The Forest by Edward Rutherfurd

though,” he calmly added.
    By God the man was insulting. She looked to Edgar, expecting him to defend her, but he seemed embarrassed.
    It was Pride who now addressed him. “I don’t remember hearing of any charter, do you, Edgar?” He stared straight at his head.
    “Before my time,” the Saxon answered quietly.
    “Yes. You’d better ask your father. He’d know about that, I should think.”
    There was a pause.
    Adela began to get the point. “Are you saying,” she asked slowly, “that King William lied about Canute’s forest law? That the charter’s a fake?”
    Pride pretended surprise. “Really? They can do that, can they?”
    She was silent herself, now. Then she nodded slowly. “I’m sorry,” she said simply. “I didn’t know.” She looked away from him and her eyes rested upon the strip of ground he had just appropriated. She understood now. No wonder he was surly when they had caught him trying, legally or not, to claw back a few feet of the inheritance he considered had been stolen from him.
    She turned to Edgar. Then she grinned. “I won’t tell if you don’t.” She spoke in French, but she suspected that Pride, observing them, had guessed what she had said.
    Edgar looked awkward. Pride was watching him. Then Edgar shook his head. “I can’t,” he muttered in French. And to Pride, in his native tongue: “Put it back, Godwin. Today. I’ll be looking out for you.” He motioned to her that they must leave.
    She would have liked to say something to Pride, but realised 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 havebrought 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