The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [257]
The miracle was made greater yet by the fact that, by the time he stepped on to the vessel under construction at the water’s edge, there wasn’t a single person in the yard who couldn’t have sworn, had you asked them, that Abraham Puckle had been there all morning.
‘That’s the best one, Fanny,’ said the Reverend William Gilpin with approval; and the heiress to the Albion estate smiled with pleasure, as she put the drawing back into her sketching book, because she thought so too.
They were sitting by the window of the library in the vicarage – a big Georgian house with a large beech tree just opposite its front door.
The vicar of Boldre was a handsome old man. A little corpulent, but powerfully built, he and the heiress of Albion House were very fond of each other. The reasons for loving the distinguished clergyman were too obvious to need explanation. His for loving Fanny, whom he had christened himself, were numerous: she was kind and thoughtful for others; she was also lively, intelligent and really drew quite well. He enjoyed her company. Her fair hair had a reddish tint; her eyes were strikingly blue; her complexion was excellent. Had he been, say, thirty years younger and not already happily married – he admitted it frankly, at least to himself – he’d have tried to marry Fanny Albion.
The drawing she had done was a New Forest view, looking across from Beaulieu Heath, past Oakley, to a distant prospect of the Isle of Wight and the hazy sea. It was altogether admirable: the near ground, which in truth had only a shallow undulation, had been judiciously raised at one point and a solitary stricken oak had been added. A small brick kiln nearby had, quite rightly, been expunged. The heath and woodland had a controlled but natural wildness, the sea a pleasant mystery. It was – and this was the highest term of praise he could use – it was picturesque.
If there was one thing – upon earth, that is – that the Reverend William Gilpin believed in, it was the importance of the picturesque. His published Observations on the subject had made him famous and was much admired. He had travelled all over Europe in search of the picturesque – to the mountains of Switzerland, the valleys of Italy, the rivers of France – and he had found it. In England, he assured his readers, there were landscapes entirely picturesque. The Lake District in the north was the best area, but there were many others. And his readers were ready to discover them.
The Georgian era was an age of order. The great classical country mansions of the aristocracy, the leaders of taste, had shown the triumph of rational man over nature; their broad parks, designed by Capability Brown, with sweeping lawns and carefully placed woods, had demonstrated how man – at least if he were in possession of a handsome fortune – could tutor nature into a state of graciousness. But as the Age of Reason swept on, people found its dictates a little too ordered, too severe; they looked for more variety. So now the successor to Brown, the genius Repton, had started adding flower gardens and pleasant walks to Brown’s bare parks. People began to see in the natural countryside not a dangerous chaos, but the kindly hand of God. In short, they went for walks outside the park in search of the picturesque, as Gilpin said they should.
He was quite clear about how to recognize the picturesque. It was all a question of choice. The Avon valley, being flat and cultivated, did not appeal to him. For similar reasons the ordered slopes of the Isle of Wight, although admirable as a blue mass in the distance, were, if one actually took the ferry across for a closer inspection, quite intolerable. Open heath, however wild, he found dull; but where there was variety, a contrast of wood and heath, of high ground and low ground – where, in a word, the Almighty had shown good judgement in showing His hand – there the Reverend William Gilpin could smile at his pupil and say, in his deep, sonorous voice: ‘Now that,