The Continuity Girl

by Leah McLaren

  “Am I interrupting?” he asked, setting down their duffel bags and the groceries and removing a can of beer.

  “Of course not,” Mish chirped.

  Meredith shot her a poison look.

  “We were just saying what a lovely place you have here. When exactly was it built?”

  “The main cottage was constructed in the mid-seventeen hundreds, and then the kitchen and bathroom were added on about a century later. I’m afraid it’s rather a mess.” He reached down and tried to push a bit of polyester stuffing back into a slash in the sofa cushion, but it kept popping out the other side. Finally he gave up and walked over to the stove.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  Mish and Meredith accepted, and once they had drunk it, Barnaby showed them to their separate rooms.

  When she was alone, Meredith lay down on her thin army-issue cot and looked around. The room was bare but bright, and sparsely furnished in the way she had always imagined a room in a Swiss sanatorium would be. Apart from the bed, the only furniture was a rickety wooden dresser and an oval-shaped mirror, glass permanently fogged with age. On top of the dresser was a curious thing: a yellowed bone inside a glass jar with a cork in the top.

  There was a soft knock.

  “Yes?” Meredith said without moving from the bed.

  Barnaby pushed open the door. He’d changed his jacket for a muddy brown oilskin, and a leather sack hung from his hip in a Robin Hoodish manner. Seeing Meredith on the bed, he began to stutter.

  “I—I was wondering if—that is, if you’re not already—” He paused and quickly rubbed a hand over his face. “Perhaps you’d rather just nap. So sorry to have bothered you.” He began to withdraw from the doorway and pull the door shut.

  Meredith laughed and called him back.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. He let the door open a crack, so that now only his head was poking through.

  “What’s that?” She pointed to the bone in the jar.

  “It’s a ham bone.”

  “Why are you keeping a ham bone in a jar on the dresser of your guest bedroom?”

  “It’s more than a ham bone. It’s a family heirloom. My grandfather found it on the front lawn during the war. It was dropped by a German bomber with a note attached mocking the ‘starving English.’”

  “How awful! Were they starving at the time? Your family?”

  “Hardly. But they did have orphans sleeping on the tennis courts and an infirmary set up in one of the barns.”

  “That’s nice of your grandfather.”

  “I suppose it was the least he could do.” Barnaby shrugged. “Listen, I know your friend is having a nap, but I was just going out to see the birds, and seeing as you’re awake I thought perhaps you’d...”

  Meredith hopped off the bed. As she did, a shiny black nose pushed itself between Barnaby’s legs and into the room.

  “Portia, rude girl, get back.” He squeezed the space between his legs shut and the dog snuffled back into the hall.

  “I’d love to meet the birds. And your dog. Hey, pooch.”

  Barnaby stepped aside to reveal a squat black Lab with gray whiskers around her muzzle. The dog waddled into the room, wagging her tail so hard it made her entire body curl up one way and then the other like a sausage squirming in a frying pan.

  “Portia’s my flying retriever. More of a beggar than a retriever really, but she likes a walk, so I take her along.”

  “Would you take me?” Meredith dug her fingernails into the spot just above Portia’s tail where dogs most love to be scratched. “I’m a talented fetcher and I take direction very well.”

  Barnaby nodded, beaming.

  A little later, they were outside on the path. Barnaby reached out and took Meredith’s hand. She had been in the middle of explaining to him the plot of the film she was working on and had just gotten to the part where the spinster pathologist is ravished by the inspector on the morgue table. Meredith lost track of what she was saying and trailed off, embarrassed. Barnaby stopped walking. They were standing just outside the aviary, so close Meredith could hear cooing from the pen. Rain was spitting and the wind was blowing, and Barnaby reached over to push Meredith’s hair out of her eyes. He was leaning down to kiss her when there was a noise from inside the pen that sounded to Meredith like a burping contest. Brack! Brack!

  Barnaby laughed. He took her arm and guided her over to the first pen in the aviary, where two of the meanest-looking birds she had ever seen sat on wooden perches. Whatever dispute they had been having a moment before they now abandoned, united in dark suspicion.

  “Vultures always fight when they mate,” said Barnaby, unlocking the door of the pen with a key he drew out of his battered leather hip bag. He reached in and pulled out a large handful of dead mice and dropped the tiny bodies into an empty margarine container on the floor in the corner. The birds watched him with canny interest. Meredith found it hard to swallow.

  “But I thought your birds were for hunting,” Meredith said. “Don’t vultures just eat dead things?”

  “They are mainly scavengers, yes. But they’re still lovely birds to breed and train. Falconry isn’t only a blood sport, you know.” He drew two slivers of steak out of his pouch and fed one to each of the vultures, who took their treats with greedy gulps. “Many people think of them as unpleasant, but they’re actually rather beautiful once you get to know them.” Barnaby reached out and stroked their blue-black feathers. “This is the female, Martha. And the male is George.” Their heads were covered with matching bonnets of gray down, which gave them the appearance of stern pilgrims. They eyed first Barnaby and then Meredith, and then glanced at each other, nodding their hooked beaks and gathering their shawls around them.

  In the next cage was an enormous bird Barnaby introduced as Waverly, a European eagle owl. Pale flotsam covered his body—as though he’d just flown through a cloud of ash—apparently part of the bird’s annual molting process. He had a queer, knowing face that rose from his body in a hump, and he swiveled it all the way around to observe his visitors with insomniac eyes. Meredith made a clucking sound like the kind she had heard people produce when trying to soothe horses, and the owl widened his eyes and gave his wings a restrained half-flap that blew her bangs off her forehead. She raised her hand toward him and Waverly cracked his beak and hissed, wagging a grumpy black tongue.

  “Don’t mind him,” said Barnaby, running a finger along the chicken wire and eliciting an emphatic hoot from the owl. “Waverly’s been in a bad mood ever since I retired him from breeding last season.”

  “Too old?”

  “No, no,” Barnaby chuckled gently, keeping his eyes on the bird. “Too rough. Poor devil fractured the neck of his last pen-mate. Eagle owls are the largest of all British owls, and Waverly here is quite powerful when he gets excited. Don’t quite know your own strength, do you, old boy.”

  Meredith pushed her hands into her coat pockets and walked farther down the aviary.

  In the corner pen at the end of the row was the peregrine. A brass plate screwed into the base of the cage bore the name HARRIET. Harriet seemed extremely serious and dressed up, like someone about to attend an important business dinner. Her chest was white and the feathers swept up, decorating her throat. Meredith admired her in silence.

  “Falco peregrinus minor,” said Barnaby, unlatching the cage door and stepping inside.

  The hawk swooped from her perch with a swift double-flap and landed upon his gauntlet. She dug one claw into the leather and stamped with the other to steady herself. There was a magical tinkling sound when she moved. It came from the jingle bell attached to her fine yellow ankle by a leather strap, and from another bell sewn into her tail feathers. Glancing coolly at Meredith, the female smoothed her feathers back into place with a haughty backward shoulder roll, in profile, and looked at her master with a single black eye.

  “Meredith, I would like you to meet Miss Harriet Helena Horatio Shakespeare the Fourth, Lady of Pear Cott
age, and thus far anyway, the single all-consuming love of my life.”

  He reached into his falconer’s pouch, pulled out a dead chick and offered it to the peregrine. Harriet snapped off the fuzzy yellow head, pulling out several thin, spaghetti-like strands of tendons along with it, and then swallowed the rest of the body, bones and all, in three jerking gulps. Barnaby explained that her stomach would sort out all the bones and feathers from the flesh and a few hours later regurgitate a pellet containing all the undigestible materials. The idea was to get down as much food as she could before her competitors stole it.

  “And day-old cockerels are Harriet’s favourite—aren’t they, darling?” Barnaby stroked the bird’s back with his ungloved hand.

  Meredith watched his fingers, fascinated, surprised at herself. “She’s awfully hungry.”

  “Yes, virtually always. Especially if you fly them every day, which I try to with this one. There’s no workout like it. For her, I mean.” Barnaby reached into his bag again, and for a split second Meredith was afraid he was going to perform some terrible trick—a twisted magician pulling a dead rabbit from his top hat. Instead, he revealed a tiny leather hood with a tassel on top. With his free hand he pulled the hood over the bird’s head so that her eyes were covered.

  “Hoodwinked,” said Barnaby, and he stepped out of the pen with the bird perched on his glove. Attached to her ankle was a short braided leather leash, which he wrapped around his arm. “Tricks her into thinking it’s nighttime. That’s where the term comes from, you know.”

  As Portia circled their legs, huffing with anticipation, Barnaby let them through the gate behind the barn and into the open country, or what he called “the quarry.” Walking and brandishing the peregrine on his arm as if he were some sort of ancient woodsman, he seemed more at ease than Meredith had seen him yet. She worried aloud that Mish (who was napping) might wake up and not know where they were, but Barnaby insisted they carry on. Mauve pouches were gathering above the horizon, making the sky seem unnaturally close to dark. Meredith looked at her watch and was surprised to note that it was only four o’clock in the afternoon.

  As they walked the moor, climbing over the uneven knobs of soft gray grass, a landslide of trivia poured from Barnaby, and Meredith found herself wondering whether on a day-to-day basis he had much company—of the human variety at least.

  “Peregrines like Harriet are the second-fastest birds of prey in the world,” he said, “the fastest being the gyrfalcon—Latin name Falco rusticolus—which are terribly expensive and nearly impossible to breed. I saw one once while visiting my cousin in New Mexico. Amazing creatures. But Harriet here is one of the fastest birds in Britain. With the right wind conditions, I reckon, she can get up to one hundred and fifty kilos an hour.”

  “There, there, lovely,” Barnaby soothed, running two fingers down her tail feathers, before continuing. “Peregrines are commonly known as the king—or in Harriet’s case, queen—of all raptors. Which, of course, is another name for birds of prey—as well as being a basketball team in Toronto, or so I’ve noted on the Internet. At any rate, the problem for most British falconers is that in order to fly a peregrine properly, you need true open country. And to that extent, I’ve been blessed.”

  They climbed up the slope to the edge of a cliff. A gentle incline of rubble and wild grass sloped down before them, opening onto a vast expanse of countryside. Only a few unkempt cedar hedgerows and crumbling fieldstones delineated one meadow from the next. It was like an oil painting you might find at a small-town art fair.

  Near the horizon was a small stone cottage that Meredith would not even have noticed if not for its smoking chimney, which cast an interrogative yellow swirl in the sky above it. She wondered what portion of this tiny island Barnaby’s family actually owned. One percent? (Something told her it would be rude to ask.) The amount of uninhabited countryside before her seemed impossible, particularly after the frenetic crush of London. For an agoraphobic moment she envied Harriet, who perched calmly on Barnaby’s gloved thumb, safe in the dark shelter of her hood.

  Without warning, Barnaby pulled off the bird’s headgear. The bird flapped her wings twice and pushed off her master’s glove, bearing down with her claws to gain momentum and then springing up. In a blink Harriet was airborne. The higher she rose, the less energy she appeared to use, resting on air currents that carried her up and up as though on a rising tide.

  “Will she come back?”

  “Of course. She’s well trained.”

  “Who trained her?”

  “I did, of course. It’s an awful lot of work, but rather rewarding in the end. I have the time after all.”

  “So that’s mainly what you do with your days?”

  “Training the birds? No. I also feed them and breed them, which is like another job in itself. Well, not a job exactly. To tell you the truth I’ve never really had one of those, so I wouldn’t know.”

  “Never?” Meredith asked. “That’s amazing.”

  “Really?” Barnaby looked pleased, and then frowned. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  Meredith shrugged. “Neither really. It’s just unusual.”

  He stooped down slightly and kissed her on the mouth. His lips were thin, but dry and soft. He touched her waist and increased the pressure of his kiss. As their faces drew apart, she could feel Barnaby tilting his head up slightly to keep an eye on Harriet.

  “We’d better tramp down the hill a bit, if you don’t mind. She’s moving east.”

  Once they got off the path, the terrain was harder going. He took her hand again as they climbed down the hill, guiding her over every fallen log and hole.

  Meredith felt she could get used to this man, with his soft skin and old-fashioned manners. She looked at the back of the hand that held hers. Strong, full of blood. She felt her spine unfurling at its base.

  Yes, she could get used to him. Not as a boyfriend, of course—but to his characteristics, genetically speaking.

  “So you follow the bird—and then what?” The spitting rain had started to soak through Meredith’s tweed coat (why had she not bought something waterproof instead?). Her knees ached. They had been out for over an hour.

  “Eventually she spies something she wants for tea.”

  “Then she dive-bombs it.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. When she sees something tasty-looking in the grass—sometimes a rabbit, or a snake, or maybe a grouse—she swoops down and grabs it with her talons. If the prey isn’t killed instantly by the speed of the stoop—that’s what it’s called when she, what did you call it?—when she ‘dive-bombs’ it—she has a special tooth on her beak called a tomial tooth, which she uses to break the neck of her quarry.”

  “Do you let her keep it?”

  “God, no. What would be the point of training her to kill her own food? The point is for her to hunt down food for us and then we feed her, thus ensuring her dependence. They aren’t stupid, these birds, and they’re not particularly social animals either. Birds don’t get attached the way dogs do.” He glanced down at Portia, who flicked her tail from side to side and gazed back at him with dumbstruck love. “The thing is, it’s not possible ever to entirely tame a raptor. You can only convince them, through training, that you are the best and most efficient food source around. Even then you’re only appealing to their survival instinct.” Barnaby shaded his eyes from the glare, watching Harriet wing her way toward the crest of the hill and curve back again like a self-propelled boomerang.

  “The main point is, no matter how devoted you are, a bird of prey will never love you back. She’ll work for you, certainly. But there has to be something in it for her.” Barnaby reached into his hip satchel and pulled out a furry swatch that looked to Meredith like a shred of fur coat. “Once she’s caught something, then we chase her down and make the trade with this.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s called a dummy-bunny. You wrap some raw beef inside when you call in the bird, and t
hen take the quarry from her.”

  Meredith didn’t think that sounded fair at all.

  In the sky, Harriet began a leisurely loop back toward the slope they had just descended.

  “That’s odd.”

  “What?” Meredith wiped the damp from her eyes.

  “She seems to be circling back to the field we just came from, which is unusual.”

  “Maybe she just wants to go home and have a hot bath before dinner,” Meredith hinted, but Barnaby and Portia were already halfway up the hill, following the bird, which had flown out of sight. Meredith mucked along, cursing herself for not bringing rubber boots. Not that she owned any.

  Harriet was still out of sight when they heard the scream.

  “What the devil...” Barnaby gasped.

  By the time they reached the crest of the hill, the shrieks had stopped and there was Mish, standing in the middle of the moor dressed in a long oilskin coat and knee-high leather riding boots, holding her head and moaning. Meredith, who had thought she was too exhausted to go on, broke into a sprint and ran ahead of Barnaby. When she got close enough, she threw her arms around her friend.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, prying Mish’s hands away from her face and checking her eyes.

  “I’m fine,” Mish said in a manner that suggested she was anything but. “This insane bird appeared out of nowhere and stole my hat. I was just coming out to find you guys and I was wearing my new beaver hat I got at the January sale at Holt’s in Montreal—Aaah!” She began flapping her hands around her head and whirling around. “Is it back? It’s back?”

  Meredith looked up but saw nothing but sky. By this time Barnaby had made it beside them. Portia greeted Mish with a push of her snout, but her efforts, or maybe something about the proximity of fur, only amplified Mish’s hysteria. Meredith pulled the dog out of the way by her collar and tried to calm down her friend while explaining the situation to Barnaby.

  “Extraordinary behaviour for a falcon,” he said, pulling at his hair. “Certain larger owls—particularly the great horned and the snowy—have been known to be aggressive to the point of attacking humans, but not—”