The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [352]
Wyndham Martell loved his wife very much. He wanted to help her, yet was not sure what to do. Most of the conversations she had made no particular sense. Even when she was in distress, it was not always possible to understand the moans and cries she emitted. And by morning, when she awoke, she would smile at him lovingly and be well enough.
Tonight, however, he thought he had understood something more.
Wyndham Martell got up and walked to the window. The night was warm. Across the park he could see to the coast, out past the distant spit of Hurst Castle and the open sea beyond. He smiled to himself: that was the province of Isaac Seagull the smuggler. His wife’s cousin. He remembered well the night Louisa had told him that and how her malice had made him feel so sorry for Fanny. Perhaps, he thought wryly, it was the very unfolding of that dark secret that had led him to the wife he loved.
Maybe everyone, he reflected, had dark secrets within them of which they might or might not even be aware.
And then, because he loved his wife and all her secrets, he quietly left the room, went down to his private library and, sitting down at his desk, took out a piece of paper. He was going to write his wife a letter.
He paused a little while, thinking carefully, then began.
My dearest wife
Each of us has secrets and now there is something which I, too, have to confess.
It was a long letter. Dawn was almost breaking before he finished and sealed it.
At Buckler’s Hard, Puckle was busily at work. The tide was out. Slipping about contentedly in the riverside mud, he moved the heavy soaked leather rag over the wooden rail. Above him the dark bulk of Swiftsure loomed beneath the fading stars like a friend. Across the Beaulieu River a bird suddenly started singing and, glancing eastwards, Puckle saw the first faint hint of the light of dawn.
Swiftsure would be launched that day. As he glanced up again at the vessel, although he had not the words quite to express it, Puckle reflected once again how, in this huge wooden ship, the trees had become transmogrified into a second and perhaps equally glorious life. And his heart was filled with joy to know that the Forest itself, with all its secrets and many wonders, would, in this manner, pass down the slideway to be joined with the endless sea.
PRIDE OF THE FOREST
1868
Brockenhurst railway station: a sunny day in July. The tall-funnelled steam engine had a burnished coppery gleam, like a snake that has just shed its skin, as it hissed and smoked by the platform. Behind it a line of thickset brown carriages, their windows wiped and their brasses buffed by the smartly uniformed guards, stood waiting to receive their passengers, who would be taken with a proud rattle and at speeds of over thirty miles an hour the seventy miles to London.
The London and South-Western Railway line was a fine affair, a symbol of all that was best in the new industrial era. A decade or so before, it had been extended westward across the Forest to Ringwood and down into Dorset. But as well as paying compensation to the Forest for this intrusion, the director of the line, Mr Castleman, had agreed to follow a winding route that would inflict minimum damage on the woodlands so that his line was known as Castleman’s Corkscrew. At Brockenhurst, where the cattleyard and pony-yards abutted the station, the engines would also pause to take on more water.
The two figures who walked along the platform made a curious contrast. The older man, almost sixty, was every inch a Victorian gentleman. As the day was warm he wore no outer garment over his grey frock coat. His wing collar was encircled by a cravat tied in a floppy bow. He carried a silver-handled cane. His tall black top hat had been brushed until it shone; there was not a speck of