The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [314]
So Fanny took her safely down into the hall and only she was aware that her aunt was still shaking.
But as the carriage was being brought round, it was the turn of sharp-eyed old Adelaide to look at Fanny and softly enquire: ‘Are you quite well, child? You look pale.’
‘Yes, Aunt Adelaide, I am well,’ she answered with a smile.
Yet in truth she was not, although she had no desire to tell her aunt the reason why. For the picture of Colonel Penruddock had been only too familiar to her: so much so that it had been all she could do not to gasp out loud when it emerged in the candlelight.
The figure and face were those of Mr Martell. To the life.
Caleb Furzey had set out at dawn on Wednesday morning from Oakley. The journey to Ringwood was one that he made every month or so to visit the market there. Sometimes he had piglets to sell, or some illicit venison. He would arrive by mid-morning, take his horse and cart to the inn, wander about in the market and, sooner or later, encounter one of the Ringwood Furzeys. By the end of the afternoon, he would be sitting in the inn, drinking and talking with anyone who cared to do so. Towards sunset, or even after dark, his cousins or the innkeeper would load him on to his cart and, while he slept in the back, the horse, who knew the way quite as well as he did, would walk slowly along the track past Burley and over Wilverley Plain and so take him home.
Given his superstitious nature and the vaguely mysterious reputation that Burley had always possessed, Caleb Furzey might have hesitated to drive past Burley on a night when the moon was full, but today, as he had proudly told his neighbours some time before, was a special occasion. It was the fiftieth birthday of one of his Ringwood cousins. ‘And if I ain’t there,’ he had told a surprised neighbour, ‘they say it won’t be a proper party at all.’
So it was with great expectations of family warmth and cheerful drinking that he was crossing the Forest now. He was up on Wilverley Plain when he saw the Albions’ carriage returning and, as they passed, he saluted the occupants respectfully enough.
The red sun was already sinking over Beaulieu Heath that evening when Wyndham Martell began to ride across it. He had just spent an interesting two hours with Mr Drummond of Cadland, but now it was time to return. Indeed, he was going to be somewhat late for Mrs Grockleton’s ball.
Hardly anyone was going to be there, as far as he could gather. As Martell gazed across the open Forest before him he saw it, very naturally, through the eyes of the gentry. And to the gentry, although the ordinary Forest folk did not realize it, the whole Forest was just a kind of lake. There were the Mill and Drummond families in the east, various others along the coast; in the centre the Morants and the Albions; there were landed families around the north of the Forest and the estates down the Avon valley, like Bisterne, on its eastern border. But as far as their social world was concerned, the forest villages and hamlets, and even the busy town of Lymington, scarcely existed. ‘There’s no one there,’ they would say, without the least sense of incongruity. Thus Mrs Grockleton’s desire to tempt the members of this class into her social orbit was not mere snobbery, but a more primeval instinct: she wanted, quite simply, to exist.
Her hopes that the Burrards would come were going to be disappointed. When she had heard he was calling upon Mr Drummond of Cadland, she had sent an urgent message through Louisa begging him to