The Painted Tent (16 page)

But for the moment Maxie was safe and he was away. Within half an hour, too, rumour would run through the prison itself.

‘There's one away.'

‘Who?'

‘Maxie Martin – the Gypo.'

‘Good luck to 'im.'

Five minutes later, swinging slowly round in a circle to bring him on a north- instead of the south-bearing line of his escape, Maxie crossed the main Princetown-Tavistock road. He jumped the far ditch, found the remembered stone wall of a small field and headed along it. At the top of the field he climbed the upper wall and dropped down to the heather and short sheep-bitten turf of the moor.

At the meeting-point of the field's side and top stone walls, he took his line from their right angle. Loping at an easy pace he began to head steadily through the mist, the daylight fading, and prayed, but without any panic, that within the next half-mile he would hit the broad mark which would be his true route to that night's sanctuary. After a while, although he was going steadily uphill, the ground began to fall away to his right, plugs of grey stone breaking its face and then, muted but unmistakable through the mist, came the sound of running water.

He went caterways down the slope and found his mark, a small stream, cascading and rippling down the bottom of a boggy-floored combe. Maxie, keeping just clear of the miry ground, began to work his way up the stream. His confidence rose for it was far from the first time in his life that he had used this route. There had been a time when he and Jimmy Jago, blood brothers, had caught the small, hungry trout in the stream, had poached the odd lamb from the moor flocks and – but less often – had cut out some foal from the herds of moor ponies to take away to be sold or used for caravan work eventually. He smiled to himself as he remembered the odd times when some snorting, angry moor stallion had come charging at them to protect its progeny – though at the time it had been no laughing matter. And it was no laughing matter now. He was away and he was going to stay away. Princetown was never going to see him again … He'd sooner die first, for wasn't that better for a real man than being shut up like a rat in a cage for years and years and the heart's truth sounding clear as a bell that the law was one thing, but justice another?

After an hour of slow progress the ground grew marshier. He had to stop now and then to pick up the sound of the water to his right. He came out finally on to a wide, sedgy, peat-bogged plateau from which the stream rose. He circled the bog to the west and picked up through the mist a broken stone wall, studded here and there with a twisted thorn. In its lee was a narrow track. He followed this, scaring small parties of sheep that now and then loomed out of the mist, hearing the thud of their feet as they went away into the gloom, until the wall ended. Then he swung left-handed, well above the stream's boggy source.

He began to climb now, edging his way up the long easy slope of a moorland tor. But he had to go slowly for the darkness had come and, although his eyes had made some adjustment to the misty gloom, he knew that one rash step, a trip over a rock outcrop, could twist an ankle or break a leg and take all chance of freedom from him. He reached the top of the tor after an hour, recognizing it, knowing where he was from times past. There was a small ring of stones enclosing a bare arena from which he heard the sound of sheep scattering as he entered it. He sat down with his back against a rock and rested. From a small flat tin which every day for months he had fixed with adhesive tape under his left armpit and worn whenever he went out on a working party, he took a small section of chocolate and ate it slowly. Then he took one of the five cigarettes the tin held and lit it with one of the red-tipped matches in the tin, striking the match against the face of the rock. He smoked contentedly, knowing himself safe from pursuit while the mist lasted, knowing, too, that he was safely on his proper route. Another two hours would take him to the cache at the bottom of Hangingstone Hill where Jimmy Jago had promised to leave provisions and a change of clothes for him.

As he sat there he sensed that the mist was beginning to thin a little and there was the faintest suggestion of a breeze stirring. That did not surprise him. It was April and late for any heavy, prolonged mist. But the mist had given him all he needed now. Once he reached the cache and could get rid of his prison clothes he knew that he could make the rest of his journey, the first stage to freedom. He sat there, high above the moor, alone, and content with his isolation.

But Maxie Martin was not alone. Fifty feet from him, across the other side of the small circle, sat another stranger in the mist whose ears had heard his approach; whose eyes had caught the small flare of the match; who sat, now, perched twelve feet up on a granite outcrop and, as the wind thinned or parted the slow veils of mist, could see the shadowed figure of Maxie sitting with his back to his rock.

It was a peregrine tiercel, a full adult in its third season. It sat there, humped against the mist and darkness, looking like a spur of the rock on which it sat.

It was a tiercel born in a Welsh eyrie. Its falcon and tiercel parents had been one of a few pairs of Welsh peregrines which, out of lingering atavistic compulsion, made the passage from their birth-place far south to the high passes and lonely peaks of the Spanish Pyrenees to winter. Adult now, the tiercel had long lost all contact with its parents. The previous year it had mated and, out of a clutch of four eggs, only one had hatched to give the world an eyas falcon which had been shot by a Welsh chicken farmer long before the time, had come for it to make its passage to Spain. The brood falcon had started her passage four days before the tiercel and had been trapped in the chestnut woods above Canterets by flying into a fine nylon net hung between two trees as she dived after a pigeon. She had been sold to a Spanish falconer.

The tiercel that sat on the rock close to Maxie now was in passage back to his Welsh hills. He had rested the previous night on the cliffs of Belle Ile off Quiberon in the Bay of Biscay. In the morning he had beat up three thousand feet and, aided by a mild southerly wind, had crossed the Brittany peninsular, meeting the coast at St Brieuc. He had winged his way north without urgency over the Channel Islands and hit the English coast at Start Point in Devon. On the southern slopes of Dartmoor he had dropped to a small river and had drunk and bathed and rested.

Late in the afternoon he had taken off and, hungry, had moved up the moor, two thousand feet high, his eyes watching the vast spread of ground below him. The migrant birds were arriving. He marked the small movement of whinchat, stone-chat and warblers and, once, the hawk shape of a cuckoo quick-flighting along a shallow moorland combe. Far below the skylarks hovered and sang and he saw a covey of partridges break cover near the Princetown-Tavistock road. The tiercel watched the movement of cars along the road, saw clearly the shine on the swinging points of pickaxes being used in the small quarry by the prisoners, and the network of small streams, gathering to become rivers, that flowed from the high reaches of the moor. Over a moorland farm, the lichens and moss on its slate roof clear to him, he saw the flight movement of three pigeons, flying high and in formation. They were a kit of three flying tipplers – a breed of domestic pigeons trained, not as homers for long-distance flying, but for endurance in the air. Flown in competition by their trainers they could circuit, sometimes as high as two thousand feet, for as long as twenty hours in the air before being called or forced down from exhaustion.

The tipplers were fifteen hundred feet below the tiercel and flying in an inverted V formation. The tiercel winged over, dropped his head and stooped, picking up speed with a few rapid sharp-cutting beats of his wings. He came down the sky almost vertically, wings closed, legs thrust forward and close up to his breast, talons clenched, his speed increasing with each second. He struck the leading tippler at eighty miles an hour, dropping his right leg and ripping into the base of the bird ‘s neck with an extended rear talon. As the pigeon's feathers exploded about him, the tiercel threw up into a tight vertical circle as the two other pigeons dropped, zig-zagging and panic-flighting, for the farmhouse roof a half a mile away. The tiercel, wind singing against his half-opened wings, went down after the tumbling, dead bird. He grasped it out of the air a hundred feet above ground and flew heavily with it on a long slant that took him to the top of the tor where he now was perched.

There he had eaten it, preened himself, rested a while, and then the mist had come down cloaking him suddenly with dampness and gloom. The tiercel hated flying in thick rain, thunder clouds, or in mist. He stayed where he was, restless at first, making small cries now and then to himself, and later quietening as the night slowly joined the mist and darkness closed in.

He sat now watching the red glow of Maxie's cigarette-end pulse and wane as the man smoked. Only the thick mist, which would cloak and confuse him if he took to flight, kept the tiercel there.

Two hours later the tiercel still sat on the granite rock spur. The mist was thinning slowly. He would sit now until first light. Five miles away Maxie had found the cache and the trowel which Jimmy Jago had hidden. He sat on the ground and dug the waterproofed haversack free. Inside were clothes, a pack of food, a small flask of brandy, a pencil-slim torch, cigarettes and a lighter, and an envelope with ten one-pound notes in it. These notes he knew were only a reserve in case he was forced to abandon his journey towards the sanctuary which had been prepared for him at Highford House.

He stripped himself completely of all his prison clothes and of his socks and boots. When he was dressed in the outfit which Jimmy had provided, he buried all his old clothing in the cache hole and covered it with earth.

The mist was thin now and the wind had freshened. Maxie occasionally caught glimpses of the sky and the stars above him. He dropped down the torside and flanked the edges of the mire which was part of the spongy womb from which the stripling Taw found life. When he reached the little combe through which the Taw first began to run with any strength and definition he stopped. Flask in hand he knelt beside it, leaned over and sucked at the water to drink. Then he took a swig from the brandy flask. Before he stood up he reached his hand into the water and splashed it over his face and the back of his neck, talking to himself in the language which the Duchess and Jimmy used between them. The libation was not done for the sake of coolness. It was a ritual thanksgiving born of sentiment and an acknowledgement of the magic which from the dawn of time all water had carried for primitive man and his descendants. And for this particular water Maxie had a special reverence for he had been born within sight and sound of it in a caravan in a field on the river bank below the village of Brushford Barton.

Just before first light Maxie left the growing river and made a detour around the village of Sticklepath which lay on the main road between Okehampton and Exeter, a road which was the northern boundary of the moor, every yard of which in daylight would hold danger for him. He crossed it with the last of the mist and rejoined the river a mile farther north.

And, with the first light, back on the moor the tiercel shook his body and head, splaying and shuffling his feathers free of mist drops and the discomfort of the night. He dropped from his rock, flew across the small tor-top arena and then rose leisurely into the air, climbing up on the breast of a mild northerly wind, leaving behind him the early soaring and singing larks, moving up and up until he should be satisfied with a pitch from which he could, a speck in the sky lost to the world below, move on towards the eyrie of his birth.

That morning – which was a Saturday – Smiler told the Duchess over breakfast about Laura's letter and asked her if she knew anyone in the district who would be able to give her lodgings.

‘She's coming sometime at the end of the month, or the beginning of May, ma'am.'

The Duchess eyed him quizzically across the table and said, ‘With her parents' approval, I hope?'

‘Oh, yes, of course. Her father's being a bit difficult right now, but Laura and her mother will see to him.'

The Duchess chuckled. ‘ I don't doubt it. What chance would one man have against two females? Well now, let's see. Lodgings. Mr Samkin has a room that he lets sometimes if specially asked.'

‘Oh, I wouldn't want Laura to be up there. I mean, Mr Samkin's nice and all that … but well, he teaches me and it could be a bit difficult of an evening if I was up there studying …'

The Duchess chuckled. ‘ You mean your mind wouldn't be on your work with Laura in the house? Well, then, what about the Parsons? They take in visitors during the summer. They'd have a room. And Sandra would be company for her while you're working – unless you were thinking of asking for the week off?'

‘I hadn't exactly thought of that, ma'am. But I don't fancy Sandra and Laura together.'

The Duchess laughed. ‘No – and I don't fancy that they would fancy it.'

Smiler said after a moment's pause, ‘I was wondering …'

‘Yes?'

Embarrassed, Smiler said quickly, ‘No, I couldn't.'

‘You couldn't what?'

Smiler shook his head. ‘ No, it doesn't matter. I'll ask Bob and Bill. They'll know some place.'

‘You won't ask them anything, Sammy. And I can't think why you're making such a bowl of porridge about the whole thing. You know perfectly well what you've got in mind. There's another spare room here. You'd like her to stay here, wouldn't you?'

‘Oh, ma'am – could she? She could help about the house and farm and she's a good cook –'

‘And what sort of holiday would that be? No, the matter's settled. She can stay here and she doesn't have to pay a penny or do a hand's turn unless the fancy takes her. Maybe, too, we might arrange it that you have a week's holiday while she's here. But not if I don't get an extra special good report on your work from Mr Samkin. He's not particularly pleased with your Latin at the moment.'