It was a day or so after this that Paul, working in the office with the garden door open, heard sounds of activity coming from the rose garden, so presently, when Ikey had brought Snowdrop round for him to ride over and see the Potters about the loan of a cart-horse, he led the horse along the terrace and looked over the box hedge at the group working in the excavation beyond. Grace was there with Handcock, old Timberlake the sawyer, the boy Gappy and the dog Goneaway, the latter behaving as though the operation had been put in hand to entertain her. Grace looked up cheerfully when he called, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. Her cheeks, he noted, had lost a good deal of their pallor and in the strong sunlight seemed to him almost as pink as the gardener’s. She called ‘Gappy! Get that dog out of here! As fast as we dig out the idiot fills it in! If you’re going out, Paul, take her along with you, please!’ and Paul, laughing, whistled Goneaway over as Horace said, with quiet pride, ‘Us is gettin’ along vamously, Squire! Us’ll ’ave the watter in ’er be the weekend!’ Paul left them to it but as he was climbing into the saddle Timberlake, who knew all about the cart-horse, said, ‘Dornee let that ole blackguard Tamer Potter talk ’ee into making ’er permanent, Squire! ’E’ll try, mak’ no mistake!’ and Paul wondered at the changes Grace had subtly introduced into the place for before his marriage he had not been able to extract two words from the sawyer, who had stood about fidgeting and tongue-tied whenever he had called at the Home Farm and watched him at work.
He went on down to the ford and along the river road, pondering Parson Bull’s comment that he was lucky to have found such a wife so quickly and he thought, as he turned up the steep lane to the Dell, ‘I’m lucky all right, but so are the staff and I believe they know it!’ and because he was in such a good humour he listened with amusement to Tamer’s catalogue of woes and his doubts as to whether the loan of a single horse would enable him to keep the wheels turning. ‘Tiz all on account o’ me zo short-handed, Squire,’ he explained, ‘an’ beggin’ your pardon, zir, ’twas you who tempted away my Sam! Now my maid has gon an’ wed that young Pascoe zo I’m obliged to attend to everything myself!’ Paul reminded him that he still had two daughters to look after livestock and another son to help him work under two hundred acres, whereas Willoughby, higher up, managed with a part-time man and a boy.
‘Ah,’ said Tamer, who had been ready for this, ‘but Willoughby’s lad be a boy broken to varming, baint ’ee, whereas my Smut’ll never do a handsturn about the plaace, an’ my ole woman aids an’ abets’n!’
The sun was shining for the first time in a month so Paul, reluctant to waste time arguing with the old rascal, said, ‘Well, you’ve got the horse and I’ll ask Honeyman to lend you a man one day a week, providing you pay him. We all want to see you make something of this holding, Tamer, it’s been a liability for too long,’ but Tamer was proof against this sort of talk and all he replied was, ‘Mebbe you’ll be proud of us bevore us ’ave vinished hereabouts,’ but privately cursed the day when the new owner of Shallowford had taken a wife to hustle him into persecuting tenants. ‘Meg!’ he bellowed, ‘come on out an’ pay your respects to the Squire, will ’ee, you lazy slut?’, and he turned his back on Paul to flush the survivors of his brood from the farmhouse. Meg Potter came out slowly and behind her the two girls, Cissie and Violet but Smut was nowhere to be found. ‘Do ’ee know where that Smut be to?’ roared Tamer, who always enjoyed exercising his largely fictitious authority over his family but Meg said no, she did not know, although she was well aware that Smut Potter, at that precise moment, was overlooking the Heronslea partridge coverts, five miles to the east and that his presence there was a reconnaissance pending a descent upon a fat buck that had been using the covert lately. She gave a bob to the Squire, however, as he rode up the track towards Deepdene. He was entitled to that, she thought, seeing how much tiresomeness lay in wait for him but she said nothing of this to Tamer or the girls, returning at once to her ruinous kitchen to finish brewing her winter rheumatism cure. The sweet-smelling concoction seethed in a huge iron pot, and a long row of medicine bottles, taken by stealth from Doctor O’Keefe’s dispensary over the years, stood waiting to receive it but as it was not yet on the boil there was time for a quick look into the future. She took out her cards and fell to shuffling and cutting them and out came not the Lady of Sorrow, as she had expected, but the Knave of Diamonds. Its appearance disconcerted her for it indicated that Smut’s future was even more uncertain than the Squire’s. It occurred to her then that she should warn Smut to leave the buck until it crossed into the safer territory of Shallowford Woods. Sam Potter, her first-born, might have abandoned the tribe, but she knew he would never come between Smut and his livelihood.
IV
Spring, so Arthur Pitts told him, had been cruising offshore for long enough, but within days of Paul’s return home it made up its mind, dropped anchor south of the sandbars and fired its green barrage over the Valley. The effect was salutary. The river went down overnight and all the Sorrel creeks and oxbows dried out. The banners of May appeared in all the hedgerows between Timberlake’s sawmill and Codsall bridge. April showers still fell but were shot through with sunshine, so that the Teazel watershed was seen through a silver gauze and up and down the Valley there was bustle and expectancy. Henry Pitts sang as he herded his cows down to the water meadows and even Sydney Codsall, with a mind full of syntax and relativity, stopped his bicycle on the way to school one morning just to watch a ladybird on a sprig of cowparsley. A week or so later all the dwarf elms and beech hedges along the western edge of Hermitage Wood were full of nesting thrushes, blackbirds, tits and finches, and the vixens on the landslips further south were out all night hunting up food for their cubs.
There were plenty of other signs that the long, wet winter was done and that everything in the Valley was bent on renewing itself. Over at Periwinkle Elinor Codsall, last year just a wisp of a girl, now dragged a thickening body across the uneven flags of the kitchen and in the woods north of the mere Joannie Potter also pregnant, was wondering how, come the autumn she would squeeze another crib into the cottage bedroom. Down in Coombe Bay were others with like problems among them Pansy Pascoe. Pansy, once a carefree Potter, looked with distaste at her swollen body, envying her husbandless sisters who were not tied to a kitchen and one hungry male but the sudden warmth of the sun drove her out into the garden where as she raised her snub nose to the sky, her spirits lifted and she set about peeling a mound of potatoes for Walt’s supper.
Only Smut Potter, lying full-length in the bracken overlooking Heronslea, cursed the sun, for its sparkle complicated his scrutiny of the ground below where he suspected the fat buck he had earlier marked down was punishing the bark of the Norwegian pines Gilroy’s forester had planted there. Smut had a customer for that buck and he meant to kill while the moon was up. He lay quite still, eyes fixed unwinkingly on a patch of shadow under the trees, but it was not until the sun clouded over that he identified the movements down there as the chaffering of deer and gave a short grunt of satisfaction. ‘There ’er be!’ he said aloud, ‘and I’ll ’ave un tonight, sure as fate!’ and he made a final eyesweep of the approach memorising contours, gorse patches and places where the heaviest shadows would lie after moonrise. Then crawling backwards on all fours, he worked his way down to a cleft where a stream ran through a small coombe to the Sorrel. In less than five minutes he was hidden by the trees that grew on the steep side of the goyle.
He had moved quickly and cautiously but somebody had observed him from the opposite ridge, a man not as well versed in exploiting cover as Smut but one who had the advantage of binoculars, borrowed for the purpose of keeping Potter in view. Nick Buller, Gilroy’s head gamekeeper had suffered a great deal on Smut’s account and once or twice had come close to being sacked for failing to catch him. Recently, however, his luck had turned. A Paxtonbury butcher, who sometimes bought surplus venison from Heronslea when the herds were whittled down, had been heard to b
oast in The Mitre at Paxtonbury, that he could buy cheaper than Gilroy was prepared to sell and the outlay of a few shillings on Buller’s part had traced his source of supply to the Dell. Buller was not such a fool as to hope that he could catch a poacher as wily as Potter in the actual act of taking deer but he thought he stood a good chance of being close on hand when the buck was killed, after which he could follow Smut to the Dell and confront him with a policeman while in the act of conveying the kill to Paxtonbury. He had made his plans accordingly but it was essential to know precisely where Smut would strike, and this explained Buller’s presence on the hillside with binoculars. He returned to Heronslea in a happy frame of mind. If Smut Potter was out tonight he was as good as nailed.
If Buller had been allowed to follow this plan things might well have turned out as he had hoped. Smut would have been trailed at a safe distance and stopped by the police en route to the butchers but Gilroy’s agent, Harry Kitchens, had more ambitious ideas. He argued that if Buller had marked the spot so accurately it would be a very simple matter to take Smut in the act and pay something off the score before he was brought before the Bench at Whinmouth Petty Sessions. Now Kitchens had been waiting for a chance to smash his fist into Potter’s face as repayment for all the nagging he had endured on his account and he said, on receiving Buller’s report, ‘Right! Get Scratton and Bostock and lay up both sides of the goyle before sunset. He’ll come in by the goyle for there’s cover all the way from the boundary. Meantime I’ll take young Glover and we’ll wait on the west side. We can close in from all sides as soon as we hear a shot! You can have five minutes with Potter yourself, Buller, but leave something for me. Then we’ll lock what’s left in the stable and hand it over to the magistrates in a sack in the morning!’
Meg Potter passed on her warning to Smut but he only laughed at her. He was fond of his mother but took small account of her fortune-telling. All his life he had put his trust in his fieldcraft, his highly developed powers of sight and hearing and, in the last instance his expert marksmanship, so why should he worry about the prattle of a greasy pack of cards? He cleaned his gun, smeared his face and hands with half-burned embers from the fire and left the Dell soon after dusk. It was a long haul in the trap to Paxtonbury and he wanted to be there by dawn so that he could enter the butcher’s yard before Beefy Bickley’s staff arrived. He would then top off a good night’s work with bacon and eggs at The Mitre, pay a brief call on a lonely woman whose sailor husband had been so inconsiderate as to sign on for an Australian run, and be back in the Dell by mid-afternoon. Smut never wasted much time in bed. A siesta would follow and he would be out again as soon as it was dark, this time moving east instead of west. But it all turned out very different and neither as Smut, Kitchens, nor Buller planned. Perhaps Meg, in the interests of the Valley, should have passed her warning to all concerned.
He killed the buck with a single shot, stalking upwind at a speed of about a yard a minute. The last sound the buck heard, the first to warn it of danger, was the soft snick of Smut’s hammer. Then it was twitching at the foot of the tree and Smut, moving expertly and rapidly, bound forepaws and hindpaws, twisted a stick under the cords and braced himself to hoist it on his shoulders. It was at that moment, when he was still bent double, that the first of the ambush party moved in.
Smut had passed within yards of Buller on his way out of the goyle but Buller did not possess the patience to play longstop for the agent. The moment he heard the gun he came plunging down the slope and would have fallen on Smut had he not misjudged his distance and overshot him as the poacher crouched above the buck. The butt of his slung gun struck Smut a glancing blow on the elbow, jarring it so sharply that he cried out in pain. Then, as he heard a confused shouting he realised that men were closing in from all sides and Buller had him fast by the ankle, bellowing for assistance at the top of his voice. For a split second, as he heard the others crashing through the undergrowth at the head of the goyle, Smut lost his head and swung his gun in an arc, the butt striking Buller’s jaw with shattering force and causing him to utter a single agonised howl as he rolled sideways in the scrub. By then Agent Kitchens and young Glover were almost upon them and two more of Gilroy’s men were crashing through the briars between Smut and the goyle so that instinct told him he must run due north towards the moor, unless he was to be caught and half killed on the spot.
He dropped his gun and broke out of the circle with only a yard to spare, Bostock colliding with Glover as the latter dashed up from the west and the pair of them, rolling on top of Buller as Kitchens, nearer the edge of the covert, bellowed, ‘Head him off to the right! Up to the moor!’, and went blundering over the tangled ground in close pursuit. Glover followed but the others remained bent over the unconscious Buller and Bostock cried, ‘Strike a light, Tom, for Chrissake! He’s killed un, I reckon!’, and in the flare of a match they looked down on the keeper, his face a mask of blood, his feet across the body of the trussed buck and his gun snapped off at the stock where it had struck the roots of a pine.
It took Smut less than two minutes to lose his two pursuers. He was calmer now and ran with his head rather than his legs, doubling north-east, then north-west and once, for twenty or more strides, back-tracking towards the cursing agent, now breasting the slope like an elephant pursuing a hare. After a hundred yards or so he gave it up and found his way back to the plantation where his raging temper was cooled by the shock of seeing Nick Buller, his head on Bostock’s knees, as the other man, Scratton, kept repeating, dolorously, ‘He’s done for un! He’s done for un!’ But Buller, although badly injured about the face, was far from dead and after they had lit the lantern he was able to sit up and gesture feebly, although he could not swallow the brandy Kitchens offered him from his flask. Working clumsily they bound his bloody chaps with strips of flannel shirt so that he sat with his back to the tree like a corpse ready for burial. Glover was sent on ahead to rouse the Big House and despatch a messenger to Whinmouth for the doctor and somehow, between them, they managed to carry Buller down to Long Covert and then across the paddock to his cottage. It was a tedious, troublesome journey and every step of the way Kitchens swore that somebody would pay a heavy price for their pains, as well as Buller’s.
As soon as Smut was sure he had lost his pursuers he walked south-east, in a wide sweep that led him to the northern tip of Priory Wood and here in a little glade, he sat down to ponder his situation. He was not at all sure that he had not killed that idiot Buller and now that he had won clear for a spell he had great difficulty in controlling a tide of panic and keeping his mind clear for his next moves for now it seemed his life might depend on them. He cursed himself for not throwing his gun aside the moment he felt his ankle grabbed and using his fists to persuade Buller to release his hold. That might have earned him six months for assault but nothing more, not the gallows, or penal servitude, and when these two alternatives presented themselves Smut’s body, already bathed in sweat, began to shake from head to foot so that he had to hold himself rigid like a man clinging to a cliff. Presently, however, he began to regain self-control and the habit of logical thought that had extricated him from so many scrapes in the past. His first impulse was to put as many miles as possible between himself and Heronslea before daylight but he soon realised that he could not travel much beyond the county border before dawn and had neither food nor money to lie up, and move on the following night until he was clear of the district. He realised also that he could not go back to the Dell, for Kitchens would be sure to go there before reporting. He could take temporary refuge with Sam, in Shallowford Woods, but after calling at Low Coombe the police would probably make straight for the cottage and yet, a temporary hideout was essential if he was to get word to Meg and through her means to win clear. Smut knew every hideout between the Whin estuary and the county border and considered each, discarding one or another for different reasons and finally deciding on one that had the advantage of being within range of Meg but aff
ording the most security. It was a cave formed by a fallen beech on the western shore of the mere and its main advantage lay in the fact that he could approach it wading along the shallows and through the running water of a rivulet, which meant that he would be safe from tracker dogs as well as men. It was an insignificant looking place and he felt sure he could remain here indefinitely, providing he could contact a member of the clan and get a supply of food floated downstream. He had found it some months ago whilst otter hunting and had occasionally slept there, warm and dry on a bed of bracken. To reach it before daylight he had to risk breaking into the open fields but he kept clear of paths and entered the western edge of Shallowford Woods with time in hand, passing within a few hundred yards of Sam’s cottage on his way round the shore. He hesitated here, wondering whether it would be worth the risk to rouse Sam, beg some food and tell him where he was hiding but he decided against it, for rousing Sam meant rousing Joannie and Joannie was not, strictly speaking, a member of the clan. So he moved on, wading across the shallows and striking the stream a quarter-mile above its outfall. He followed it down to the great sprawling mass of the beech and then through the network of roots without leaving a single footmark in the silt. Once inside he felt secure and relaxed, his come-day-go-day philosophy returning to still the tumult of fear in his heart but under this protective belt of self-righteousness began to assert itself, so that soon, although sorry for Buller and sorrier still for himself, he began to see himself not as a man wanted for violent assault or perhaps murder but as a persecuted minority who had cleverly evaded an ambush prepared by those who denied him the right to live by his wits. A little comforted by these reflections he smoked a cautious pipe and curled himself up in the dry bracken to sleep. Ten thousand men could walk shoulder to shoulder from Heronslea to the county border and back again, but they would not find him here, snug, warm and within hailing distance of the first Potter to use the path to Sam’s cottage. He would be hungry, perhaps, but that was no hardship; he and all his kin had been hungry often enough in the past.
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 32
