The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [353]
If Colonel Albion was even a fraction nervous at the prospect ahead of him he no more showed it now than he had, a dozen years before, when he led his men into battle in the Crimean War. If he could face the Russians, he reminded himself, then he could certainly face a Select Committee of his fellow countrymen, even if they were all peers of the realm. He squared his shoulders, therefore, and went forward bravely.
The figure beside him, about ten years younger, was also looking his smartest, in a different manner. He was dressed in his Sunday best – a rather more shapeless frock coat made of sturdy material. On his head, a wide-brimmed countryman’s hat. His boots, under the Colonel’s strict instructions, were shining. Like most working men, he couldn’t see the point of the high polish that the gentry and the military favoured on their boots, which were bound to get dusty again. His beard was neatly combed and his wife had continued brushing his coat until the Colonel had come for him. But as Mr Pride, tenant smallholder of Oakley, strode cheerfully along with a slightly loping gait, beside his landlord, he was probably less concerned than the Colonel about the prospect before him.
Besides, if the Colonel wanted him to do this, then as far as Pride was concerned, that was reason enough. He’d known the Colonel all his life and his parents too. As well as being his landlord, the Colonel was a man you could trust. When, a few years back, the Colonel had started a local cricket team on Oakley green, and Pride had shown a distinct aptitude as a spin bowler, there had sprung up an extra bond between them which, as far as social position allowed, could almost be called a friendship.
Only one cloud darkened his horizon. His son George. They’d scarcely spoken this last few years. Until three days ago when the boy had turned up begging him not to go, afraid he’d lose his job. His brow darkened when he thought of that; he didn’t want to ruin his son.
‘You shouldn’t have gone to work for Cumberbatch then,’ he’d said coldly. And he’d gone with the Colonel.
He had never been to London before. He had read about it. Like his father Andrew before him, he had attended the little school founded by Gilpin and he took quite an interest in the newspapers. But this would be his first time in the capital; so the day was rather an adventure. The fact he was about to face a panel of peers meant nothing in particular to him. He supposed they would be like the gentlemen verderers. And anyway, whether they were devils incarnate or a choir of archangels, he knew who he was. He was a Pride of the Forest. That was good enough for him.
The Colonel, however, with subtler distinctions on his mind, was not sorry as they came along the platform to see another top-hatted figure, with a rich brown beard, waiting by the entrance of the first-class carriage. For though his fellow landowner, the lord of the great Beaulieu estate, was only a little over half his age, he was the son of a duke, which was no small thing to be in Victorian England.
‘My dear Colonel.’ The aristocrat raised his hat and even gave Pride half a nod.
‘My dear Lord Henry.’
‘We are here, I believe,’ Lord Henry smiled at them both, ‘to save the New Forest.’
In the year 1851, the fifteenth of the reign of Queen Victoria, the British Parliament had passed an Act that was to mark the greatest change in the New Forest since the days of William the Conqueror.
They decided to kill all the deer.
Nobody knew exactly how many deer there were: surely seven thousand; perhaps more than ten. Red and fallow, stags and hinds, bucks and does, calves and fawns – they were all