And so the lessons went on. If she couldn't always follow the scientific information with which he constantly plied her, she could at least get a sense of the subject. And then she could watch his tall, athletic form striding ahead of her again.

He was an ecologist by training, but a Forest historian too. And knowledgeable. Impressively so. She wondered how old he was. Early twenties, twenty-five perhaps. Maybe a year or two younger than she was, but not more. She wondered if he was attached.

He was amused by her name. 'I'm just one of them,' he explained. 'But there are Prides all over the Forest. Are you sure you don't come from here?'

Her father had told her when she was a girl that she reminded him of his grandmother Dorothy, and indeed she'd been named after her. She had also discovered from him, more recently, that his grandmother had never been married. 'She led a bit of a life, actually,' her father had said. 'Lived with an art professor for years. Then another one. She seemed to have a talent for attracting artists. The first one left her a lot of pictures, which turned out to be quite valuable. Who his father was, my own father was never quite sure. But he took her name anyway, which was Pride.'

'My great-grandmother was born Dorothy Pride,' she said. 'But she came from London.'

He nodded quickly, but said no more on the subject.

He was curious about why she wanted to see Grockleton's Inclosure. When she explained that her boss, John Grockleton was connected with the Forest, he seemed to think it very funny. 'Grockleton was a Commissioner of the hated Office of Woods,' he explained. 'Built a railway line where several people were injured. Not a popular name here.'

'Oh.' She would have to think of something else to tell him.

'Here we are,' he said cheerfully, a few minutes later. 'Grockleton's Inclosure.'

The plantation, though it had been harvested several times, was much as it had been a century before. The lines of conifer seemed endless. Beneath the trees, in what little space there was, all was dark, silent, dead.

'Let's go,' she said.

They were a few minutes early at the New Forest Museum back in Lyndhurst, so they took a quick turn round the exhibits. Every facet of Forest life, from a recent famous snake-catcher to a detailed diagram of how to build a charcoal fire, was covered. By the time they went upstairs to the library she was longing to ask some questions.

The figure who rose from the big central table proved to be a short, white-bearded man with a kindly face and twinkling, observant blue eyes. Peter Pride had already explained that, although the older man's manner was quiet, he was the discreet force behind much of what went on in the Forest museum.