The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [380]
‘So I said yes to Colonel Albion and no to Mr Lascelles.
‘My patch was the northern part of the Forest. I was glad to go back up there. The cottage we found was up at Fritham. So that’s where Jack was brought up almost from birth.
‘We were very happy up there. I had a good horse and I’d ride out each day. I’d got rid of my whiskers and grown a long moustache then. They say I looked somewhat dashing. I’d take my son Gilbert out with me on his pony because I imagined that was the sort of job he might like to have one day, too. He could spot if a cow was getting sick even better than I could and I’d send him off to tell the owner. He was sixteen or so then and a great help to me.
‘But it was Dorothy who was the best of all. The Furzeys had been very good to her during the years after I lost my job with Cumberbatch. They’d kept her in their house and paid her, which was a considerable help to us. And besides being a good training for her, they had taught her a great deal. She had read books quite beyond what the other girls had. Every year she would do my wife and me a painting – they were really lovely – as a present for Christmas. We had them up on the wall. We were so proud of her. And although I say it myself she was a lovely-looking girl, tall and slender, with her long, dark hair. She was wonderful at keeping house, a second mother to the children so that when we moved up to Fritham my wife was very glad to have her there. We imagined she could have the pick of the Forest when it came to a husband.
‘She decided to work from home then as many girls do, taking in laundry. She’d go round the local villages. But every week or two she’d go to collect from the Furzeys. By the time Jack was two years old she had as much as she could handle. Sometimes she’d be out delivering for hours. She must have been twenty then.
‘Do you ever go up to Eyeworth pond? I can just remember when Eyeworth was a pretty little keeper’s lodge. It’s only half a mile walk, as you know, from Fritham. But then the Office of Woods sold it – to a man who wanted to make gunpowder there. Can you imagine such a thing? A gunpowder factory right in the middle of the Forest? But that’s the Office of Woods for you. Then a German company bought it. So the Schultze Gunpowder Factory it became and they made the pond as a little reservoir for their factory. They had quite a collection of sheds up there, though fortunately they were mostly hidden by the trees. But they made their presence known in other ways.
‘The waste that trickled out of that place! Dark and sulphurous. Stinking. And it seeped down into the Latchmore Brook, which runs past that place and so it got carried westward for miles across the heath. Part of my job as Agister was to make sure the cattle stayed away from that stream because if they drank the water it made them sick. One or two died.
‘I was riding past Eyeworth one summer afternoon about two years after we got to Fritham when I saw Dorothy, looking very pale. I could tell she’d been waiting for me.
‘“I’ve got to talk to you, Dad,” she says. I asked if we couldn’t talk at home but she shook her head and said: “I can’t go home.”
‘So I got down and we stood by that stinking little brook. And then she told me she was going to have a child.
‘As you can imagine, I was so surprised because I knew nothing of any young man. And I thought to myself, I hope it’s a good man at least. And then I thought, I hope he doesn’t work for the Office of Woods.
‘“Oh,” I said, “I reckon you’ll be getting married, then.” But she just shook her head again. “If you want me to go and have a word with this young man,” I said, because sometimes they needed a little persuading, you know.
‘“It isn’t a young man,” she said. “And he’s married.”
‘“Oh,” I said.
‘“I don’t know what to do, Dad. So I came out looking for you. I can’t face Mum,” she said.
‘It’s funny really it should have been me and not her mother she went to. Just then