It was a mild, pleasant night and he was enjoying himself in his own quiet way. The woods were full of safe, springtime scents, so that his nose told him precisely what ride he was crossing at any one time. Down here by the mere anemones and irises grew and the sap in the split reeds gave off a scent that recalled long summer days in the holts under the bank, where he often met otters. Otters fished for a living and had no quarrel with him but he knew they were hunted like himself and sometimes envied their ability to take to the water. He passed the pagoda and circled Sam Potter’s cottage, recalling the big man’s joyous whoop whenever he saw him bound out of a bracken in the area further north, where Sam spent most of his time felling timber. Traveller liked Sam, who had no malice but he did not care for his younger boy, Ted, who was prodigiously fast on his feet and could leap across broken ground at the speed of a whippet. Once or twice, in this part of the woods, he had come close to running Traveller down but there was no risk tonight, for Ted was always early to bed like his father. Only Joannie Potter and her long-faced daughter, Pauline, sat up late and as Traveller paused outside the tightly wired hen enclosure Pauline came out of the back door calling the cats to their supper. She was, he recalled, crazy about cats, who were strangely pampered at this house and not left to fend for themselves as at all the other farms in the Valley. Coddling them had made them soft so that he did not fear them as he feared the half-wild cats at Deepdene or the Dell. He jumped the stream, threaded the rhododendron maze and climbed the hill where the Shallowford badgers lived. One or two of them were pottering about and bristled at his approach. They were excessively fastidious animals and only a dire emergency would drive him to use their holts as a refuge but he had refuged there from time to time until hounds were called off to another part of the woods. Every animal in the woods was leagued against Man and the badgers were no exception.
He padded through a forest of bluebells to the head of the slope and then, at a leap, dropped down into Derwent territory, or what had been Derwent but was now a wilderness, recalling in its sordid disarray, the old camp on Blackberry Moor before it was overgrown by creeping colour. Unlike the camp, however, there were few pickings to be had here now. He did not understand what had been happening in this part of the preserve but had remained curious ever since the downslope of the hill above the farm had been ripped open by great clanking machines, like those that rushed down the shining rails near Sorrel Halt and now, he noted, there were other changes, none of which fitted into the broader pattern of agricultural pursuits as he had observed them over the years. Some of the great engines stood about, protected by tarpaulins that lifted in the breeze and momentarily deceived him into thinking men were on hand although the wind carried no taint of men. Then he saw them for what they were, coverings of the kind used on haystacks and he snarled at them and crossed the red weals in Eight Acre to inspect a long row of squarish pits, cross-covered with beams and surfaced underneath with a hard, gritty substance that was neither earth, grass, rubble nor the familiar tar of made-up roads. The pits puzzled and disturbed him and he wondered if they were a row of gigantic traps of a new and hazardous design; then it occurred to him that they were not unlike dwellings, although it seemed improbable that a man like Derwent would have so many people cluttering his land. His reasoning powers were considerable but they were limited by his experience and he had no previous experience of building sites, Nun’s Bay having been completed shortly before he was born. The changes here were immense since his last visit and instinct warned him against change of such catastrophic proportions so that he could not help but link the disarray at High Coombe with the dissolution at Periwinkle on the far side of the woods. Viewed separately they were singular; taken together they were alarming.
He padded down the long slope towards the sea and whilst crossing the approach lane of Deepdene he wondered what had become of the old woman who had so many children for whom she would sometimes ring a bell, the clang of which carried over the river on certain winds. Then he heard the heavy crunch of hobnail boots on gravel and at once took cover in a bed of docks as Dick Potter, Farmer Willoughby’s cowman, checked his stride, sniffing the air before moving on with a grunt. Dick, as Traveller well knew, had affiliations with the cottage back in the woods and it struck him that the Potters, one and all, were a tribe to be watched. Each of them, it seemed, possessed some special skill; Sam, the woodsman, could throw a hatchet and kill a rabbit on the run and his son Ted, could outpace a whippet over a given distance; now here was Dick, Ted’s brother, who could smell a fox on a windless night and Traveller was grateful that the moon had yet to rise. He waited until the sound of footsteps had died before taking the steep, winding path to the Dell. Here there was nothing to fear. The two farmers and their fat wives were an amiable lot and Traveller had a special interest in one of the men because he had a curious, lop-sided walk, not unlike Traveller’s own. There had been a time when the Dell was sown with traps but that was before Traveller’s time. Today neither Fanner Bellchamber, Farmer Brissot, nor anyone else about here bothered to keep down the conies which abounded in Low Coombe. Traveller killed one in passing and then wished he had not for the rabbit’s shriek set the dogs barking and one of the women came out into the yard and shouted to them to be quiet. The dogs he knew were chained so he lingered in the area for a spell, remembering the times he had given hounds the slip in the fields of kale about here; then he trotted off and turned left-handed, emerging from the wood at the head of the Bluff where he was just in rime to see the moon rise and tip twenty cartloads of silver into the bay. He paused, looking down, half inclined to descend the rock-ledges to the landslip terrace and visit the vixen who lived there but he thought better of it. He was already tired and it was a long way home and his need of vixens was less urgent than in the past.
It was in an enclosed garden above the forge that he was made aware of other changes since he had passed this way. The village seemed to be extending up the hill and, whereas evening loiterers had usually gathered under the one roof of The Raven, tonight a group of them, all men, were standing in the soft glow of the forge that spread beyond the open door. He went closer and looked directly down on them, their taint reaching him like an advancing wall, their cigarettes glowing like a scatter of watch fires. Some he recognised and some he did not, according to their occupations and habitat. Abe Tozer, the aged smith, was there, leaning on a long-shafted hammer, his white whiskers reaching the top of his leather apron and close by two or three of Abe’s cronies—Morgan, the pot-bellied builder, Noah Williams, the sailor who never went to sea, and Thorn, the new sexton whom Traveller had often watched at work on the churchyard. With them was a sprinkling of younger men, like the hideously disfigured Gappy Saunders, and the blind man, Willis, who walked with a white stick. The rumble of their voices came up to the fox as he rested and again the pattern of change was revealed to him for not so long ago this street would have been empty under the stars at this time of night.
He circled the forge, crossed the street and climbed the hill to the dunes where the smell of the sea vanquished every other scent until he caught the reek of gorse growing among the marram grass. Then he turned inland along the river bank as far as Timberlake’s sawmill, a place where he had often refuged from hounds and watched them overrun his scent among the newly-sawn logs before he doubled back to the nearest covert. The house behind the sawpit was silent and shuttered, as though its occupants had turned their backs on the Valley like Elinor Codsall and Farmer Derwent, and for the third time that evening Traveller sensed change and a shifting pattern, so that suddenly, from being merely curious he felt uneasy, despite the reassuring scents of resin, dry sawdust and woodsmoke and leaving the yard hurried on his way, crossing the river at the ford and taking a short cut across the stubble to Four Winds. Here, to his relief, nothing had changed at all. The yards were still tidy and spotlessly clean, the fences in repair, barns and byres bolted. There were no rat-holes in the weather-boarding and ligh
ts burned behind the neatly-curtained windows; all the same he went on through to the watershed without pause. The fat Boxer kept by the new landlord was a pet and was therefore almost certainly asleep beside the fire in the kitchen but all his life Traveller had feared the Four Winds cats of which there seemed to be a baker’s dozen, all as aggressive as stoats. By the time the moon was high he was safe across the Teazel and heading through Heronslea coverts and within minutes of reaching his culvert beside the tower he was curled muzzle to brush, or what little remained of his brush, but before he slept the changes he had marked during his circuit had been filed away in his memory. Hunting had finished until autumn but when it began again every scrap of information acquired that night would multiply his chances of outwitting hounds and the tyrant who fed them as a reward for betraying every other beast of the field.
II
The changes Traveller had marked during his fact-finding foray seemed abrupt to him for, alone in the Valley, he and Squire Craddock were half-rebel, half-conservative. To most people in the Valley post-war changes were accepted as the wear and tear of years—incidents like the death of old Arthur Pitts, or the decision of Mary Willoughby to close her little school and spend the remainder of her days sharing a bungalow with an elderly cousin, in Dawlish. Everyone had noted, of course, the inroads of Codsall’s shock troops at High Coombe, and some of them smiled and shrugged when they heard the story of the irascible old farmer’s assault on his son Hugh at the time of the sell-out, but for the most part they did not share the resentment of father, sister and brother-in-law. A man was entitled to do as he liked with land bought and paid for and the bungalows Codsall’s partner Tapscott built in Top Warren were soon sold, the row of shops in Coombe Bay High Street soon let. The proposal to build a permanent camping site for tents and caravans, with its own row of shops in Eight Acre, caused, a somewhat wider ripple of comment but once the site was cleared and the foundations that had so mystified Traveller marked out, few were outraged by what was happening along the eastern border of the estate. Farms were being sold off everywhere nowadays and it was accepted that there was no future in agriculture. Young men like Dick Potter, and Will Codsall’s younger son Mick, who clung to the industry were the exceptions. Maybe they were too idle to leave the Valley and learn a trade in Paxtonbury, maybe there were too stupid.
Most of the young ones had left by the end of 1932, some to look for work in the cities, others to marry and one or two, despairing of finding regular jobs, to join the Services or go abroad like Rumble Patrick Palfrey. The Valley was not at all surprised to learn that he had sailed away to Australia ;-anything might be expected of a child born in a cave above the Shallowford badger sets but as the Depression deepened, and the national tally of unemployed topped the three million mark, some of Rumble’s contemporaries had second thoughts about his hereditary daftness and themselves wrote away for details of Government-sponsored emigrant schemes. Young Sally Pascoe, for instance, the younger daughter of Walt Pascoe and ‘Pansy-Potter-that-was’, left in 1931, writing within six months to say that she had found herself a husky husband in Ontario. Brother Albert (the hidden persuader of Pansy’s second marriage) soon followed her and after him went Esther Eveleigh and her husband George, only son of the blind wheelwright, Willis. Yet somehow the broad outlines of the Valley did not change much, at least not along its northern and western boundaries. Periwinkle remained derelict; nobody would be fool enough to move into Elinor Codsall’s farm, where the acres Will had reclaimed from the moor were already waist-high with dock and thistle and the farmhouse, never much shakes as a dwelling, was partially roofless and soggy with damp. In the south-east the Willoughby holding continued to prosper, Francis Willoughby having proved that it paid to specialise and his success with beef had attracted two local youngsters to sign on with him at the new agricultural rates. Deepdene was a very democratic farm these days, Francis and his two hired hands (one a Potter and the other a Timberlake), living a carefree life with a daily woman to cook and clean for them. Master and men made regular jaunts to Paxtonbury where, it was rumoured, Francis learned to lose his woman shyness in the roystering company of young Dick Potter, his foreman. Whether this was true or not Francis must have mellowed since his trip to the Argentine for when teased by Claire on the subject of his bachelor status he had shocked her by quoting the famous Churdles Ash quip—that the act of taking a wife at his age was akin to leaping into a river to quench thirst! Claire thought this evidence that Francis’ success had done much to enlarge the son of Preacher Willoughby, the old prophet who had once stalked the Valley warning the unrepentant against an eternity of hell fire.
Lower down the long slope, where the unlikely partnership of the lame French Canadian Brissot and the Cockney Jumbo Bellchamber had now entered its second decade, there was hope that the Dell would continue to hold its own, for Brissot was a good farmer and his talkative friend a better salesman. The two Potter girls had sobered beyond local recognition and had even been known to express disapproval concerning the shameless behaviour of girls like Prudence Pitts, who, to some extent, had inherited the Potter reputation of tasting every dish in the Valley before making a final decision. Prudence’s mother, the once tawny, now greying Gloria, was outraged when the comment reached her as it did within hours. Like everyone else among the older generation she had vivid memories of the Potter girls’ reputations up to the moment they had married at the end of the war and it seemed to her grossly hypocritical on their part to quarrel with her daughter’s efforts to make the most of the shrinking supply of men in the Valley. She carried her complaint to Henry, demanding that he confront the slanderers but Henry only laughed and said, ‘Dornee talk so bliddy daaft, woman! Us dorn mind what the Potters zay an’ never did! Besides, tiz true baint it? I baint zeed ’er with the zame chap three times in a row!’ Gloria complained that he was deficient in family loyalty but she had regarded herself as the dominant partner but the shearing episode, in the disordered kitchen of Elinor Codsall in 1917, had taught her otherwise. Since then she had made one or two half-hearted attempts to regain the ascendancy but all they had earned her was the traditional penance of a valley shrew, a profound reluctance to sit upon anything unupholstered for a day or so. Apart from an occasional flare-up between man and wife, and a brief sulk on the part of Prudence when she was between boy friends, life pursued an uneventful course at Hermitage. Henry’s son David, now twenty-six, had his father’s and grandfather’s reverence for large whites and saddlebacks and in the main he upheld Henry’s refusal to abandon traditional tools for one or other of ‘they bliddy machines’. Paul declared that Hermitage was the most old-fashioned farm in the county, a holding that had never heard the stutter of a tractor, or the clatter of the muck-spreader but deep in his heart he counted Henry Pitts his most reliable tenant. Their relationship, always cordial, had now ripened into friendship and they would sometimes ride the rounds together, talking of old friends and old adventures that led all the way back to the rescue of shipwrecked sailors in Tamer Potter’s cove. Paul was not alone in his affection for Henry. Everyone in the valley welcomed his broad, rubbery smile and his high-pitched, ‘ ’Ow be ’ee then?’ His aged mother, Martha, still treated him like a child but she respected his judgment as she had never minded that of her amiable husband, Arthur.
Over at Four Winds Harold Eveleigh had made good his pledge to regard farming as a way of life rather than a temporary alternative to the dole queue. The farm had almost regained its pre-war rhythm for Harold’s wife, the pretty Lancashire girl, was quick to learn from Marian and from Deborah, her sister-in-law, whereas Harold brought to his new occupation the serious application that had promoted him from private to captain in three years of active service in the East and afterwards in Ireland. It heartened Paul to see Four Winds surface again and shake off its gloomy reputation, and when Harold’s son Norman was born he broke his resolution to cease adding to the long roll of his Valley godchildren. Mary, his daughter, and Haro
ld’s wife Connie, became close friends and Whiz, his second daughter, taught Connie to ride. Paul never had cause to regret his snap decision; from the time Harold took over his western flank was secure.
The fox’s uneasiness when he paused outside the silent, shuttered sawmill was justified, for that very day Dandy Timberlake had died, indirectly as the result of the lung wound he had received in the Dardanelles seventeen years before. He and Pansy Potter had made a good marriage and Walt Pascoe’s children found him a tolerant and conscientious stepfather. Walter’s eldest son, Tim, stayed on at the mill as sawyer, assisted by Dandy’s own child, who bore the name of Pascoe notwithstanding the fact that everyone in the valley was aware that he was the product of a walk home in a storm on the night of the Coronation fête, in 1911. The boys were both single and after Dandy’s death their mother lived on at Mill Cottage, where Hazel had settled after bearing Ikey’s child in the woods. In spite of having had a largish family and two husbands Pansy held middle-age at bay more successfully than either of her sisters. At forty-nine she was still a very handsome woman, with enormous reserves of Potter vitality, and although she regretted Dandy in the way she had regretted Walt, she made no secret of her intention to marry a third time as soon as opportunity presented itself.
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