1. The Fairweather Will

THE HIDDEN FOREST - 1

Paul Fairweather was proud of the fact that he was a nobody who ate too much sweet and fatty stuff and who had consequently developed the sort of waistline that even he was ashamed of. Paul Fairweather, in short, was fat. Very fat. Kind people suggested he was bonny, but he was in actual fact fat. The truth can be most cruel.

And Paul Fairweather would have continued on the road to an early death due, presumably, to heart failure or the decay of other essential organs like his liver, had not Toby Cringleworth of Cringleworth, Cringleworth and Cringleworth not sought him out when he was consuming a plate of pies in the Jolly Bumkin, a public eatery that prided itself in the number of calories it shoe-horned into its excessively large pies.

But Mr Cringleworth Junior (the senior and median Cringleworths were resident in the Brumpton Private Cemetery for Cringleworths) had spent a few moments of a long lifetime searching for Paul Fairweather.

It all came down to a document that had lain in a bottom drawer in the Cringleworth office since Queen Victoria had been knee high to a grasshopper, and not a single Cringleworth had managed to sort it out despite titanic efforts to do so.

To put it into a nutshell, there was a large plot of land that had reverted to how nature liked it somewhere in the south of the county because nobody had tended it in at two centuries. And the Cringleworth, Cringleworth and Cringleworth team of legal eagles had been presented the task of arranging the probate of the last will and testament of Mr Saul Blondeau who had passed away so secretly and privately that it was an age before anyone realised he was dead, and by that time the document to which he had appended his signature had accumulated a layer of dust that made it look indistinguishable from the wooden bottom of the drawer it had been placed in, which is most likely why it was rarely distinguished.

It was unfortunate that Mr Saul Blondeau had quarrelled with his own name to the extent that he had used legal proceedings to change the Blondeau into Fairweather, which it had remained during the tumultuous period since his demise at the age of ninety seven in Wallamboola, a comfortable enough watering hole in the Australian outback where he went to celebrate his ninetieth birthday in antipodean style, and remained because Wallamboola pies were just the best. Indeed, he lay at rest in a desert graveyard at the other side of the Earth from his place of birth, and very little in the way of news arrived anywhere in the Northern hemisphere on our planet from such an obscure resting place.

Several Cringleworths sniffed his last will and testament and frowned disdainfully and one or two even read it, but not one of them could find any authorisation to read it to anyone else, and those due to inherit his large plot of virtually unploughable land would have been less than interested even if they had received news of his death, which is unlikely.

And so the legal niceties regarding that document passed to the most recent and only surviving Cringleworth who felt that he needed a challenge, and dug it out.

It did not, of course mention any person, living or dead, who occupied the land after the Fairweather burial, so Mr and Mrs Ghoul and their mischievous offspring went unrecorded.

To cut the story short, he discovered that there was a Fairweather still alive and well and living in Brumpton, and after a considerable search through innumerable records he decided he must be a surviving relative of the man who passed away in the Australian outback, and probably the only such being. So on a rainy day in October he found himself in the Jolly Bumpkin with fat man and a plate of pies.

“Mr Fairweather?” he asked.

Paul Fairweather belched, then burped, then belched again, took a swig from his enormous personalised two-pint beer glass, and burped again. “Who’s asking?” he asked before deigning to reply.

Mr Crickleworth sat down in an empty seat far enough from the rolling stomach of the belcher not to seem intrusive, and replied.

“I, sir, am Toby Crickleworth of a whole line of legal Crickleworths, and have been toiling away manfully with your great-great-great-great grandfather’s last will and testament,” he said.

“What’s that? Four great’s and the old fool’s only just pegged it?” he asked, “how old was he, for goodness’ sake?”

Toby Crickleworth smirked. He had a special smirk which he reserved for people he classified as beneath him, such as unnecessarily fat people and skeletally thin ones, and he replied. “He went to live in Australia and died a considerable time ago. We can’t be sure when because his demise wasn’t recorded anywhere, or if it was it got lost in the great Wallamboola fire of 1902.”

“Wallamboola? Never heard of it! And they had a fire? Well fancy that!” grunted Paul Fairweather shoving half a steak and kidney pie into a mouth already in the process of masticating the other half.

“Several papers were destroyed in the deaths department, and his must have been,” sighed Toby Crickleworth. “Anyway, before he left for a new life down under your great times four grandfather left a will, and I’m here to tell you that you inherited, as his only relative so far as I can tell, a considerable amount of land.”

Toby Crickleworth was being deliberately obtuse when he said that because he disliked Paul Fairweather with the sort of irrational dislike that very prejudiced people can display in all manner of situations, and his prejudice was especially keen when it came to people who ate steak and kidney pies whilst he was talking to them, largely because he had a fondness for steak and kidney pies himself, though he would never have admitted it.

“You mean,” gloated Paul Fairweather, “that I have inherited half of Australia? That I can go down there and become landlord to a mighty metropolis and lord it over men wearing cork hats and swigging lager all their lives?”

“Not quite,” murmured Toby Crickleworth dryly, “You have inherited an area of scrub and woodland in the south of this lovely county where we now are, not so many miles indeed, from where you now find yourself enjoying your pies and where you’re dribbling gravy down your tee-shirt. A very sensible colour for a tee-shirt if I may say so, gravy-brown.”

“You mean, I’ve not inherited a stake in the land of pretty girls and manly boys?” asked a disgruntled Paul, “well I never!”

“You never what?” asked the solicitor politely.

“I never heard so much cod’s wallop in all me natural, cobber,” replied Paul, “I dared say when I’ve finished my lunch I’d best go and take an eyeful of my estate, then. How do I find it?”

“I have a complete note here, and a map, which you’ll probably need. Anything else, well, just give me a ring and I’ll answer as best I can, then send you a bill,” smiled Toby, “I must be off now, sir, I have a cow to milk before nightfall.”

It wasn’t a common practise for Toby Crickleworth to display any sign of humour, and he wasn’t when he said that. He had a small allotment down Swanspottle way, and he kept a cow and three hens on it.

© Peter Rogerson 02.11.20