The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [84]
Luke loved to walk through the Forest. He would stride for miles. When he was a child he had learned to move fast to keep up with John and Mary; so that now, anyone who tried to walk beside him would be astonished at his speed.
People thought him dreamy, yet his eyes were always sharper than theirs. There wasn’t a stream in the whole Forest he didn’t know. The most ancient oaks, every great ivy-covered hulk, were like his personal friends.
His appearance had altered since leaving the abbey. Dressed in a woodman’s smock and jerkin, with woollen leggings and a thick leather belt, his hair and beard now grown long and shaggy, he looked exactly like a score of other such fellows and no one seeing him trudging along a forest path would have given him a second thought.
But he was on the run – about to be outlawed. What did that mean? In theory, that every man’s hand was against you. And in practice? It depended on whether you had friends and whether the authorities really wanted to find you.
As things stood at present, if one of the foresters met him face to face and recognized him, they’d take him into custody. No question. But if young Alban, say, caught sight of a shaggy figure in the distance that just might be Luke, would he ride up to challenge him? Possibly. But he was far more likely to turn his horse’s head and ride another way.
What should he do, though? He couldn’t go on like this for ever. The court at Lyndhurst had made its feelings pretty clear. He might do well to turn himself in and hope for mercy.
The trouble was – perhaps it was in his blood – Luke had an instinctive distrust of authority.
That might seem strange for a man who had chosen to live under the monastic rule of Beaulieu. Yet in reality it was not. For Luke, the abbey was a sanctuary in the middle of a huge estate where he enjoyed working and which gave him the freedom of the Forest. He liked the services in the abbey church. He would listen, enraptured, to the singing. His natural curiosity had led him to learn many of the Latin psalms and their meaning even if he could not read. But he wouldn’t have wished to go to services all the time like the choir monks. He wanted to get back out in the fields, or to help the shepherds as they went from grange to grange. The abbey fed him and clothed him, and left him free of responsibilities, without a care in the world. What more could you ask?
Above all, in his mind the abbey worked because it was tied to the natural order. Nature was what he understood. The trees, the plants, the forest creatures: they had their own rhythm. You could never know it all, but it worked; and the abbey estate made sense only because it had made itself part of the process.
So if outsiders, men like Grockleton or the king’s justices who didn’t really understand the Forest, came along and tried to impose a lot of stupid rules, if they claimed to be authority, the only thing to do was to avoid them. In his heart, the only laws he respected were the laws of nature.
‘The rest don’t amount to anything, really,’ he would say. And the authorities who set such store by these laws were certainly not to be trusted. ‘They may speak you fair one day, but they’ll get you the next. The only thing they truly care about is their power.’
It was a simple peasant’s view of authority and entirely accurate.
So he didn’t intend to trust the justice and his court, especially with Grockleton still around. The best thing to do, he reckoned, was to stay out of sight and wait for something to turn up. You never knew what might.
He had friends. He’d be all right until the next winter. In the meantime he had found plenty to keep him busy. Every few days, although she had no idea of it, he had gone to keep an eye on his sister Mary. He liked to observe her going about her tasks by the cottage, or running after the children as they played outside, even if he never spoke to her. It was as if he were a guardian angel, secretly watching over her. ‘I’m