The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [70]
She nodded quietly, then looked thoughtful. ‘Yet might it have been an accident?’ she asked. ‘If the lay brother repents, wouldn’t they show mercy?’
‘You are right to be cautious in judging,’ he said. ‘And mercy is God’s grace.’ What a good woman she was. She feared for the monk, yet thought with compassion of his assailant. ‘But we must all accept righteous punishment for our transgressions.’ He looked stern. ‘You know the fellow has run away?’ She seemed to shake her head. ‘He will be caught.’ The steward of the Forest had been informed by the abbot that morning. ‘I believe they are taking out the hounds.’
With a kindly nod he left her. And poor Mary, her heart pounding, ran all the way back across the heath to the place where, last night, she had hidden her brother Luke.
Tom Furzey clenched his fists. They’d get what was coming to them now. Already he could hear the hounds in the distance. He was not a bad man. But bad things had been happening to him recently. Sometimes he hardly knew what to think.
The Prides had always thought he was a bit slow. He knew that. But everything had been so friendly and easy before. They were all part of the Forest: all family, so to speak. That pony, though – that had been a shock. If John Pride could just casually take a pony foaled by his, Tom Furzey’s, own mare, with not so much as a by-your-leave: what sort of brother-in-law was that? He despises me, Tom thought, and now I know it.
It was strange. The first day he couldn’t quite believe it had happened, even with the foal in Pride’s pen, before his very eyes. Then, when challenged, Pride had just laughed at him.
And then Tom had called him a thief. In front of the others. Well, he was, wasn’t he? Things had snowballed after that.
But Mary: that was another matter. That first day, after she knew what had passed between him and her brother, she had gone round to Pride’s house as friendly as you like. ‘Didn’t you tell him to give the pony back?’ he had stormed. But she had just looked blank. Never even thought of it. ‘So whose side are you on, then?’ he had cried. The fact was, after years of marriage, she hadn’t really given him a thought. That was the hurtful truth of it. Poor old Tom, a useful husband for Mary: that’s all I am to the Prides, he reckoned.
But whatever she thought of him, she owed him respect as head of their family. What sort of example did it set the children if she let all the Forest see how little regard she had for him? He wasn’t going to be made to look a fool. He had put his foot down; forbidden her to go to John Pride’s. Wasn’t that right? His sister said it was. So did a lot of others. Not everyone in the Forest thought so well of the Prides and their high and mighty ways.
It hadn’t been easy, though, watching his wife, day by day, growing colder towards him.
Well, the Prides were going to be put in their place today. And after that … He wasn’t sure what. But something, anyhow.
His mind was full of these thoughts when he caught sight, nearly a mile away, of Puckle riding a Forest pony. He seemed to be dragging something behind him.
There were ten riders. The hounds were in full cry. The prior had given them a scent of Brother Luke’s bedding and they had been following it all the way from the grange. The steward of the Forest himself was leading them. Two of the other riders were gentlemen foresters, two more were under-foresters, the rest servants.
Since its inception, the New Forest had always been divided into administrative areas, known as bailiwicks, each in the charge of a forester, usually from a gentry family. Down the western side ran the bailiwicks of Godshill, Linwood and Burley. A big tract just west of the centre was known as Battramsley bailiwick. Recently, however, the largest bailiwick of all, the central royal bailiwick of Lyndhurst, which ran right across the heath to Beaulieu, had been subdivided, the hamlet of Oakley where Pride and Furzey lived falling within the southern section. Over all these presided the warden of