Who benefited from his death? Not his brother Robert, as it happened, nor the Clare family, as far as is known. But his younger brother - loyal, silent Henry with his fringe of black hair - took over the Winchester treasury by dawn and was crowned in London within two days. In time he took Normandy from Robert, just as Rufus had planned to do. But if he had any hand in the death of Rufus - and many have whispered that he must have done - not a trace of evidence remains.

Indeed, so completely did the Forest hold its secret, that even the place where it happened became forgotten until, centuries later, a stone was put up to mark the spot - in the wrong part of the Forest entirely.

There was, however, one other beneficiary of the mystery. A few days after it, Cola happened to come across Godwin Pride, who politely approached to have a private word with him. It seemed, he assured the surprised huntsman, that he had reason to believe that he had, in all honesty, a right to a large pen, far bigger than the one he had illegally made, next to his smallholding.

'What possible proof have you, man?' Cola enquired.

'I think you could be satisfied,' Pride replied carefully. 'And if you'd be satisfied, I'd be satisfied.'

'Meaning?'

'I happened to be down Througham way the other day.'

'Oh?'

'Yes. Funny what you see sometimes.'

'Funny?' Cola was watchful now. Very. 'Care to tell me what you saw?'

'Shouldn't care to tell anyone.'

'Dangerous.'

'Shouldn't wonder.'

'Well, I've no idea what you think you saw.' Cola looked at him thoughtfully. 'And I don't think I want to know either.'

'No. I shouldn't say you did.'

'Talk can be dangerous.'

'See what I mean about that pen?'

'See? I don't suppose I see any better than you do, Godwin Pride.'

'All right, then,' said Pride cheerfully and walked off.

And when, the next summer, a splendid new pen, almost an extra acre, with a small bank and a ditch and a fence appeared by Pride's homestead at the heath's edge, neither Cola, nor his elder son, nor his younger son Edgar, nor Edgar's wife Adela - who had received a nice little dowry upon her marriage from Tyrrell in Normandy - nor any of the royal foresters, ever seemed to see it or take any notice of it at all.

For in such ways life is arranged in the Forest.

BEAULIEU

1294

He ran along the edge of the field, bending low, hugging the hedgerow. He was red in the face, panting. He could still hear the shouts of rage from the grange behind him.

The mud-splattered habit he wore marked him as belonging to the monastery; but his thick hair was not shaved in the choir monk's tonsure. A lay brother, then.