The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [267]
This was greeted with a silence during which the clock quietly sounded another forty ticks.
‘Of course she should.’ Her aunt Adelaide.
Fanny knew better than to interrupt. Not yet, anyway. Only twenty ticks now intervened.
‘How long shall you be gone, Fanny?’ A hint of reproach, of sadness, bravely borne.
‘Only six days, Father, including the journey.’
‘Quite right,’ said Adelaide firmly. ‘We shall miss you, but you are right to go away to see your cousin.’
‘She’s going to see Oxford. It seems a long way.’ They had come full circle. A greying cinder fell.
Francis Albion was eighty-eight years old. People said he had stayed alive so long to see his daughter grown up and it was probably true. Then people said that he wanted to see her safely married. But since any mention of that subject seemed to fill him with dismay, this clearly could not be the case. And there were even those who wondered if, having grown so used to being alive for such a prodigiously long time, Mr Albion might not be doing it for himself.
The fact was that Francis Albion had never expected to have a child at all. The last of Peter and Betty Albion’s children, who had expected his elder brother to continue the family line, he had been a wanderer much of his life. A lawyer in London, an agent in France, a merchant for a while in America, he had always made enough to live as a gentleman, but not enough to marry. By the age of forty, when the death of his brother left him heir to the Albion estate, he was a confirmed bachelor with no desire to settle. His sister Adelaide had kept Albion House going alone for another twenty years before he had finally returned, as he put it, to take up his family obligations in the Forest.
These were not onerous and he made sure they were profitable to him. They soon included the position of gentleman keeper of one of the walks, as the minor divisions of the Forest were now called. His discharge of this responsibility was typical. Even by the genial standards of the eighteenth century the administration of the New Forest had become notoriously lax. When the crown, in one of its occasional attempts to sort the old place out, had held a royal commission some years before, the commissioners, having pointed out that the woodward of the Forest had kept no accounts for eighteen years, also noted rather sourly that when they inspected the coppice in Mr Albion’s walk, where the king’s timber was supposed to be grown, they had found it used as a huge rabbit warren, with not a single tree to be found in the whole inclosure.
Having assured the commissioners that something would be done, Francis Albion’s only comment to his sister was: ‘I had a thousand rabbits out of there last year and I’ll have another thousand next.’
What then, at the age of sixty-five, had induced Mr Albion to marry Miss Totton of Lymington, thirty years his junior?
Some said it was love. Others that, after his sister Adelaide had suffered a severe cold, it had occurred to Albion that she might not always be there to look after him. Whatever the reason, Mr Albion proposed and Miss Totton accepted, and came to live at Albion House.
It was strange, really, that Miss Totton had not married long before. She was pleasant-looking, respectable; she wasn’t poor. Perhaps she had been crossed in love when young. Whatever the reason, at the age of thirty-five, she had obviously decided that marriage into the Albions, even as a nurse, was preferable to her present situation. Her half-brother, as head of the Totton family, was pleased with the Albion connection, and Adelaide seemed genuinely glad to see her brother married. She kept to her own wing of the house and the two women had got on well.
The marriage had been rather successful. Miss Totton had not expected much, but marriage seemed to have given Francis Albion a new lease of life. Even so, it came as quite a shock to him when, in his sixty-eighth year, his wife informed him that she was pregnant.
‘Such things can happen, Francis,’ she told him