The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [75]
On a wintry December afternoon Mary walked hurriedly towards Beaulieu.
A cold wind was blowing into her back, pushing her along the tiny track as the heather scraped her legs. To the north the distant tree line had sunk beneath the slow swell of the ground so that the landscape resembled the bare tundra it must have been thousands of years before. Behind her, over the expanse of brownish heather and dark-green gorse, banks of cloud with a faint orange glow were moving steadily along the coastline, threatening to overtake and smother her as she went eastwards, across the great waste between the Forest centre and the abbey, which was now called Beaulieu Heath.
She had no wish to be there; she was only doing it to please her husband.
Tom did not work for the abbey in winter, but this year the monks had called him in for a special task. They wanted a cart.
Tom was not usually a carpenter. It was difficult to persuade him to make anything in the house. But for some reason, all his life his imagination had been fired by the idea of making carts. A cart made by Tom Furzey was a formidable affair, with a framework base and four framework sides, each of which could be removed. Every beam was neatly jointed into its fellow. Tom’s carts were always the same and they would last until doomsday. But he would never make the wheels. ‘That’s wheelwright’s work,’ he would say. ‘I make the cart and he makes it go. That’s the way I look at it.’ He seemed to like to dwell upon this thought.
Once, when they were still on speaking terms, John Pride had got him to confess that he disliked the thought of making wheels because they were curved. ‘You’d make wheels if they could be square, wouldn’t you Tom?’ he had genially asked.
And Tom, to Pride’s delight had answered, thoughtfully: ‘Reckon I might.’
So Tom had gone to work on the cart for the monks. That had been ten days ago. It would take him at least six weeks to complete and while he did so he was staying at St Leonards Grange. Every few days Mary would visit him there. Today, she had promised to bring him some cakes. She was especially anxious to do so because she felt guilty for the fact that she was glad he was away – firstly because of Tom’s moods; secondly because of Luke.
In his strange, dreamy way, Luke had seemed almost happy living out in the Forest. Even as the weather grew cold he had always managed to make himself a snug lair somehow. ‘I’m just a forest animal,’ he had told her contentedly. He always claimed he could feed himself. But as she pointed out: ‘Even the deer get fed in midwinter.’ So as soon as Tom had departed for St Leonards she had brought Luke into their little barn. No one, neither her brother nor her children, knew he was being fed and sleeping there. She didn’t know how long it could last; it frightened her. But what else was she to do?
By the time she reached the edge of the farmlands that lay around the grange the wind had strengthened. There was a cold dampness around the back of her neck. Looking behind her, she saw that the yellowish clouds were barrelling on to Beaulieu Heath, bringing flurries of snow to the western edge. For a moment she wondered if she should turn back, but decided to continue, having come so far.
Brother Adam looked gratefully at the door of the grange. The flurries of snow, although they seemed so soft, had started to sting his face.
There were five granges south-west of the abbey: Beufre, the main centre for the plough oxen; Bergerie, where all the sheep were sheared; Sowley, down by the coast, where the monks had built the huge fish pond; Beck and, nearest to the mouth of the river estuary, St Leonards. He had been to Bergerie that day and intended to walk back from St Leonards to the abbey that evening.
The last two weeks had been exhausting. Within the Great Close, apart from the five in the south-west, there were ten more granges north of the abbey and another three on the eastern side of the Beaulieu estuary. Then there were the string of little holdings over in the Avon valley west of