The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [330]
‘You shall never be alone, Father.’
‘You promise me, Fanny, that you won’t go away and leave me all alone?’
‘Never, Father,’ she promised, suddenly moved. ‘I will never leave you.’
Fanny had not been in love before and so she did not know about the pain. There was, besides, this further problem: she had no idea she was in love at all.
If Mr Martell came into her mind, as he often did, it was only as a figure of fear and repulsion. If she suddenly fancied she saw his dark image through a window or, hearing a horse’s hoofs, turned, half expecting it would be him, or listened carefully whenever her cousin Louisa spoke of her visits to the Burrards’, in case she spoke of him, these were only examples, she told herself, of a sort of morbid interest, just as one might think of some threatening, ghostly figure from a Gothic novel. To think that she could have been on terms of near intimacy not merely with a Penruddock, but with the very image of her great-grandmother’s murderer – for that was effectively what he was. What could she make of her own feelings, of his smile, of his hints, even of tenderness? She did not know; she told herself she did not care. It was all useless and meaningless anyway. But with these reflections came one other new and insidious thought.
Could it be that her judgement was at fault? Bad blood. She had bad blood, low connections: she was tainted. Her gentility, her claims to consideration were, in a sense, a fraud. At least the peasants like Puckle are honestly what they are, whereas I lack even that excuse for my existence, she thought. Even if Mr Martell were not an impossible Penruddock, he could scarcely wish to touch me if he knew the truth.
Although hardly aware of the process, she found that by Christmas she had less and less energy. Sometimes she would sit all morning in the parlour, apparently reading a book yet in reality not even doing that. If a visitor like Mr Gilpin called, she could rouse herself into a liveliness, so that she seemed her normal self. But the instant he was gone she would relapse into lethargy, staring out of the window. If Gilpin invited her to tea she would agree to go; she would mean to go; but for some reason she did not understand herself she would sit, hardly able to move until Mrs Pride, standing there with her coat, would induce one of those little bursts of energy that would carry her through the visit.
She got through her days. She did all that was required. One might have accepted, if one did not know her, that the weather was making her listless. No one could know, since she could not tell them, that, hour after hour, she felt not sadness as much as a great, grey sense that everything was pointless.
By mid-January Mrs Pride and Mr Gilpin were seriously worried about her.
Fanny Albion was not the only worry upon the vicar’s mind that month. Of no less concern was the fate of another even younger life.
Nathaniel Furzey had been found out.
It was inevitable that sooner or later someone was going to talk. Over the Christmas season one of the boys told his sister; she told her mother. Within a week it was all over the Forest. Some people laughed, others were scandalized. With the exception of the Prides, who were embarrassed, the parents of the other boys involved were up in arms. To induce the boys to slip out of their cottages at night; to run around naked; to play at witchcraft. They came to see the vicar.
So did the master of the school. ‘This cannot go on,’ he told Gilpin frankly. ‘The boy is a bad influence. I do not think I can continue if he is there. Perhaps’, he added with a viciousness he had been storing for months, ‘you have been teaching him too much.’
It was useless to argue with so much