The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [262]
‘Who sold you the plot of land for the school?’ Fanny had once asked him. She knew the ownership of almost every inch of land around there, but could not place that particular piece.
‘I stole it,’ the vicar had replied amiably, ‘from the King’s Forest. They made me pay a small fine later.’
The purpose of the vicar’s encroachment was simple enough: to take twenty boys and twenty girls from families in the Boldre parish hamlets, and teach them to read and write and cipher, as basic mathematics was then termed. For reading, naturally, they used the Bible, on which they were tested twice a week. Every Sunday, they put on the smart green coats with which the school provided them and paraded to Boldre church. This last feature also provided the vicar with a useful incentive. He knew his parishioners. If now and then a child was needed to help its parents in the field, no questions were asked about a day’s absence; but the strong woollen and cotton clothes the school provided free along with the green coats were a powerful inducement for a country family. And if any of the parents expressed doubts about the value of so much learning for their daughter he could assure them: ‘As writing and arithmetic are less necessary to girls, we spend more time on practical things – knitting and spinning and needlework.’ Beyond this level of education the parish school did not venture. To go further might, everyone agreed, have been to make the village children discontented with their lot.
‘Is it difficult’, Fanny now asked as they reached the gate of the school, ‘for these children to learn to read and write?’
Gilpin gave her a sidelong glance. ‘Because they are simple country folk, Fanny?’ He shook his head. ‘God did not create people with such disadvantages. I can assure you that a young Pride will learn just as quickly as you or I. The limits to his learning will be determined by what he sees – quite correctly, I may say – as being of use to him. Whoa, Sir,’ he suddenly exclaimed, as a small ten-year-old boy with a mass of curly black hair came rushing out of the schoolroom door and tried to get past them. ‘As for this young man.’ Gilpin smiled as he expertly caught the fleeing child and scooped him up. ‘This child, Fanny, would be a fine classical scholar had he been born in another condition – wouldn’t you, you rascal?’ he added affectionately as he held the boy securely.
Nathaniel Furzey had been a great find of Gilpin’s. He didn’t come from Boldre parish at all, but from up at Minstead; but the child was so precociously intelligent that Gilpin had wanted him for the Boldre school. Supposing that the Oakley Furzeys might have some family connection with the Minstead branch, he had enquired if they would take the child in during the school term, but the Oakley Furzeys weren’t interested. The Prides of Oakley however who, even a century after the Alice Lisle affair, still scarcely spoke to their Furzey neighbours, had no objection to housing this child from the Minstead family; their own boy, Andrew, attended the school. And so each morning Gilpin could look out of his window with pleasure to see Andrew Pride and curly-haired Nathaniel Furzey going along the lane towards his school.
‘I assume from your flight’, the vicar said cheerfully to his prisoner, ‘that the doctor is already here.’ He turned to Fanny. ‘This boy does not trust doctors. I told you he was intelligent.’
The doctor from whom Nathaniel Furzey was running was no less a person than Dr Smithson, the fashionable physician from Lymington, whom Gilpin had summoned at his own expense. He was standing in the main schoolroom with the children obediently waiting in line before him. The treatment he was administering was a vaccination.
Only eight years had passed since there had been a minor but troubling outbreak