The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [389]
A brief report was read out. Then came the list of ponies knocked down by cars: a melancholy record at every meeting. When the meeting was opened to the floor, a succession of people came up to the witness stand to make their depositions, known as presentments. Each time, her companion would murmur a word of explanation in her ear. One man, with a broad face and fair hair, came to complain of litter from a nearby campsite. ‘That’s Reg Furzey. Smallholder.’ Another man, with a curious gnarled face that seemed to her to have been carved out of oak came to complain of a new property whose fence was encroaching upon the Forest. ‘Ron Puckle. Sells wooden garden furniture in Burley.’ The young man smiled. ‘It’s funny, when you come to think of it,’ he whispered. ‘For centuries the old Forest families spent their time making encroachments on the Forest; now they spend their lives making sure nobody else does!’ At the end of each presentment, the Official Verderer would politely rise, thank the person concerned and promise to consider their point. Some of the issues raised concerning Forestry Commission activities on local bye-laws were too technical for Dottie to follow. But the sense of the meeting was very clear: this was the ancient heart of the Forest. And the commoners with their verderers, were determined to protect its ancient character.
It was still before noon when they emerged from the court. Her next appointment was in the museum early that afternoon, and it seemed that her companion was now preparing to leave. She wondered how she could keep him with her.
‘I’ve got to go to see Grockleton’s Inclosure,’ she said. ‘Could you show me where it is?’
‘Oh. All right.’ He looked surprised. ‘I suppose so. You’ll have to walk a bit.’
‘That’ll be fine. By the way, what did you say your name was?’
‘Peter. Peter Pride.’
‘Pride?’
She had never walked that fast before. She wondered, if she stopped, whether he would just continue on his way, and didn’t dare find out. Fortunately, however, he did pause frequently to show her some lichen, or a strange beetle under a log, or some small plant which, to the trained naturalist, made this ancient area such an ecological paradise. At one point, as they came out onto some open heath, she had noticed that the holly trees on a nearby ridge had a curious profile against the sky.
‘They’re flat underneath, like mushrooms,’ she remarked.
‘That’s the browse line,’ he explained. ‘The ponies and deer eat the leaves up as far as they can reach.’ And she realized that most of the trees she could see exhibited this feature. In the distance, it gave them a magical, floating effect.
And so the lessons went on. If she couldn’t always follow the scientific information with which he constantly plied her, she could at least get a sense of the subject. And then she could watch his tall, athletic form striding ahead of her again.
He was an ecologist by training, but a Forest historian too. And knowledgeable. Impressively so. She wondered how old he was. Early twenties, twenty-five perhaps. Maybe a year or two younger than she was, but not more. She wondered if he was attached.
He was amused by her name. ‘I’m just one of them,’ he explained. ‘But there are Prides all over the Forest. Are you sure you don’t come from here?’
Her father had told her when she was a girl that she reminded him of his grandmother Dorothy, and indeed she’d been named after her. She had also discovered from him, more recently, that his grandmother had never been married. ‘She led a bit of a life, actually,’ her father had said. ‘Lived with an art professor for years. Then another one. She seemed to have a talent for attracting artists. The first one left her a lot of pictures, which turned out to be quite valuable. Who his father was, my own father was never quite sure. But he took her name anyway, which was