The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [48]
It was necessary to be careful. In the first days of its life her fawn would be completely defenceless. If a dog or fox found it alone, the fawn would surely die. This was the handicap that nature, in her bleak wisdom, had placed upon the deer. The foxes tended to live at the edge of the Forest, however, near the farms. She sniffled about carefully but could detect no scent that would tell her a fox had passed that way.
And there, in deep green shadow, in the great warm silence of June, she gave birth to her fawn – a little, sticky, bony mass in the grass – and licked it clean and lay beside it. The fawn was a male; it would be coloured like its father. They lay together and the pale doe hoped that the huge Forest would be kind to them.
Towards the end of June two developments took place. Neither was unexpected.
Cola announced the first. ‘Rufus is going to invade Normandy.’
His brother Robert was now expected to reach his duchy in September. Rufus intended to be waiting for him.
‘Will it be a big invasion?’ Edgar asked.
‘Yes. Huge.’ Edgar’s brother had sent word from London of the preparations there. Large sums were being raised to pay mercenaries. Cartloads of bullion were being withdrawn from the treasury at Winchester. Knights were being summoned from all over the country. ‘And he’s demanding transport vessels from most of the harbours along the southern coasts,’ Cola explained. ‘Robert will arrive to pay off his mortgage and find himself locked out of his house. Rufus has all the resources. If Robert gives battle he’ll lose. It’s a bad business.’
‘But didn’t everyone expect it?’ Adela asked.
‘Yes. I think they did. But it’s one thing to foresee an event, to say it’s likely, and another when it actually starts to happen.’ He sighed. ‘In a way, of course, Rufus is right. Robert really isn’t fit to govern. But to act like this …’
‘I don’t think the Normans will all welcome this,’ said Adela.
‘No, my dear lady, they won’t. Robert’s friends, in particular, are …’ He paused before choosing the word, ‘perturbed’. The old man shook his head. ‘And if he does this to his own brother in Normandy, what do you imagine he’ll do to Aquitaine? It will be just the same. The Duke of Aquitaine goes on crusade. Rufus lends him the money and waves him God speed. Then steals his lands while he’s gone. How do you think people feel about that? How do you suppose the Church feels about it? I can tell you,’ he growled, ‘the tension in Christendom is rising.’
‘Thank heaven these things don’t affect us down in the Forest,’ Edgar remarked.
His father only stared at him grimly. ‘This is a royal forest,’ he muttered. ‘Everything affects us.’ Then he left them.
A week after this a man dressed in black, whom Adela had never seen before rode up and spent some time alone with Cola. After he had gone, the old man looked furious. She had never seen him like this before. Nor, in the days that followed, did he look any less angry. She could see that Edgar was concerned about him too, but when she asked him if he knew what the matter was he only shook his head.
‘He won’t say.’
The second development came a few days later while they were out riding. Edgar asked her if she would marry him.
On the western edge of the dark dell of Burley the ground rises to a substantial wooded ridge, which achieves its highest point about a mile northwards of the village on a promontory known as Castle Hill. Not that there was any Norman castle there, but only the outline, under the scattered ash and holly trees, and the clusters of bracken, of a modest earthwork inclosure – although whether these low earth walls and ditches were the remains of a stock pen, a lookout post or a small fort, and whether the folk who had used it were distant ancestors of the Forest people or some other dwellers from unrecorded