The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [307]
She had been sitting outside, three mornings after Louisa’s and Edward’s departure, trying to read a book; and, hardly aware that she was doing so, she had started to finger the little wooden cross she wore, when suddenly the thought struck her. The old woman who had given it to her: how lonely she must have been. Did my mother ever go to see her, Fanny wondered? Probably not. I’m quite sure I was only taken to see her once. And why? Almost certainly because my mother was ashamed of her. She didn’t even want me to keep this wooden cross, the only thing the old woman was ever able to give her granddaughter. Here am I, she considered, feeling sorry for myself because I have not been invited to the house of a man I hardly know and who has probably forgotten me; but how many years was my grandmother left to sit in that house in Lymington all alone, denied the love and affection of a granddaughter, all for a worthless vanity. For the first time in her life Fanny realized that nature is as wasteful of the affections as it is of the acorns that fall upon the forest floor.
‘I don’t care what they think,’ she murmured. ‘I shall go into Lymington tomorrow.’
Isaac Seagull gazed at her with interest. He understood exactly the daring of her question, as she calmly set out across the great social chasm that divided them, like an explorer upon a flimsy bridge. This one’s got courage, the master smuggler thought. He answered her carefully, all the same. ‘I’ve never thought of it as such, Miss Albion,’ he said. ‘It would be very distant, you see, and a long time ago.’
‘Did you know my grandmother, old Mrs Totton?’
‘I did.’ He smiled. ‘A fine old lady.’
‘Was she not born a Miss Seagull?’
‘So I believe, Miss Albion. In fact,’ he admitted straightforwardly, ‘she was my father’s cousin. She had no brothers or sisters. That line of the family’s all gone.’
‘Except for me.’
‘If you wish to think of it that way.’
‘You don’t advise it?’
Isaac Seagull looked towards the end of the small garden. His curious, chinless face, in reflective repose, had an unexpected fineness, she thought.
‘I shouldn’t think, Miss Albion, that anyone in the town would remember about old Mrs Totton being a Seagull. I expect I’d be the only one who knows.’ He paused, apparently doing a quick reckoning. ‘You had sixteen great-great-grandparents and one of those was my great-grandfather. Only through your mother’s mother, too. No.’ He shook his head wryly. ‘You’re Miss Albion of Albion House as sure as I’m plain Isaac Seagull of the Angel Inn. If I said I was related to you, Miss Albion, people would just laugh at me and say I was getting above myself.’ And he smiled at her kindly.
‘So if my grandmother was the daughter of a Mr Seagull,’ she persisted quietly, ‘who was her mother?’
‘I can’t say I remember. Don’t think I ever knew.’
‘Liar.’
It was not often that anyone dared to say that to Isaac Seagull. He looked down into the girl’s startling blue eyes. ‘You don’t need to know.’
‘I do.’
‘If my memory serves me,’ he said reluctantly, ‘she might have been a Miss Puckle.’
‘Puckle?’ Fanny felt herself go pale. She couldn’t help it. Puckle, the gnome-like figure with the oaken face she had seen at Buckler’s Hard? Puckle, the family of woodsmen and charcoal burners, the lowliest peasants in the Forest? Why some of them, she had heard, used to live in hovels. ‘One of the Puckles of Burley?’
‘He was very taken with her, Miss Albion. She possessed a rare intelligence. She taught herself to read and write which, forgive me, none of the other Puckles has ever done, I’m sure. My father always told me she was a remarkable woman in every way.’
‘I see.’ She was dazed. Entire landscapes were suddenly opening up before her. In her mind’s eye she saw vistas of underground places, deep burrows, gnarled roots. They were peopled, too, with strange creatures – loathsome, subhuman, hag-like – who turned to look at her or came to her side, claiming her for their own. She felt a cold panic, as though she had been trapped in a cave