The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [387]
‘“And then, about an hour later, I hear this sort of rustling sound by the bed. And even with all my dressings and all the disinfectant I could smell something, mud and sweat, I suppose, that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. And then I hear this voice. ‘Your name Jack Pride?’ it says. ‘Well if it isn’t you can die and it’s all right. I just got here and my name’s Alfie Seagull. But if you happen to be the Jack Pride I’m thinking of, I watched you nearly get buried under a gravel slide in a railway cutting. Is that you, then?’
‘“So I tried to make some sort of sign that it was. ‘So it is you then,’ he says. ‘You can’t die here,’ he says. ‘Blimey! Have you forgotten who you are? You’re a Pride of the Forest.’ And it’s funny, but then I remembered our cottage, and the woods, and how we used to ride out together in the early morning; and when I thought of that, somehow it did give me strength, Dad, and so here I am.”
‘And I suppose it’s foolish,’ said George, ‘but I was always so pleased he told me that.’
THE FOREST
APRIL 2000
Sunday morning. Dottie Pride had only arrived at the Albion Park Hotel the evening before, but already she felt the familiar flutter of nerves. There was a whole week to go – a week in which to work out what the story was and find the angle. Plenty of time. But this was the stage at which she always began to panic.
She decided to visit Beaulieu first. She would be going there on Saturday to set up the shoot, but she wanted to have a private look around the place in advance. Perhaps it would give her some ideas. It was only a ten-minute drive, even at the forty-mile-an-hour speed limit which was in force to protect the ponies and the deer.
She was impressed. If the stately homes of Britain needed tourists to pay for their upkeep, the present Lord Montagu had shown considerable flair. Taking his father’s interest in the first motor cars as his starting point, he had built up the Motor Museum at Beaulieu into a huge national institution. Dottie wasn’t particularly interested in mechanical things, but she spent a fascinating half-hour gazing at Victorian Daimlers, Edwardian Rolls-Royces, and even the later cars of the fifties. As she left the museum and walked the short distance into the abbey itself, however, the mechanical age seemed discreetly to vanish, and she entered the quiet peace of the medieval world.
It was all very well done. After the house, she walked through an exhibition of monastic life in the huge domus where the lay brothers had lived when they were not out at the granges. And when she went out into the ruined cloisters, she could almost see the Cistercian monks, moving quietly about their business amongst the old grey stones. In one of the carrels where they used to sit, she noticed with disapproval that some vandal had carved a little letter ‘A’.
Beaulieu would open the documentary and the timing was perfect. Lord Montagu had chosen the twenty-fourth of April, Easter Sunday, to mark the nine-hundredth anniversary of the killing of King William Rufus in the New Forest. He had organized a large archery competition at Beaulieu with the actor Robert Hardy, who happened also to be a world authority on the longbow, opening the proceedings. Lord Montagu was to act – this was the medieval term for the patron of such an event – as Lord Paramount of the day. A colourful day, full of pageantry. Excellent television material.
With an historical surprise. A prominent local historian, Mr Arthur Lloyd, had shown beyond much doubt that the killing of Rufus had been recorded at the time as taking place at Througham, on the coastal stretch below Beaulieu. The famous Rufus stone, one of England’s best-known tourist sites, was actually in the