The Forest by Edward Rutherfurd

that they must leave.
    She would have liked to say something to Pride, but realized she must not. A few minutes later, as the smallholder and his family were lost to sight, she spoke. ‘I can’t go back to Lyndhurst, Edgar. I can’t face all those huntsmen. Can we return to your father’s house?’
    ‘There’s a quiet track,’ he said with a nod. And after a couple of miles he led her down through a wood to a little ford, quite soon after which they came up to heathland over which they walked their horses, picking up a track that led westwards until, late in the afternoon, they descended from the Forest into the lush quiet of the Avon valley.
    It was some time before they reached the forest edge that Puckle, on some errand of his own, had happened to pass by Pride’s hamlet and hear his tale.
    ‘Who’s the Norman girl?’ the smallholder asked. Puckle was able to tell him and to relate the incident of the pale deer.
    ‘Saved a deer?’ Pride grinned ruefully. ‘She could have brought it to me.’ He sighed to himself. ‘Are we going to see her again, do you think?’ he asked Puckle.
    ‘Maybe.’
    Pride shrugged. ‘She’s not bad, I suppose,’ he said without much feeling, ‘for a Norman.’
    Adela’s fate, however, was to be decided by a much harsher court than that of Pride and Puckle, as she discovered when dusk fell that day.
    ‘A disgrace. There’s no other word for you,’ Walter stormed. In the light from the evening sky there seemed to be purple shadows under his slightly bulging eyes. ‘You’ve made a fool of yourself in front of the whole hunt. You’ve ruined your reputation. You’ve embarrassed me! If you think I can find you a husband when you behave like this …’
    For a moment words apparently failed him.
    She felt herself go pale, both with shock and with anger. ‘Perhaps’, she said icily, ‘you do not feel you can find me a husband.’
    ‘Let’s just say that your presence will not help.’ His little moustache and his dark eyebrows seemed clenched, now, in quiet rage, menacing. ‘I think you’d better stay out of sight for a while,’ he went on, ‘until we’re ready to try again somewhere else. I feel that would be best, don’t you? In the meantime, might I suggest that you think rather carefully about how you conduct yourself.’
    ‘Out of sight?’ She felt alarmed. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘You’ll see,’ he promised. ‘Tomorrow.’
    The great, sunbathed silence of a midsummer afternoon: it was the season known as the ‘fence’ month when, to ensure that the deer could give birth in peace, all the peasants’ grazing livestock were removed from the Forest; after which, more than ever, the area seemed to return to those ancient days when only scattered bands of hunters had roamed the wastes. It was a season of quiet, of huge light on the open heaths and of shade, deep green as river weed, under the oaks.
    The buck moved stealthily, keeping to the dappled shadows, his head held carefully back. His summer coat, a creamy beige with white spots, made a perfect camouflage. It was also handsome. But he did not feel handsome. He felt awkward and ashamed.
    The change in the psychology of the male deer in summer has been observed down the ages. In spring, first the red deer and then, about a month later, the fallow males cast their antlers. First one antler, then the other breaks off, leaving a raw and usually bleeding stump, or pedicel. In the days after this, the fallow buck is a sickly fellow and may even be bullied by other bucks, such is the nature of animals. Like new teeth, his next antlers are already growing, but it will be three months before they are complete again. And so, though his fine new summer coat is on him, he is robbed of his adornment, as the antlers are known, naked, defenceless, ashamed.
    No wonder he wanders alone in the woods.
    Not that he is inactive. The first thing nature silently instructs him to do is to find the chemicals he will need to