The Forest by Edward Rutherfurd Read Free Book Online Page A

it darted straight across the open ground and made for the nearest piece of woodland opposite. She cantered forward, watching the doe, until she finally saw her make the trees.
    But what to do now? She was alone in the middle of the open heath. Looking back at last, she saw that no one had followed her. The line of the ridge and the park pale seemed deserted. All the people were on the other side. She could not even hear the cries of the huntsmen any more, only the faint hiss of the breeze. She turned her horse’s head. Hardly knowing what she wanted, she began to ride down the heath with the park pale away on her right. When it curved westwards she started to do the same, walking her horse into the woods about a quarter of a mile below the wall. She entered a long glade. The ground was soft with grass and moss. She was still alone.
    Or nearly. He was standing by the uprooted stump of a fallen tree. There was surely no mistaking him – the forward stoop, the bushy eyebrows. Unless these gnarled men grew identically in the Forest, it was the same strange figure she had seen earlier. But how had he got there? It was a mystery. He was quietly watching her as she went down the glade, although whether with approval or disapproval she could not guess.
    Remembering what she had seen before, she raised her hand and saluted him as Edgar had done. But he did not answer with a nod this time and she remembered being told that the Forest people did not always care for strangers.
    She had ridden, after that, for almost an hour. She still wouldn’t go back to Lyndhurst. She could imagine her reception: Walter’s furious face; the huntsmen – contemptuous she supposed. Hugh de Martell – who knew what he thought? It was all too much; she wasn’t going back there.
    She kept to the woods. She did not know exactly where she was although, judging by the sun, she was heading south. Sheguessed, after a while, that the hamlet of Brockenhurst must be somewhere on her right, but she did not particularly wish to be seen and kept to the woodland tracks. Later on, she thought, I’ll head back towards Cola’s manor. With luck she could sneak in before the hunters returned, without attracting too much attention.
    So she hardly knew whether to be annoyed or relieved when, just as she was wondering which of two tracks to take, she heard a cheerful cry behind her and turned to see the handsome form and friendly face of Edgar, cantering towards her.
    “Didn’t they tell you,” he said laughingly as he came up, “that you’re not supposed to deer-hunt on your own?” And she realised she was glad that he had come.
    His French was not very good, but passable. Thanks to a Saxon nurse in her childhood and a natural ear for languages, she had already discovered that she could make herself understood by these English. They could communicate well enough, therefore. Nor was it long before he had put her at her ease. “It was Puckle,” he explained, when she asked how he had found her. “He told me you’d ridden south and no one saw you at Brockenhurst so I thought you’d be somewhere this way.”
    So Puckle was the name of the gnarled figure.
    “He seems mysterious,” she remarked.
    “Yes.” He smiled. “He is.”
    Next, when she confessed her fear of going back he assured her: “We pick and choose the deer. You’d only have had to ask my father and he’d gladly have spared your pretty deer.” He grinned. “You are supposed to ask him, though.” She smiled ruefully as she tried to imagine herself asking for a deer’s life in front of the hunters, but, reading her thoughts, he gently added: “The deer have to be killed, of course, but even now, I hate doing it.” He was silent for a moment. “It’s the way they fall, so full of grace. You see their spirits leave them. Everyone who’s ever killed a deer knows that.” He said it so simply and honestly that she was touched. “It’s sacred,” he concluded, as if there were nothing to