The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [261]
Not all the Customs men were so cowardly, though. Over on the Isle of Wight, the Customs officer William Arnold had won the grudging respect of the whole region by the way he had gone about the job. With little support from the government, he had paid out of his own pocket for a swift cutter to patrol the local waters; and very effective it had been. If the other towns had had such cutters, the smugglers along the coast might have had a hard time of it. There were other ways to catch them, though, and whatever Grockleton’s faults may have been, he had a strong sense of duty and he had courage.
That was why, if his plan worked, he was soon going to be the most hated man in the county.
He continued down the street towards the quay. People were moving about now, but they were still watching him. He could imagine the looks behind his back, but he did not turn to see. At the bottom of the street just off to one side was the Customs house which was his official place of business.
He was just in sight of it when he happened to see the Frenchman. The Frenchman, also, bowed and smiled politely. But for a different reason. He and his compatriots were in Lymington as guests of His Britannic Majesty. It was his duty to be polite, therefore, even to a Customs official.
The count – for as well as commanding a regiment, he was also an aristocrat – was certainly a most agreeable man and a great favourite with Mrs Grockleton whom he treated as if she were a duchess. Several of his relations having met their deaths by the guillotine in the recent French Revolution, he carried, at least in Mrs Grockleton’s eyes, a certain aura of tragic romance about him. With his fellow aristocrats and troops quartered in Lymington, and some other émigré French forces taking refuge in England, he was anxious to go and fight against the new revolutionary regime in France at the first opportunity.
‘Soon, Monsieur le Comte.’ Mrs Grockleton would sigh. ‘Soon, we shall see better times, I trust.’ That England during the last hundred years had been engaged in, or close to, hostilities with royalist France for most of the time was a fact which, faced with the charming French aristocrat, she had now entirely forgotten.
There was nothing very surprising, therefore, if, seeing the Frenchman, the Customs officer should have reached into his coat pocket, drawn out a letter and handed it to him with the words, overheard by a passer-by: ‘A letter from my wife, Count.’ Then he passed on towards the Customs house.
Only a little while later, in the privacy of his lodgings, did the count open the letter and read its contents with an expression of horror. ‘Mon Dieu,’ he murmured, ‘what shall I do now?’
From the Reverend William Gilpin’s front door the lane ran straight between the hedgerows of small fields until it met another track at right angles. Down the lane, in pleasant sunlight, came Gilpin wearing a large clerical hat and carrying a stick, and Fanny in a long coat and cape. The two friends enjoyed the pleasant walk. Their object was the small building on the left just before the end of the lane.
Gilpin’s school was a somewhat different establishment from Mrs Grockleton’s academy, yet possibly just as useful. The Boldre parish never having had a school before, Gilpin had founded it not long after his arrival there and the little seat of learning had such charm that you might almost have called it picturesque.
The whole building was hardly forty feet long and built in the shape of a ‘T’. The long central section was a single high room, twenty-five feet long. The cross section was divided into two low storeys, with accommodation for a teacher and a classroom for the girls. The end of the central section facing the lane was charmingly shaped like a classical fa