The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [235]
By summer, however, the pond began to evaporate. The warm heath soaked up any showers that fell upon it. The snake of water disappeared. Day by day the animals cropping the lush grass by the pond’s edge advanced a little further. By the fence month in midsummer the pond was only half its springtime size. By August it was often completely dry. As he looked at it now, two cows and a pony were grazing in the green depression beside the three or four large puddles remaining at its centre.
Stephen Pride was feeling relieved. He had been to Albion House that morning and had just walked back. The news there had been exactly as he’d hoped: Dame Alice was still in London and no word had come to say she was returning. That was good. He’d known and loved Dame Alice all her life, and he didn’t want to see her back at present, not the way things were at Lymington.
Because of his wife and her family, Pride usually knew more than most of the Oakley people about what was going on in Lymington, but nobody could have failed to be aware of the way feeling was running there in the last few years. If the little harbour town had been seething, so had almost every borough in England.
There might be some in the county who still hankered for the old Catholic faith, but the century since the Armada had thinned their ranks greatly by now. As for the townsfolk, they wanted none of it. The merchants and small traders of Lymington had disliked Charles I and distrusted Charles II. A few years ago, when concerns about the Catholic succession had been especially high in Parliament, a rogue named Titus Oates had invented a Catholic plot to depose Charles and put James in his place. The Jesuits were to take over the country; honest Protestants would be murdered. The whole thing was a fiction from start to finish, by which Oates aimed to make himself a rich celebrity. But the English were so afraid of Catholicism by then that they believed it. Hardly a week went by without Oates creating some further tale. Up and down the country people started imagining Jesuits peeping from behind windows or lurking round corners. And the growing port of Lymington was no exception. Half the town was looking for Jesuits. The mayor and his council were ready to arm the citizens.
So when Monmouth had raised his banner for the Protestant cause, Lymington had not hesitated. Within a day the mayor had several dozen men under arms. The local merchants and gentlemen were mostly with him. Pride himself had seen half a dozen local worthies riding past Oakley on their way up to Albion House to seek Alice’s support. A message had already been sent by a swift horseman to Monmouth to assure him: ‘Lymington is with you.’ The afternoon before, there had been a march through the streets with pipes and drums, followed by ale and punch for everyone at the house of one of the merchants. It was like a carnival.
And Stephen Pride the villager, like John Hancock the lawyer, looked on cautiously. ‘Let the townspeople get excited,’ he had told his son Jim. ‘But those of us in the Forest may be wiser. No matter what happens with Monmouth, I’ll still have my cows and you’ll still be underkeeper. I just thank God’, he added, ‘that Dame Alice isn’t here. They’d draw her in whether she wanted it or not.’
He was in a reasonably cheerful mood, therefore, when he caught sight, a hundred yards past the pond, of a group of people listening to an argument. He went towards them.
It wasn’t often you saw the two Furzey boys together. They were actually middle-aged men now and, since Gabriel’s death a few years ago, George Furzey had taken over his cottage; but to Stephen Pride they were still the Furzey boys. God knows they both looked just like old Gabriel. George was a little bigger, but they both bulged at the waist in the same way. And, Stephen thought privately, they were both just as obstinate as their father.
William Furzey had never made much of himself over at Ringwood: he worked for a farmer as a stockman, looking after the cattle. A long way to go for no good reason, it had always seemed