The Painted Tent (5 page)

Smiler's birthday came and he was sixteen. Jimmy Jago was at home for it and gave him a good second-hand watch. ‘Now you're a working and studying man, my lad, you must value time. It's like water under a bridge. Once gone you can't bring it back.' The Duchess gave him a thick sweater she had knitted herself, a stormproof jacket for the winter, and a fountain pen for writing up his notes because Mr Samkin was old-fashioned enough to value good writing and turned up his nose at biros and self-propelling nonsenses like that. And Bill and Bob – not without design – gave him an old twelve-bore, single-barrelled shotgun, promised to provide the cartridges for it, and to teach him how to use it, so that from then on he could shoot the pigeons and rabbits around the farm for the table and also for feeding Fria – and relieve them of the job. When Smiler asked about having a licence for it, Bob looked at him (or it might have been Bill), winked, and said, ‘We'll meet that fence when we come to it. But remember – if we ever see you handle that gun anyway different from what we're goin' to show you, then you get your backside beaten and you'll be thrown in the Bullay brook.'

But the best present of all was a letter from Laura Mackay which the Duchess gave him when they were alone. Before he had opened it, Smiler – blushing a bit – asked, ‘But how could she write to me … she don't know my address?'

The Duchess shook her head, setting her red curls dancing, and said severely, ‘Not “don't know”, boy. “Doesn't know”. Mr Samkin would give you stick for that. And how your girl knows your address is my business – there's not a county in the whole of this Kingdom where I don't have friends. Now up to your room and read it before you start work.'

Smiler ran up to his room and sat by the window and read it.

Dear Sammy,

An old gypsy man called by the other forenoon when Mum and Dad were out. He made me swear some sort of secret daft rigmarole and then told me where you were. So I'm writing and no one will ever know unless you say so, and I wish I could come down to see you. And you can write to me because if Mum and Dad saw the letter they would never ask questions and anyway they would never give you away, not after everything. I hope you are keeping well as everyone here is, including the Laird and Bacon that is still with him. I miss you a lot, though I think you were a daft loon to go on the run again, but then you always thought you knew best. Look after yourself.

Yours,

Laura

PS. Don't forget you promised to ask a certain question one day.
XX

Smiler read it through twice and each time little shivers of pleasure ran through him. Then he took his new fountain-pen and a sheet of paper eager to answer the letter right away – but the excitement was too much for him. He just couldn't keep his bottom still on the chair and his right hand shook. He wrote ‘Dear Laura' – and then was stuck. He'd never written a letter to a girl in his life. Then he remembered one of the first things Mr Samkin had told him: ‘Before you put anything to papers first of all think about it, then think about it again, get your mind settled about what you're going to say – and then write. Many a man has ruined himself by a few ill-considered scrawls of ink on a piece of paper.'

Smiler got up, went out of the window, across the kitchen roof and into the far barn. He walked the length of the cages and pens and finished in front of Fria. This now had become a ritual with him. It was always with Fria that he finished up. As he stood there one of the mynah birds opened an eye, whistled, and called, ‘Oh, look at us! Look at us!' But Smiler scarcely heard the bird.

Fria, her dark-brown eyes wide open, watched Smiler. She sat there, her breast feathers slack and shabby the slate-blue feathers of her wings loosely laid, lacking the taut, steely compactness which would have marked a healthy bird like a coat of mail. There was a dinginess to the dull yellow of the cere at the base of her beak and of her long-taloned feet. The only feeling of power and wildness in her came from the stance of her head, in the unflinching gaze of her eyes bracketed by the black cheek-marks curving downwards. She knew Smiler now. It was he who fed her with pigeons, rabbit pieces, and the bodies of the barn mice caught in the traps which were around the place. She knew him, too, because he moved always without any sudden movement. Since he had come he had changed the bathing-tray in her cage for a wider, shallower one which she preferred. Now she bathed each day whereas before she had known no regular desire for the cleanliness which all peregrines love.

Standing before her, touched as he always was at the sight of her, Smiler said softly, ‘Fria … Fria …' The falcon made no movement. ‘Fria, I've had a letter from Laura … all the way from Scotland. And one day I'm going to be a vet and I'm going to marry her. I am. I promised to ask her. Not yet, of course. Not never – I mean, not ever – until I'm a real vet. And I'm going to be because everyone's helping me. That's good, isn't it? Maybe … well, perhaps I'll be able to think of something that … well, something that I can do for you, old girl.'

Fria closed her eyes. She shut Smiler out. She shut everything out, closing out the world, drawing back into the limbo of her own unfathomable nature.

Smiler went quietly out and switched off the light.

Bob and Bill gave Smiler lessons in shooting and he soon became a fairly competent shot and – after one or two lapses, when he did get his backside kicked but was not thrown into the brook – a very safe handler of a gun. Although he didn't like killing things he now shot rabbits and wood pigeons and justified it because he knew that they were for the pot and for the griffon and Fria. But everything else was safe from him.

One day as he was pushing his bicycle up the hill from the farm a white minicar with a police sign on it pulled up alongside him. A youngish-looking policeman with a red, plump face leaned out.

‘Hullo, there – you're Sammy, aren't you, the Duchess's nephew?'

For a moment Smiler didn't know what to say. Then remembering Mr Samkin's edict, he thought for a moment or two, and said, ‘Yes, I'm Sammy.'

The policeman smiled. ‘And I'm P.C. Grimble – not Grumble, though I do. Nice to meet you, Sammy, and a word of advice.' He winked. ‘So long as you keep that twelve-bore on your own patch I don't know it's there and I don't want to know. But you step on the highway with it and … well, that's it.' He winked again, and then drove off. And so Smiler began to learn that although the law is the law – as he well knew – there was in every country community a law within the law, but it was one which had to be strictly observed. That he was the Duchess's nephew was news to him but, since he now knew something of the way the Duchess could arrange things, he decided that there was no point in mentioning it to her.

So, through the autumn and into the winter, Smiler worked hard and studied hard. The leaves turned brown and gold and fell, leaving only the green plantations of fir and pine to stand black against the early sunset sky. The rains fell and the Bullay brook and the Taw were swollen with chocolate-brown spates from the run-offs and streams bringing down the rich red Devon soil. And, as the spates began to fall, so the salmon and the sea-trout ran high up the river and cleared the weirs to seek their spawning-grounds. Smiler, hedging in the meadows by the brook, would sometimes creep up and watch the hen salmon cutting at their gravelly redds in the spate-cleared water while the cock fish hovered close by, ready to fertilize the eggs with their cloudy milt. He grinned to himself when sometimes a cheeky little trout would dash in first – a boy trying, as Bob or Bill said, to do a man's work.

Now, by the time he had finished his work, it was dark so that it was only at the week-ends he could get on his bicycle and explore the country around or go for long walks – which was what he preferred most to do. But, being young and not wedded to the habit of regular sleep, there were times when even after the day's labour there was an itch in his limbs for movement. Sometimes, after checking the creatures in the barn at night, he would delay going back to bed and in moonlight or clear starlight go off for a tramp for an hour or two. It only took a little while for his eyes to become accustomed to the dark and he moved quietly and unobtrusively and was well rewarded. He soon found where the nearest badgers had their sett, knew the fox earths, and the trees where the kestrels and buzzards roosted. He was no longer startled when a barn owl ghosted silently by him over the short field-stubble. His hair no longer stood on end almost when a little owl shrieked suddenly. The dogs on the neighbouring farms knew him and now, when they scented him, never bothered to bark, and there were dozens of places where the pheasants roosted and it would have been easy for him – had he been a poacher – to raise a hand and take one. But Smiler preferred just to be out, to be an inhabitant of a night-time world which few other people knew. He knew the track that came down the hill by the farm which the travelling otters used when they came over country to reach the brook and so to the Taw, and the places in the clumps of cotton-grass where the jack-snipe bedded down. But the place he liked to go to most at night, particularly if there were a moon, was Highford House.

Highford House was about a mile and a half from Bullay-brook Farm. To get to it Smiler would follow the brook up the valley for a while then cut up the valley side through rough pastures and woods, across a small lane, and through a long stretch of Forestry Commission land which overlooked the Taw valley. The house, which had been built in the latter part of the nineteenth century, stood on the top of a hill that flanked the west side of the river. Once it had been a splendid mansion standing in its own park and woodlands. Now it was derelict and only a broken shell of its former self. The roof had been stripped of its lead and tiles, the windows of the magnificent rooms were without glass, and all the grand oak staircases had been removed. The park had become pasture and the once well-kept gardens had been reclaimed by thorn, elderberry, and small saplings of beech and oak. No formal flowers remained but the primroses, cowslips and other spring flowers had come back, and in autumn it was a riot of willow-herb and balsam. Built of great greystone blocks, it straddled the hilltop with its back to the woods, stranded like the skeleton of some long-dead monster. The winding drive that led out to the road was overgrown and hard to pick out. The once carefully kept rides of rhododendrons and azaleas had become a jungle and a sanctuary for all sorts of birds and animals. The jackdaws, kestrels and owls knew its broken roof parapet and crumbling walls and nested among them. Badgers and foxes over the years had burrowed to the wide maze of cellars that lay under the fallen rubble, and grass snakes and adders in summer sunned themselves on the warm stone slabs. Just behind the house was a tall, red-brick tower, relic of some older house that had once crowned the hilltop. Parts of the stone stairway that twisted up the inside of the tower still remained. But after the first floor there were great gaps in it and anyone who moved inside was in danger of setting off falls of brick and stone from higher up the tower. It rose high above the old house and the wilderness of woods and derelict park and from its top miles of the curving valley of the Taw could be seen, a valley where road, river and railway kept company, parted, and moved companionably together again as they ran northwestwards to Barnstaple and the sea.

It was here one December night that Smiler, still restless after a day's work and an evening's study, made his way to what he called his ‘thinking-place'. This was the wide parapet ledge of the roof at the back of the house. He reached it by climbing the stout stems of an old ivy and, once ensconced, he could look down into the rubble-filled shell of the house or across the wilderness that had been a formal garden to the redbrick tower. Though his eyes and ears were always wide awake for the movement of a night bird or animal, the squeak of a field mouse or the scrape of a rat or rabbit, he would let himself go off into a reverie, imagining the times when all his troubles would be over, his father back and he well on the way to being a vet. Sometimes, a shadow amongst the other shadows of the old house, he would just sit and dream and later hardly know what his dreams had been. Now and then he would even go over in his mind all he was learning from Mr Samkin – but not often.

He was sitting there this night, one of sharp frost, the fields already hoared and the stars blinking icily through the cold air, warm in his sweater and storm jacket, when he heard a noise come from the inside of the house which he had never heard before. From below him, but away near one of the empty front windows of the ground floor, he heard the sound of something metallic suddenly ring out. Just for a moment or two he was startled and felt the quick prick of fear tingle his scalp. Although there was always a friendly feeling about the place, despite its ruined and lonely state, his mind leapt to the thought of ghosts and strange spirits. But a moment later he forgot them because clearly to his ears came a decidedly human grunt and a man's voice said crossly, ‘Next time bring a bugle and blow it.'

Two men came into view, picking their way across the rubble below, clearly lit by the wash of starlight that flooded through the gaping roof. Moving quietly they crossed to the front window and paused there, surveying the stretch of wild pasture outside. The smaller of the two men carried a sack or a workman's tool-bag slung over his shoulder and Smiler guessed that something had probably fallen from this to make the noise he had heard.

The man with the tool-bag slipped through the window and was gone. The other man remained, as though waiting to watch that the other got unobtrusively away before he too left. One side of his face was clear in the starshine and Smiler saw that it was Jimmy Jago. For a moment his instinct was to call out to him, but he checked himself. He knew by now something of the ways of the Duchess and Jimmy and Bob and Bill. They were circus and Romany people and their ways were secret, even magic, and they lived by different rules than ordinary people.