The Painted Tent

by Victor Canning

  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. T
o 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.

  At that moment Smiler was glad of Mr Samkin who was making him read Kipling and remembered some lines from the last poem they had done –

  If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,

  Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the

  street,

  Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie,

  Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go

  by!

  So, Smiler sat where he was, a shadow in the angle of a ruined parapet ledge. And below, Jimmy Jago waited like another shadow. Then, from outside, there suddenly came the double note of a wintering curlew, or so Smiler thought it was until he saw Jimmy move, drop something among the rubble to the left of the window, and then slide out into the night. He knew that it had been an all-clear signal from the other man, who, he felt, might easily from his appearance have been either Bob or Bill.

  To be on the safe side, Smiler sat where he was for fifteen minutes by his birthday watch – hands luminous – the present of Jimmy. He wondered, though he knew it was none of his business, what Jimmy was doing up here when only that morning he had supposedly driven off in his shabby old car on a dealing trip for two or three days. One thing was clear: neither of the men were poaching for there was nothing in the house to poach.

  When he thought the coast was clear Smiler climbed down and went into the house. He picked his way across the broken rubble and stones of the floor to the window. Lying on the ground to one side of it was the object Jimmy had dropped.

  Smiler picked it up. He stared at it puzzled. It was a very small broom or besom made of bunched hazel twigs bound together with a couple of twists of binder twine. Although it had no long wooden hazel pole for a handle it was a miniature of the hazel besoms that he used sometimes to sweep the floor of the barns.

  Smiler studied it, shook his head in bafflement, and then told himself, ‘Samuel M., Jimmy’s business is Jimmy’s business and he’s your friend.’

  He put the besom back where he had found it. But all the way home – although he knew it was none of his business – he just kept wondering what on earth anyone should want a besom for in a ruined old mansion that it would have taken an army of men and builders to bring back to its former glory.

  3. All Kinds of Monkey Business

  It was three days before Jimmy Jago showed up at the farm again. He returned after supper and while Smiler was studying in his room he could hear him and the Duchess talking in the kitchen. It was not possible to hear what they said, but he had the impression that now and again some sort of argument was going on between them. However, Smiler, who knew what it was to be in trouble of his own, wisely decided that other people’s affairs were nothing to do with him unless he were invited to share them. He sagely decided to say nothing and keep his own counsel – but this could not keep him from the use of his eyes.

  Three times before Christmas arrived he sat on his parapet ledge at Highford House and saw the two men leave, always around the same time. Now, when he went up there – which was less often as winter gripped the valley – he always looked to see if the hazel besom lay by the window. If it did he was content to stay. But if the besom was not in its place, then he quietly made off.

  He wrote to Laura regularly now and took a great deal of trouble over his letters so that they should be grammatically correct. It annoyed him sometimes that Laura did not write as often a
s he did, but when he taxed her with it she wrote back and told him ‘… not to be a daft loon. Do you think I’ve got nothing else to do all day but sit and write letters? And anyway you only write to me so much because you want to show off your grammatics.’

  Smiler also wrote to Albert a couple of times without giving his address. He got Jimmy Jago to post the letters well away from Devon while he was on his travels.

  Through all this, Smiler went twice a week to Mr Samkin who lived in the village at the head of the brook valley. But, although Smiler studied hard, he was not as happy at Mr Samkin’s as he had been. Mr Samkin had taken on another student for extra coaching. This was a sixteen-year-old girl from the village called Sandra Parsons whose father was the local postman. Sandra had fair hair, blue eyes, a nice but slightly hooky nose, and a funny sort of giggle of a laugh which Smiler found irritating. But the chief thing that annoyed him was that Sandra was too friendly towards him. She so often found excuses to cycle down to Bullaybrook Farm and talk to him, when he should have been working, that he took to hiding when he saw her coming. On a Sunday, with two or three other girls, she would walk down and they would hang about the small stone bridge over the brook and, when he went off for a walk, follow him, giggling and laughing. But he had to admit that while they were at Mr Samkin’s Sandra was entirely serious and attentive to the instruction being given. Once in a fit of pique when Sandra spoilt one of his walks by joining up with him he called her nose ‘a hooky beak’. Instead of being put out she laughed and said, ‘Oh, Sammy – that just shows how uneducated you are. It’s an aristocratic nose. All the Parsons are descended from the King of the Barnstaple Treacle Mines. I suppose you’ll tell me next that you didn’t know treacle comes from a mine?’