The Painted Tent (15 page)

Glasses on her, Smiler laughed and fidgeted with delight, and for the next five minutes the world was forgotten as he watched Fria's first display of play, the need for which is instinctive in all peregrines.

She went fast along the edge of the wood, six feet from the ground and chased a green woodpecker which was coming in from the pasture in a lazy looping flight. Fria went up under the bird, rolled on her back, just brushed him with her talons clenched, and was gone; beating high on quick wings before the bird knew what had happened. On pitch again, and a little higher this time, she came down over the green length of a fir plantation and chased a passing wood pigeon, whose eyes – from experience – were all for danger from the ground below, not the sky above. She passed inches above him. The bird slewed downwards in a plummeting panic dive for the cover of the pines. She swung upwards in a tight circle, going over on her back, and came out at the bottom of the circle and overtook the pigeon six feet above the nearest pine-tip, flashing by him in play, crying to herself and exhilarated by the tight vertical loop she had made for the first time in her life.

Then, pressed by her real need, she came back fast towards Smiler. She passed with a hiss of wings between the tower and the old house and slanted down the valley-side to the river. Some way below Eggesford bridge the valley woods reached right down to the river and the overhanging trees on either bank made a tunnel through which the Taw raced over a rocky bed. She dipped low over the river and went fast down the tunnel.

The white flick of a dipper on a moss-topped rock in midstream caught her eye. Fria swerved and came down almost to water level and dropped one leg to pick the bird off as she passed. But the dipper, which had survived many a sparrow-hawk's similar corsair attack, dived under the water, running along the stony bed for a couple of yards before surfacing and flying into the cover of some dead nettles on the bank.

A few hundred yards down the river Fria found a pool left in a rock basin by the dropping river and she settled and took her bath.

On the roof of Highford House Smiler sat in a quiet trance. The last he had seen of Fria had been her plunge into the river tunnel. The glasses idle in his hands on his lap, he just sat and shook his head in wonderment. The ruffled, spiritless bird of the barn was gone. He knew that this was the beginning of a new Fria, and from what he had seen of her display he guessed that she had now found she was able to take food for herself. He had no more worry about that.

An hour later Fria came back. She had bathed and then made her toilet on the branch of an oak hanging over the river.

Smiler saw her coming up the valley side and put his glasses on her. In the talons of her right leg, dangling a little below her body, she held the body of a dipper which had not been so fortunate as the first one. She flew to the tower-top and settled. Holding the dipper with one claw, she began to plume and eat it. When she had finished she cleaned her beak, preened her breast feathers and then dropped down and settled on the ledge of the recess. For a moment she raised her wings, half-arching them above her back, flexing the muscles, and then shuffled into her quarters.

With the last of the light going from the sky Smiler made his way back to the farm, the joy and excitement which were still in him making him kick out at odd stones on his path and swing with a hazel stick he had picked up at the dead heads of last year's foxgloves and tansies.

Back at the farm while he was having supper Smiler suddenly remembered Jimmy Jago.

He said to the Duchess, ‘Have you heard at all from Mr Jimmy, ma'am?'

‘Not for two weeks. He was in Newcastle then. Did you have any luck with Fria?'

Smiler realized that she had changed the subject deliberately and he knew enough about grown-ups now to ask no more questions. He had his own evasions to practise, too. Fria was his, and the last thing he wanted was a lot of people knowing where she was. At some time or other he knew that someone must see her flying, but it was ten to one that they would think she was a falcon that had come inland from the far coast and would not be tempted to go searching for her. Since he had no good reason to ask the Duchess to keep the discovery a secret (and knowing, too, that she had many friends with whom she loved to gossip) he said diplomatically, ‘She's around Eggesford way by the look of it. I found a pigeon she'd killed and eaten.'

The Duchess smiled to herself. Though he had tried to cover it, she had noticed the excitement in Smiler when he had returned. In her own mind she was sure he had found Fria. Being an understanding woman, she had decided that if he did not want to be frank with her it must be for some good reason of his own.

For the rest of that week Smiler only managed to get very short glimpses of Fria. He had found that by eating his lunch quickly he had just time enough to run up to Highford House and spend a few minutes there before he had to get back to his afternoon work. If he missed this expedition there was just enough light now as the evenings lengthened with March's going to give him a short time up at the house before night fell. Mostly Fria was sitting on the tower-top or the recess ledge when he arrived, since she liked to hunt in the morning or late afternoon.

The following week-end he spent most of his time up there. While Fria was away from the tower he went inside and climbed the stairs as high as he dared go. There was a twenty-foot gap before the remains of the top flight began again. The narrow lancet windows of the tower were either boarded over or smothered in ivy growths so that it was dark inside. The darkness gave away the position of Fria's ledge, for the daylight angled into the tower through the small gap in the bricks at its rear. As Smiler stared up at the shaft of light it suddenly flickered and then was blotted out. He ran outside and, with his glasses, saw from his parapet that Fria had returned and gone into the recess.

That Fria was getting enough food now he had no doubt. Often, as he explored through the woods around the hill, he came on the remains of her kills and could easily identify them. There were more wood pigeons than anything else, but Smiler also came across black-headed gulls, lapwings and partridges – and once, where the railway passed over the river above Eggesford, the remains of a tufted duck lying on the gangers' track at the side of the line.

Since he could not always be borrowing Mr Samkin's binoculars, Smiler took all his savings from his wages and the little money he had brought to Devon with him and bought himself a pair of second-hand glasses in Barnstaple one weekend. They were not as good as Mr Samkin's but they were good enough to satisfy Smiler.

Mr Samkin said to him one night after Sandra had left, ‘You never want my field-glasses now.'

Rather wooden-faced, Smiler said, ‘No, sir. Thank you.' For some reason which he found it hard to explain to himself he did not want to say a word about his discovery of Fria and her progress in adapting herself to her new life.

Mr Samkin gave a little smile. He could read Smiler like a book and he could have explained to him his reasons for wanting to say nothing about Fria.

He said, ‘I'm not going to put you in the witness-box, Samuel, and grill you. Field-glasses are as personal a possession to a sensitive man as his watch, his fountain pen, or his trout or salmon rod … even if he has to fit himself out with secondhand ones to begin with. And don't worry too much about people around here. Most of them never lift their eyes above the horizontal. They only know the sun is shining because they feel the heat on the top of their heads. But there are some whose eyes miss nothing. Nine out of ten of them give thanks for what they may see and keep their own counsel. The tenth is a scoundrel, and damned be his name, for profit is his god.'

Before he could stop himself, Smiler blurted out, ‘I know where she is, sir. But I don't want to say, even to you, please, sir.'

Mr Samkin, with a twinkle in his eyes, said, ‘You don't have to tell me anything, Samuel. I go for long walks. I have eyes in my head.'

April came and, as was the custom each year, Bob and Bill brought out the painted tent from the barn store and set it up on the small lawn. On fine afternoons the Duchess would sit in its doorway, with Scampi in attendance, and knit or just enjoy the sun and her own thoughts. Now and again someone would come for a consultation and the Duchess would oblige them.

The hawthorns were in half leaf and the ashes began to show green. Spring was stirring and the early blackbirds and thrushes had already laid their eggs, though not so soon as the sparrows and the starlings which haunted the barns and the farm buildings.

Fria was used to hunting for herself now, though she was still far from possessing all the skills of an experienced peregrine. Her condition had improved; the yellow skin of her legs was now almost buttercup-coloured and the slack, half-hardened quills of her primary, secondary and tail feathers had firmed up. She flew with a compact, powerful rhythm. She fed well, sometimes taking two wood pigeons or their equivalent each day. But she never killed without hunger. She killed only to eat, and death came swiftly as her hooked beak bit into a bird's neck, jerked, and snapped through the neck column.

But, now, for some reason beyond her understanding, she found herself impelled to strange moods, mostly at first light. She would fly to the tower-top or sometimes to the tall crest of a nearby oak and sit wailing softly to herself or shuffling to and fro, croaking and talking to herself, and then suddenly raise her wings and beat them in quick spasms without taking to the air. Only after she had killed did the mood leave her.

In the first week in April Johnny Pickering got another letter. It read: LEAVE IT TOO LATE AND YOU KNOW YOUR FATE.

Worse still, as he went out of his house to go to work, he found a police patrol car parked on the opposite side of the road. As he bicycled away the car started and slowly began to follow him. Before he could help himself he began to ride quickly, touched with panic, and his heart almost stopped as the car passed him. He waited to see whether it would draw in ahead. But the car went on and swung down a side turning. The two policemen in the car were completely uninterested in him. They had merely stopped in the road to send a message over the radio on a matter which in no way concerned Johnny Pickering. But Johnny Pickering had had a nasty moment and was far from recovered from it when he reached work.

In that first week of April Smiler had a letter, too. It was one which sent him out to his morning work whistling his head off. Laura had written to say that there was a good chance that at the end of April or the beginning of May – by dint of much badgering of her parents – she would be coming down for a short holiday to Devon and could Smiler find her rooms or a lodging somewhere near him? ‘But I can't give you the proper dates yet because it depends how the work goes here on the farm. And my father's not whole-hearted convinced about me going yet (though he will be) because to hear him carry on you'd think I was a bairn in arms still and Devon as far away as Australia. Parents! (Though Mother's all on my side I fancy.) The latest from himself is that – if he lets me go – I'll have to pay my own railway fare, but he'll have to reckon with Mother over that.'

So Smiler went whistling about his work as though, Bob said, he had swallowed a canary.

And on the Friday morning of that first week in April, the mist for which Maxie had been praying for weeks and weeks without the weather obliging, came to the moor.

It came down at three o'clock in the afternoon. The sky was overcast with low, barely moving clouds, and there was the faintest fret of a drizzle in the air. Slowly the distant tors and stretches of the moor were lost in what seemed a thickening of the air. Then, suddenly, the drizzle fined and became a veiling of mist which changed rapidly into a grey-white blanket that cut all visibility down to a hundred yards and still closed in.

In the quarry where Maxie was working, watched by the warder guards, a whistle blew and was followed by shouts from the warders for the prisoners to cease work and to assemble on the quarry bed to be marshalled for the march back to Princetown Gaol.

Maxie dropped the sledge hammer with which he had been breaking up stones and began to walk towards the assembly point. As he went, the mist thickened and the warders' calls became harsh and demanding. Maxie knew that his moment was coming. He walked slowly, judging the quick thickening of the mist and the dwindling distance between himself and the men and warders beginning to congregate in the quarry.

He was fifteen yards from the group when a heavy pall of mist swirled slowly across the quarry and the group was lost for a moment. Maxie dropped to his knees behind a quarried block of stone, rolled over, and let himself fall off the small track into a cushion of heather and tall grasses below a small bank. He rose and stooping low began to run away from the group, following a small water gully that sloped upwards to the low crest of the quarry.

Maxie was a strong, fit man and he had not allowed prison life to soften him. He went as fast as he could now, knowing that every yard he made before his absence was discovered would be precious, and he knew exactly which course to take. For months he had studied the quarry area and the wide sweeps of the moors around it. The knowledge was a vivid map in his mind which he followed unerringly. He had the true countryman's gift of a feeling for his surroundings, of carrying in his mind small and large patterns of the twists and turns of streams and tracks, and of sensing his direction from the drift of the mist and the wind-angled lean of bushes and isolated trees.

Behind him, suddenly, there was the shout of alarmed voices and then the blowing of whistles. He knew exactly what had happened. He had been missed. As he ran he could picture the scene. The men would be marshalled in a tight file, a couple of warders would be checking the roll-call again while another warder would already be on his radio link alerting the prison authorities in Princetown. He knew, too, that in this mist none of the warders would come after him. They had the other prisoners to keep safe and they knew that if the mist for the moment was Maxie's friend it could also in a few hours become his enemy. To make a breakaway was one thing – and many men had tried it – but to keep going through the mist, knowingly and unerringly following a line to safety, was a task few men could accomplish successfully. Within half an hour there would be blocks formed on all the moor roads. The moment the mist lifted, search parties would begin to comb the moor, and with daylight there would be a helicopter or two to help them.