The Forest by Edward Rutherfurd Read Free Book Online Page A

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. She guessed, 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 realized 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 argue about.
    ‘I wonder’, she said, after a pause, ‘if Hugh de Martell feels the same.’
    ‘Who knows.’ He shrugged. ‘He doesn’t think like that.’
    No. His way, she imagined, was more blunt. A proud Norman landholder had no time for such thoughts.
    ‘He didn’t think I should be hunting. I expect your father agrees.’
    ‘My mother and my father used to ride out hunting together,’ he said softly, ‘when she was alive.’ And instantly she had a vision of that handsome couple, sweeping beautifully through the forest glades. ‘One day,’ Edgar added gently, ‘I hope to do the same.’ And then with a laugh: ‘Come on. We’ll ride back along the heath.’
    So it was, a little time afterwards, that the two riders cantering along the short turf at the heath’s edge approached the hamlet of Oakley and came upon Godwin Pride, moving his fence, illegally, in broad daylight.
    ‘Damn,’ muttered Edgar under his breath. But it was too late to avoid the fellow now. He had caught him in the act.
    Godwin Pride drew himself up to his full height: with his broad chest and splendid beard, he looked like a Celtic chief facing a tax collector. And, like a good Celtic chief, he knew that when the game was up, the only thing to do was bluff. To Edgar’s enquiry – ‘What are you doing, Godwin?’ – he therefore replied imperturbably: ‘Repairing this fence, as you see.’
    It was so quietly outrageous