Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  Perhaps the only two souls in the entire Valley to welcome the snow were Ikey Palfrey and Hazel Potter, the one because here in the country it was a novel experience, the other because it gave her an excuse to play truant every day.

  Ikey had seen snow before, of course, but never snow like this, pure, unsullied and dazzling white, crisp, powdery and untrodden by man or beast. When snow fell on Bermondsey it never lay more than an hour but was soon slush under the pressure of boots, hooves and cartwheels. Under a mantle of snow every Thames-side factory looked like a prison and every dwelling was seen as the squat, defeated hovel it really was but down here, especially when the sun shone, the long slope between the big house and Shallowford Woods turned coral and rose-pink and every branch of every tree became a crystal chandelier. The birds grew tame, not merely sparrows and thrushes that always haunted the scrap­yard, but all kinds of birds, some of which he had never seen at close quarters, great tits and blue tits, crested wrens, greenfinches, bullfinches and dozens of perky robins who perched on the harness pegs and ate crumbs from his hand. Then there were gloriously long slides in the drive and snowball fights with Gappy, the gardener’s boy, when Chivers was safely out of the way, but Ikey liked best his lonely tramps along the edge of the woods and up the west face of the Coombe to school, for here, in a silent, winter world, he could indulge his extravagant fancies and there was no one in sight to break the spell.

  He saw himself in many disguises and by no means always against a background of snow and ice but sometimes crossing waterless deserts and mountain ranges and sometimes rafting across the Pacific or shifting for himself (and possibly Squire Craddock) on a coral island, like Jack, Ralph and Peterkin, in Ballantyne’s book. During those tramps to and from Deepdene he was everyone he had ever met in Mary Willoughby’s library—Robinson Crusoe, Monte Cristo, D’Artagnan, Sherlock Holmes, Jim Hawkins and David Balfour on the run from redcoats. Anyone watching him making his way across the meadow to Hazel Potter’s squirrel tree, or along the southern edge of Shallowford Woods, might have thought him pursued by Furies. Every now and then he looked fearfully over his shoulder and darted for cover to emerge, bent double, to dash across the snow, firing as he ran until he reached a bank where, it seemed, yet another ambush awaited him which he evaded by changing direction and disappearing into a ditch.

  He was so engaged one overcast morning on his way home from Deepdene after Mary Willoughby had dismissed school an hour before time because Derwent had told her there would be another fall by mid-afternoon. Ikey usually went part way home with Sydney Codsall and children of a Codsall labourer, but they were an unadventurous group and preferred to take the track down the Dell and through the Potter holding to the river road, whereas Ikey liked the steep slopes of the Bluff, where he could toboggan down to the thick gorse that grew along the edge of the Coombe and then, by a frozen brook and two stiles, enter the meadows bordering Shallowford Woods.

  It was very cold but he moved swiftly and kept his blood circulating, so that when he reached the woods he felt pleasantly warm and was tempted by a faint gleam of sunshine to use his extra hour’s freedom by pushing through brittle briars to the top of the escarpment, overlooking the mere. He had not thought of the mere as being a solid oval of ice, with its mysterious, pagoda-crowned island as the sole break in its surface but now it occurred to him that he might be able to cross over and inspect the ruin, which was something he had been wanting to do for some time. He went on down to the margin and tested the ice but it was not strong enough to bear his weight so he moved round the lake to its far side to explore a part of the wood that was new to him. A tangle of evergreens grew here, close-set larch and dwarf pine, stockaded about with overgrown laurels and rhododendrons and it was here that he flushed a hare, who bounded from under his feet and dashed into the woods with Ikey in hot pursuit. He soon lost sight of the hare but found instead some deer tracks and followed them for about a mile along a narrow twisting path that split and split again, until he lost the tracks at a spot where a pine had fallen across the path barring further progress.

  He had been so intent upon the chase that he had not noticed snow had begun to fall but when he turned back, seeking the mere, it drove into his face so harshly that he could hardly see his way and although he reasoned that it could not be more than two o’clock the wood seemed terrifyingly dark and gloomy. His outward tracks were now obliterated and soon he realised that he must have taken a wrong turning, for he blundered on and on in growing desperation without being able to break free of the tangled undergrowth or come within sight of the lake. Snow whirled down on him more and more thickly and in spite of his exertions he began to feel numb, particularly in the foot that got wet testing the ice. He tried to console himself with the thought that this was a real adventure but it was little comfort. His courage ebbed with every step and soon he realised he was wholly lost and likely to stay lost unless he could find help or shelter. He held on as long as he could, and perhaps a little longer, setting his teeth and slashing with numbed hands at the clawing briars and laurel branches but at last, as he entered a tiny clearing, the storm, the thicket and the paralysing cold defeated him and he uttered a wild shout of despair that issued from him involuntarily like a soul quitting a body.

  The sound of his own voice encouraged him a little and he shouted again but when there was no answer he suddenly burst into tears and sat down on a log, thrusting his knuckles into his eyes and howling with terror and misery. He was still in this unheroic posture when he heard the crunch of feet and looking up, wildly hopeful, saw Hazel Potter standing gazing down at him in silent wonder, one hand pulling at her lip, the other swinging a small tin attached to her wrist by a string.

  He recognised her at once as the child who had sat crosslegged on the pedestal at the coronation supper-ball and the horrid embarrassment of being caught by a girl in the act of blubbering made him glare as though she had been a predatory animal on the prowl.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he blustered, but she did not seem to resent his aggressive manner and continued to pluck her lip and swing her tin, which Ikey now identified as a home-made handwarmer of the kind he had often used in winter in the scrapyard.

  ‘Youm lost, baint ’ee?’ Hazel said at last, and the corners of her mouth puckered as though she could easily have laughed at his dilemma.

  It was useless to deny the fact so he said, loftily, ‘Yerse, I am, I never bin this side o’ the woods and was caught in the storm. Tracking deer!’ he added, impressively.

  This interested her. ‘You was gonner kill ’em?’

  ‘No,’ he said modestly, ‘I ain’t got a gun an’ Squire won’t have ’em killed. I was tracking ’em, to where they went.’

  ‘Ah, they went downalong,’ she said authoritatively, ‘they always do in the snow. Henry Pitts puts feed out for ’em but they don’t stay, they come back, soon as they’ve eaten an’ move over to the spruce where there’s plenty o’ bark to bite on! Most everything lives this side o’ the mere—foxes, hares, an’ badgers too, tho’ there’s a set ’longside my squirrel tree, upalong.’

  She talked as an expert, as someone privy to all the secrets of the wood and he had a strong impression that she thought of foxes and badgers not as creatures but as family units, inhabiting farms and living within prescribed borders, just like the Potters, the Codsalls and the Willoughbys. He had never heard the word ‘set’ before in this sense and would have liked to ask about it but not wishing to display his ignorance he said, ‘Can you show me the way aht? I’m late ’ome and I got work waiting in the tack-room.’

  She smiled then, and he noticed that her rather vacant face underwent a remarkable change when her mouth widened, exposing strong, white teeth. It was as though the smile was something she used for switching identities—from a dull-witted waif to a woodsprite in a homespun skirt of undyed sheep’s wool and long gaiters of rabbit skin, tucked into patched, lace-up boots. One of the boo
ts gaped like the mouth of a fish and exposed pink toes. He was enormously impressed by her yet was careful not to show it for although she clearly knew her way, which he did not, she was still only a girl and also a Potter and therefore of no account. She looked, he thought, only half human in her outlandish clothes, with a mop of matted red-gold hair and green eyes but as she continued to smile at him and her pink tongue emerged to moisten her lips, he had the impression that here in the woods she was a kind of queen and that all the creatures would come running to her whistle, that she could have told you everything in the wood that was good to eat and every berry that was poisonous, that there would be nothing that went on here that she did not know about and this gave her a purely local omnipotence exceeding even the Squire’s. She said, carelessly, ‘You’d ha’ died o’ the cauld, Boy, if I hadn’t ’eard ’ee squawk! You shoulder kept walking ’til you dropped an’ even then you should ha’ crawled! Youm praaper mazed to zit yourself down in the snow. Coom, I’ll tak’ ’ee backalong!’, and without giving him an opportunity to justify himself in any way she took him by the hand and led him into what looked like a low tunnel cut through the thickest part of the laurels.

  What astonished him more than her anticipation of every twist and turn in this maze of undergrowth was her body temperature. The hand that clutched his was as warm as if it had just been withdrawn from a fur glove, and he reasoned that her feet must be just as warm for how else could she endure to walk through thick snow with a gaping hole in her boot? She not only knew exactly which rabbit run to follow and which to reject but also the strength and thickness of every obstruction. Without leaving hold of his hand for a moment she twisted this way and that, pushing through a tangle of branches without a second’s hesitation, so that presently they came out on the side of the lake that ran directly past the island with the pagoda. He said gruffly, when he had recovered from his astonishment, ‘Orlright, I know me way from here,’ but she did not relinquish his hand but began hauling him up the slope to the crest of the escarpment where, in the gathering dusk, he saw the welcome yellow glow of the Big House lights.

  ‘I’ll leave ’ee here, Boy,’ she said, ‘but dornee stray that zide again ’til the snow’s gone.’ She looked up at the sky and sniffed.

  ‘’Er won’t be long now; us’ve zeen the worst of it.’

  His respect for her grew and grew, whittling away at his male arrogance and making it seem mean and ungracious, so that he admitted, hesitantly, ‘I was lost orlright, an’ I dunno what I’d have done if you hadn’t bobbed up. What’s your name? Mine’s Ikey, I’m stable boy down there.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’ve overlooked ’ee often enough,’ she said lightly. ‘I’m Hazel, and they zay I’m mazed. I’m not tho’, but I let ’em think it’s so, for that way I go where I plaises,’ and with this astonishing confession she turned away and seemed on the point of vanishing into the dusk but he called urgently, ‘Where can I find yer if I want to go that side of the mere again?’, and she replied, pausing in her stride, ‘Come down by the Niggerman’s Church and whistle. Whistle loud and I’ll come to ’ee,’ and she put her fingers in her mouth and blew, producing a long, low and very piercing sound like the summons of a London cabby. Then, before he could ask her to teach him this engaging trick, or identify the ‘Niggerman’s Church’ as the old pagoda, she had disappeared, moving so silently that he could not have sworn whether she went back down the slope or east along the path towards the Coombe.

  He stood there looking into the darkness where she had vanished and he thought how far from mazed she was but how completely she fooled everyone in the Valley. Then he wondered if he should tell Chivers or Mrs Handcock of his adventure, of how, without Hazel Potter, he might have died down there in the wood but he decided not for this would be an admission of personal inadequacy and might also mean future prohibitions. At least, this was what he told himself but the truth was he was reluctant to share with others the knowledge that Hazel Potter was really a princess, masquerading as a half-witted waif, or that God who had once before come to his aid in a moment of despair obviously had a special interest in his welfare. Why else should He have directed her to him, barely fifteen minutes before daylight faded?

  He brushed the dead leaves from his coat and went on down the slope towards the pool of orange light.

  Chapter Eight

  I

  Hazel Potter knew her weather signs. The wind veered round to the south-west before Christmas and the snow was washed from the banked lanes by driving rain, so that after a spell there was hardly a trace of it save for pockets of slush under the trees.

  Paul went about his business cheerfully enough, making his rounds two or three times a week, discussing spring sowing with unhurried men like Arthur Pitts and Honeyman, and pigs with Will Codsall, whose ramshackle holding was now gradually assuming a patterned neatness like Four Winds and High Coombe. Paul did not think of Grace Lovell much during the day but at night, when he was sitting before the library fire, loneliness sometimes stole upon him and the technical books on soil, shorthorns and land drainage, prescribed as evening reading by John Rudd, lay undigested on his knees as he pictured the dark, compact figure of Grace in the leather armchair opposite, her eyes bent over some sewing or gazing abstractedly into the red glow of the Home Farm apple logs blazing in the hearth.

  It was, he admitted to himself, a very improbable picture but his thoughts of her were always in this pleasant frame for after an interval of seven weeks, with no word from her except the scribbled message on the label of the puppy’s collar, his memories of her arranged themselves in thicknesses, laid one upon the other like dockets in his office tray.

  First there was the overall impression of mystery that her presence brought to him, with the certainty that somehow she belonged here in this house and by this fireside and this conviction was as strong and unreasoning as that which had possessed him concerning the estate as a whole on the day he had first ridden down from the moor alongside John Rudd. He could not say why this should be so; she had done little or nothing to confirm it but it persisted just the same, matching his possessive pleasure in the meadows, woods and leafy lanes between the Sorrel and the Bluff, the railway line and the silver sands of Coombe Bay. Then, adding a pinch of spice to her sense of belonging here, was the physical impact she made upon him—her neatness, her containment, her cool, ivory skin seen against blue-black side curls and straight fringe, her dark, contracting brows arching over eyes the colour of dog violets in Priory Wood, her long cheekbones and firm little chin with the large dimple, but above all, her presence as a whole, that seemed to him to promise so much to a man who could break through the defences she had erected against an invasion of her intense privacy and self-isolation. Was he such a man? He doubted it but doubts did not deny him reveries and flights of fancy, so that sometimes the sudden fall of the heavy book from his knees would drag him from an exotic dream in which he was mastering her in silent places about the house, while she, for her part, was submitting to his domination. The absurdity of these imaginings was sometimes brought home to him when he recollected that a proposal of marriage on his part had yielded no more than a vague promise to ‘think about it’, but then, for comfort, he would look down at her dog and reflect that she must have thought of him as a man of compassion, gauche and unsophisticated perhaps, yet more eligible than the roystering Ralph Lovell, or any of the men she met in her father’s rootless set, and this would launch him into fresh fields of speculation regarding the life she led in London, and what kept her there all this time, and if there was a lover in the background. He wondered too how much she knew about the source of his money and whether, indeed, such knowledge would disqualify him in her eyes, or those of her stepmother. It was then that the absurdity of his spontaneous proposal came down upon him with a rush, so that he told himself that he really had no wish to be taken seriously and that, for both their sakes, it would be better if they could look upon his impulsive
advances as a flirtation, approximately in the same category as that he and Claire Derwent had shared before it went sour and she ran away to hide in Kent.

  As the days passed it was this aspect of their relationship that began to gain ground at the expense of all the other daydreams. After all, he told himself, what did he know of the girl, and how much could one listen to instinct in matters as final as this? He had met her five times during a period of six months and on two of those occasions their conversation was such as might have passed between people in the street. He was sure, for instance, that a man like Franz Zorndorff would regard his infatuation as hopelessly immature, a park bandstand romance between adolescents, whereas John Rudd would have even stronger feelings about it, for he made no bones about including her family in his blanket of detestation of all the Lovells. And yet, behind all these misgivings was a curious inevitability of Grace Lovell as Mistress of Shallowford that could not be separated from his own identification with the estate and assumption of personal responsibility for all the people of the Valley. He had no clear idea of what he would tell either Rudd or Zorndorff about her, or what indeed he would say to Grace or Celia Lovell if either one of them took him at his word. He only knew that somewhere and somehow their paths would converge and that until they did real ownership of the Valley would elude him.

  His thoughts were in this confused state when, a day or so before Christmas, a batch of letters arrived by a single post. He extracted all the seed catalogues, trade agricultural leaflets, bills and conveyances and carried the rest into his office, locking the door against interruptions.