The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [231]
‘So he had no right to Estovers?’
‘Technically no. I can make application, of course, but unless we mean to conceal this from the court …’
‘No. No. No!’ The final word was a shout. Her patience had suddenly given out. ‘The last thing in the world I need now is to be caught out in a lie, concealing evidence from the court. If he hasn’t the right of Estovers then he hasn’t and that’s that.’ She couldn’t take any more today. ‘John, please make him go away.’
Furzey listened carefully, as the lawyer explained, but he did not hear. The explanation about the building date of his dwelling meant nothing to him: he had never heard of it, didn’t believe it, thought it was a trick, refused to take it in. When the lawyer said, ‘It’s a pity you didn’t make the claim when you should have back in the last king’s reign – plenty of those claims are improper, but they’re all being allowed,’ Furzey looked down at the floor; but since that made it his fault, he managed within moments to screen this information from his mind. There was only one thing Furzey knew. Whatever this lawyer had said, he’d heard it for himself. That shout – ‘No!’ – from behind the door. It was that woman, the Lady of Albion House, who had denied him.
And so it was, in an excess of rage and bitterness, that he swore to his family that night: ‘She’s the one. She’s the one that’s taken away our rights. She’s the one that hates us.’
Two months later, Alice was greatly surprised when the Duke of York dropped his lawsuit against her.
1685
People were often surprised that Betty Lisle was twenty-four and unmarried. With her fair hair and fine, grey-blue eyes she was pleasant to look at. Had she been rich, no doubt people would have said she was beautiful. She wasn’t poor: Albion House and much of the Albion land was to come to her.
‘The fault is mine,’ Alice would acknowledge. ‘I have kept her too much with me.’
This was certainly true. Betty’s older sisters were married and away. Margaret and Whitaker were frequent visitors, but Bridget and Leonard Hoar had gone to Massachusetts where, for a while, Hoar had been President of Harvard. Tryphena and Robert Lloyd were in London. Alice and Betty were often alone, therefore, in the country.
Mostly they were at Albion House. They both loved it. To Alice, no matter what hardships she had known, the house her father built her had remained a refuge where she felt secure and at peace. Once the Duke of York’s threat of litigation had been withdrawn she had known that it would pass intact to Betty and what might have been lonely years for her were filled with the joy of watching her youngest daughter relive the happy years of her own childhood. For Betty herself the gabled house in the woods seemed the happiest place on earth: her family home, hidden away from the world. In winter, when the frost left gleaming icicles on the trees and they went down the snowy lane to old Boldre church on its little knoll, it seemed intimate and magical. In summer, when she rode up on to the wide heath to watch the visiting birds floating over the heather, or cantered down to Oakley, to see old Stephen Pride, the Forest seemed magnificent and wild, yet full of friends.
But the house was also a serious place, on account of the visitors: the men of religion. King Charles’s promise to Alice at Bolderwood, that he would give his subjects religious freedom, had actually come to pass in 1672. But it hadn’t lasted. Within a year, Parliament had struck it down. Dissenters were thrust firmly back to the margin of society and forbidden all public office. The only effect of the brief freedom was to cause all the dissenters to come out into the open so they’d be known in future. Alice quietly continued to provide a haven for Puritan preachers and was generally left alone; but it brought a certain air of seriousness and purpose into the house that was bound to affect the young girl living with her. There was something else, besides: although Alice hardly realized it, the preachers who came to seek her hospitality