The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [83]
Now Tom was standing, squared off, in front of the justice, with his tousled hair and leather jerkin, as if he was ready to fight him.
‘We’ve had no notice. This hasn’t been forwarded from the Court of Attachments,’ said the clerk crossly.
‘Well, as we’re here, we may as well hear it,’ the justice replied. He fixed Tom sternly with his eye. ‘What’s your business?’
‘Theft, my lord,’ Tom bellowed in a voice that shook the rafters. ‘Damnable theft.’
The hall fell silent. The clerk, having almost jumped off his bench at the shout, took up his quill.
The justice, a little taken aback, gazed at Tom curiously. ‘Theft? Of what?’
‘My pony!’ Tom shouted again, as if to call the heavens themselves to witness.
It took a second or two for the titters around the court to begin. The justice frowned. ‘Your pony. Stolen from where?’
‘The Forest,’ Tom cried.
Chuckles were breaking out now. Even the foresters were starting to grin. The justice glanced across at the steward, who shook his head and smiled.
The justice liked the Forest. He enjoyed its peasants and secretly relished their modest crimes. After the business of Martell, which had truly annoyed him, he had no objection to ending the day with a little light relief. ‘You mean your pony was depastured on the Forest? Was it marked?’
‘No. It was born there.’
‘A foal, you mean? How do you know it was yours?’
‘I know.’
‘And where is it now?’
‘In John Pride’s cowshed,’ Tom cried in rage and despair. ‘That’s where.’
It was too much. The whole courtroom began to laugh. Even his Furzey kinsmen couldn’t help seeing the joke. Mary had to look down at the floor. The justice turned to the agisters for illumination and Alban, in whose bailiwick this lay, stepped over and whispered in his ear, while Tom scowled.
‘And where is John Pride?’ the justice demanded.
‘He’s here,’ Tom shouted, swinging round and pointing triumphantly to the back of the crowd.
Everybody turned. The justice stared. There was a brief silence.
And then, from beside the door, came a deep voice: ‘He’s gone.’
It was no good. The hall dissolved. The Forest people howled. They wept with laughter. The foresters, the solemn verderers, even the gentlemen of the jury couldn’t help themselves. The justice, watching, shook his head and bit his lip.
‘You may laugh,’ Tom yelled. And they did. But he wasn’t done. Looking right and left, red-faced, he turned back to the justice and, pointing at Alban, he shouted: ‘It’s him, and the likes of him, that lets Pride get away with it. And you know why? Because he pays them!’
The justice’s face changed. Several of the foresters stopped laughing. At the back, Mary groaned.
‘Silence!’ the justice roared and the laughter in the hall began to die. ‘You are not’ – he glared at Furzey – ‘to be impertinent.’
The trouble was, there was some truth in it. Young Alban probably was innocent, as yet. But there was inevitably a certain traffic between the Forest people and those in authority in the bailiwicks. A nice pie, a cheese, a fence mended without charge – it might be hard after such kindnesses for the steward not to overlook some minor infraction of the law. Everyone knew it. The king himself had once remarked to the justice, not wholly in jest, that one day he would have to set up a commission to investigate the whole Forest administration. If Furzey wanted to be a troublemaker this was neither the time nor the place to be watched.
‘You are to go through the proper channels,’ the justice told him curtly. ‘Your case will only be heard here after it comes through the Court of Attachments. Clerk,’ he ordered, ‘enter that in the record. The court’, he announced, ‘is closed.’
So while Tom stood there in his impotent rage and the crowd, chuckling again, started to make for the door, the clerk dipped his quill in the ink and wrote in the parchment the record that would be preserved, as the true voice of the Forest, down the long centuries:
Thomas Furzey