The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [369]
She had dictated much of it herself. She had taken out his ironical asides, his humour, his references to Beatrice’s improving education. She had watched him write it and then taken it away before he could add anything more.
And, amazingly, it had worked. With no very good humour, and after she herself had pointed to some of the respectful passages in the letter of which she was particularly proud, the Colonel had grudgingly agreed that Beatrice and the artist might come to dinner.
The dinner went surprisingly well. There is nothing like misfortune for bringing people together, and it happened that the day of the dinner also brought the bad news of the House of Lord’s decision. Their Lordships had concluded, not unreasonably, that since there were two parties, the Office of Woods and the commoners, whose interests were diametrically opposed, the only long-term solution was to partition the Forest between them. They did agree that the commoners should be fairly treated and that Cumberbatch and his men should not be allowed to steal all the best land.
‘But that’s what will happen in practice,’ Albion remarked gloomily. ‘I’m not sure even Pride will survive.’
‘If I understand it correctly,’ Minimus was respectful, on his best behaviour, ‘this Select Committee report isn’t binding.’
‘That is true. It is only an opinion. But it carries weight,’ explained Albion. ‘The government may not find time to prepare legislation on the Forest for a year or two, but when they do they’ll almost certainly follow the Committee’s advice.’
‘We must fight on, then,’ said Minimus.
This earned a smile from Mrs Albion and a grunt of approval from the Colonel. But Minimus did even better with his next suggestion.
‘I refuse to believe,’ he remarked, ‘that we can all be browbeaten by people who walk into step mires.’ And he gave them an account of Grockleton’s recent accident.
The Colonel was delighted with this. ‘You mean he just marched in?’ he asked, incredulous.
‘I swear to you,’ said Minimus with a smile, ‘I behaved perfectly. I warned him. I told him it was a bog. And he wouldn’t listen. Straight in, up to his armpits!’
The meal became quite cheerful after that and it was almost with good humour that, after they had drunk their port, Colonel Albion led Minimus into his office for a private talk.
Colonel Albion’s office perfectly expressed the man; it also told you much about the state of the New Forest. On the shelves were the usual works of genealogy and county history, the foundation stones and buttresses of the gentry’s world. There were the bound eighteenth century Parliamentary Reports on the New Forest, a shelf of parchment inventories of the Albion estate, and several volumes of minutes of the Verderers’ Court which he had borrowed from Lyndhurst ten years ago and forgotten to return. There were literary works too. A set of Jane Austen’s novels were lodged beside Mr Gilpin’s works, not so much for their literary merit, but because the author had lived in the same county. There was also, given to him by a kinsman who owned the Arnewood estate where the story was set, a copy of Marryat’s Children of the New Forest, whose numerous technical errors on Forest matters were neatly underlined and noted in the Colonel’s own hand.
Hanging near the door, resplendently scarlet, was the Colonel’s hunting coat. There were two leading hunts in the New Forest now. One hunted the fox, the other the deer which, despite the Deer Removal Act, were still to be found in the area. As a reminder of the days of the medieval deer Forest, they had been granted royal permission to wear the ancient insignia of the Lord Warden on their buttons. Colonel Albion, descendant of Cola the Huntsman, hunted with both.
Upon a table was a case containing a pair of guns. For the two hunts were not the only sports flourishing in the Forest. The