landed classes. A notorious brigand or two gave a certain patina to the ancestral furniture. But you had to be careful. Bad blood meant danger, uncertainty, unsoundness, blighted harvests, diseased trees. The gentry, who were still partly farmers, had their feet on the ground. Breeding people, after all, was no different from breeding livestock. Bad blood will out. It had to be avoided.
But to her surprise, her father only smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘now let me advise you on that.’ And giving her that look of his that announced, ‘I speak with a lifetime of experience as a lawyer,’ he proceeded: ‘When a man has a father who has lost his substance there are two things he can do. He can accept a lowly condition, or he can fight back and make his fortune.’
‘Isn’t that what younger sons are meant to do?’
‘Yes.’ A cloud crossed his face as he reflected that this was just what his own younger brother had failed to do. ‘But when a father has dishonoured his family as well then the case is even sharper. The son of such a man faces not only poverty but shame, ridicule. Every step he takes down the street is dogged by shadows. Some men hide. They seek a life of obscurity. But the bravest souls outface the world. They hold their heads high; their ambition is not like a fire of hope, but a sword of steel. They seek fame twice: once for themselves and once to erase the shame of their fathers. That memory is always with them, like a thorn, driving them on.’ He paused and smiled. ‘John Lisle, I think, is such a one. He is a good man, an honest man. I’m sure he is kind. But he has that in him.’ He looked at her with affection. ‘When a father has an heiress as a daughter he looks, if he is wise, for a husband who will know how to use that fortune: a man of ambition.’
‘Not another heir, Father? The ambitious man, surely, might care only for her money.’
‘You must trust my judgement.’ He sighed. ‘The trouble is that most of the heirs of fine estates are either soft, or lazy, or both.’ And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he laughed.
‘Why are you laughing?’ she asked.
‘I was just thinking, Alicia.’ He sometimes called her that. ‘With your strong character I wouldn’t inflict you on some unsuspecting heir to a great estate. You’d destroy the poor boy entirely.’
‘I?’ She looked at him in genuine astonishment. ‘I have no thought of being a strong character, Father,’ she replied, which only caused him to smile at her the more fondly.
‘I know, my child. I know.’ He tapped his finger lightly on her arm. ‘Consider John Lisle, though. I only ask that. You will find him worthy of respect.’
When, two days later, Stephen Pride stopped at the cottage of Gabriel Furzey on the way to the green, he reckoned he was doing him a favour. ‘Shouldn’t you be going?’ he enquired.
‘No,’ said Gabriel, which, thought Pride, was typical.
If, in the three hundred years since they had quarrelled about a pony, the Prides and the Furzeys had remained in Oakley, it was