The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [382]
‘The baby was a girl. A pretty little thing I must say.’ He paused. ‘It only lived six weeks though. Caught a fever. Dorothy cried for days.
‘A couple of months after it was born, I was summoned down to Albion Park, to see Mrs Albion this time.
‘“Do you know the Hargreaves at Cuffnells?” she asked me. I knew Cuffnells as being a fine house just outside Lyndhurst, but I’d never had occasion to go in there. The Hargreaves family had bought it years before and recently young Mr Hargreaves had got married to a Miss Alice Liddell. You still see her about nowadays, of course, but she was the Alice, as you may know, that figured in Alice in Wonderland.
‘“They are very good friends of ours,” Mrs Albion went on. “And they have a position for a girl to work as a maid to young Mrs Hargreaves. Actually,” she smiled, “I think it might be as a nanny before too long. I had a long talk to them two days ago and I wondered if your Dorothy might be interested. It’s really a very good position and naturally I should be glad to recommend her. Would you like to ask her?”
‘Well, you can imagine my feelings as I rode home. This was a very respectable position. A new start in life for Dorothy.
‘When I got home, I saw they were all looking a bit glum, but I told them: “I’ve got news that’ll cheer you all up.”
‘“I don’t think it will,” said my wife. And then she told me: “Dorothy’s gone.”
‘She’d gone away. We didn’t know why. We didn’t even know where. Nor did we for a month, when we had a letter from London. No address. Just to say she was sorry and she wasn’t coming back.
‘We couldn’t do anything. The Colonel hired a man to try to find her for us, but nothing came of it. So that was the end of Dorothy, as far as we knew.’
He looked down at his hands and then out of the window. ‘I don’t think I can talk any more today,’ said George Pride.
‘Your Jack was only five, hardly old enough to be a nipper, as we say, when he got into the newspapers,’ George began the next day. He went over to the dresser and pulled out an old brown envelope stuffed with papers and slowly unfolded a yellowed newspaper cutting. ‘He made headlines too.
‘It was a year I’d remember anyway. We had a very cold winter. It was the year that Lord Henry was given the title of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, on account of all he’d done for the Forest. The commoners were pleased about that.
‘It was a sign of the times, I suppose, that ordinary people were coming to retire down by the coast. We saw it all the way from Hordle along to Christchurch: little brick villas, semi-detached mostly, springing up like mushrooms. But the biggest area of building was further west, beyond Christchurch.
‘When I was young, Bournemouth was just a fishing village a few miles west of Christchurch. Open heath all round it. But then it turned into a little town and by the time of these events there were already houses, hotels and boarding houses spreading right along the coast.
‘The old railway line, Castleman’s Corkscrew, went from Brockenhurst over to Ringwood, miles inland from the sea. So now they wanted a coastal line across to Christchurch and on to Bournemouth. A good enough idea you might think. Mr Grockleton had a new enthusiasm now: he was one of the directors of this railway line.
‘Quite a few young men from the Forest had gone to work on it. The pay was quite good. But I hadn’t been at all pleased when Gilbert told me he was going too. I’d been training him to be an agister.
‘The trouble was, there weren’t any jobs working on the Forest just then and he wanted to earn some money.
‘“It’ll only be for a year or two,” he’d said to me. “The line will be finished then anyway.”
‘About a week after Gilbert signed on I had a visit from Mr Minimus Furzey. It