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By Root 3353 0

Although land inclosures and new production methods had taken the traditional livelihood from some peasant farmers, the landowners had prospered. In London and the handful of big cities that dotted the vast stretches of rural England, speculators were building handsome Georgian squares. People were moving about. Even the open wastes of the Forest were now crossed by a turnpike road – the first return to such a civilized transport system since Roman times. Like the latter-day Romans they were, the fashionable English classes were going in search of health and leisure. In the West Country the ancient Roman spa of Bath had been revived and a gracious resort built around its mineral springs. More recently the royal court of King George III, in the belief that it might help cure the king’s bouts of madness, had become interested in the benefits not only of mineral waters but of those of the sea. Several times in recent years King George III had come to the New Forest on his way to the little seaside resort of Weymouth, some forty miles further west along the coast. He had stayed with the Drummonds and the Burrards, and visited the Isle of Wight.

‘Why go all the way to Weymouth, when Lymington is so much closer and surely just as healthy?’ Mrs Grockleton declared. People came to bathe at Lymington, some of them very respectable. If the king and his court made regular stays there the fashionable world would surely follow. ‘And then,’ she explained to her silent husband, ‘our own position, what with the academy and my other plans, is assured. For we shall, you see, be there already. They will come to us.’ She gave him a delighted smile. ‘I have not told you, Mr Grockleton, of my latest idea.’

‘And what is that?’ he enquired, as he knew he must.

‘Why, we are going to give a ball!’

‘A ball? Dancing?’

‘Indeed. At the Assembly Rooms. You see, Mr Grockleton, with our girls at the academy, their families and friends – don’t you understand? Everyone will come!’ She did not say so, but she had already secretly included the Burrards in this number.

‘Perhaps’, Mr Grockleton said sagely, ‘nobody will come.’

‘Oh, fie, Mr Grockleton,’ said Mrs Grockleton again, but this time with some asperity.

Yet Mr Grockleton had a reason for these fears – something he knew, which she did not. Unfortunately, he could not tell her what it was.

It might have been supposed that in Georgian England the age of miracles was passed. Yet at the very moment when Mrs Grockleton was chiding her husband for his lack of faith in Lymington – that is to say, at eleven o’clock that spring morning – a few miles away on the Beaulieu estate a miracle of sorts was in progress. It was happening at the busy place on the Beaulieu River known as Buckler’s Hard.

There, in the bright morning sunlight, a man had become invisible.

The Hard – the name meant a sloping shore road where boats could be drawn up – had a lovely setting. As the river made a westward loop, broad banks created gentle slopes, almost two hundred yards long, down to the water. Situated some two miles downstream from the old abbey and the same distance upstream from the Solent water, it was a peaceful place, sheltered from the prevailing sea breezes. Once, long ago in the days of the monks, a furious prior with hands like claws had nearly come to blows with some fishermen at the river bend above. But his shouts had been one of the few to disturb the habitual silence of the sheltered curve and the reedy marshes opposite. The abbey had been dissolved, the monks departed; Armada, Civil War, Cromwell, the merry monarch, all had come and gone; but nobody had troubled about the quiet place. Until about seventy years earlier.

The reason was sugar.

Of all the opportunities for amassing wealth in the eighteenth century, nothing could approach the fortunes to be made in sugar. The sugar merchants’ lobby in Parliament was powerful. The richest man in England, who had purchased a noble estate west of Sarum, was heir to a sugar fortune. The Morants who had bought Brockenhurst and other New Forest estates were