The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [367]
‘It’s a bog,’ said Furzey.
‘No it isn’t!’ Grockleton suddenly shouted. He began to stride down the slope. ‘It is a slope, Furzey.’ He called back the words deliberately, as though to a slow-witted child. ‘A slope and not …’ He never reached the end of his sentence, however. Instead, he let out a loud cry as he suddenly disappeared up to his waist.
There are several kinds of bog in the New Forest. In the lower-lying southern region, where the valleys are wide and shallow, the great peat bogs drawing moisture off the Forest’s gentle gradient extend for hundreds of yards. Some have alder trees along the line of the water flow. Purple moor grass, bog myrtle, ferns, tussocks of sedge and reeds grow there. The edges are flanked with moss. Even after centuries of cutting, the peat in these bogs is often five feet deep, sometimes more.
In the steeper, narrower gullies of the northern Forest there are smaller bogs. But it is up in the high sweeps of the northern ridges that a different and unexpected kind of bog occurs. These are the step mires.
In fact their formation is quite logical. As the water seeped down through the gravel of the high terraces, it often encountered a layer of clay. Seeping sideways now it would undermine the gravel above and create a ledge, even hollow out a trench in the ledge, from which it would seep down into the valley below where, if the drainage was poor, a bog would form. Down the main part of the slope a covering of mosses and clumps of purple moor grass would indicate that this was wet heath. But towards the top, where the moisture drained swiftly, the covering of bare grass might lead the unwary to suppose the slope was dry. And the ledge? The centuries had filled it with watery peat and covered it over with vegetation. It seemed a level part of the slope but it was in fact a deep bog. This was the step mire. And Grockleton had just walked into one.
‘Told you so,’ said Minimus pleasantly.
It was unfortunate that as he climbed, wet and filthy, back up the slope, Grockleton should have seen Beatrice returning from her ramble. She was wearing a straw hat. She looked down at him, her blue eyes concerned.
‘You poor man. I did that once.’
He was grateful for that. Even Furzey, he noted, had the grace not to laugh.
But George Pride was laughing. He hadn’t meant to but he just couldn’t help it. He was biting his lip now, but his body was shaking.
Grockleton looked at him. If the young woodman hadn’t been so respectful all afternoon he mightn’t have minded so much. But seeing him laughing now, Grockleton couldn’t help wondering if George hadn’t been secretly mocking him ever since they met. These damned Forest people were all the same. He’d speak to Cumberbatch about that.
It had been quite soon after her marriage that Beatrice had started to dye her hair. Sometimes she would dye it black, and Minimus would call her his raven. With her slim, pale body, and her full breasts – Minimus said they were voluptuous – she had soon learned that if she lay across the carved bed with her dark hair draped across her breasts, it excited him very much.
Sometimes she would dye it red, and put waves in it so that she looked like a gorgeous figure from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Her face had a strong, rather classical bone structure, so she could carry off these transformations with effect. The changes were not merely decorative; there was magic in them. There was also some calculation. When Furzey was out, she would sometimes take her clothes off and practise attitudes in front of the glass. And then of course she would also return to being the golden-haired landowner’s daughter she was originally, and Minimus liked that too.
The attitude of her parents to her way of life, insofar as they knew about it, contrasted sharply. Once, when her father saw her walking towards him down Lyndhurst High Street with her hair in rich, crimson curls, he