The Painted Tent

by Victor Canning

  The following week-end he spent most of his time up there. While Fria was away from the tower he went inside and climbed the stairs as high as he dared go. There was a twenty-foot gap before the remains of the top flight began again. The narrow lancet windows of the tower were either boarded over or smothered in ivy growths so that it was dark inside. The darkness gave away the position of Fria’s ledge, for the daylight angled into the tower through the small gap in the bricks at its rear. As Smiler stared up at the shaft of light it suddenly flickered and then was blotted out. He ran outside and, with his glasses, saw from his parapet that Fria had returned and gone into the recess.

  That Fria was getting enough food now he had no doubt. Often, as he explored through the woods around the hill, he came on the remains of her kills and could easily identify them. There were more wood pigeons than anything else, but Smiler also came across black-headed gulls, lapwings and partridges – and once, where the railway passed over the river above Eggesford, the remains of a tufted duck lying on the gangers’ track at the side of the line.

  Since he could not always be borrowing Mr Samkin’s binoculars, Smiler took all his savings from his wages and the little money he had brought to Devon with him and bought himself a pair of second-hand glasses in Barnstaple one weekend. They were not as good as Mr Samkin’s but they were good enough to satisfy Smiler.

  Mr Samkin said to him one night after Sandra had left, ‘You never want my field-glasses now.’

  Rather wooden-faced, Smiler said, ‘No, sir. Thank you.’ For some reason which he found it hard to explain to himself he did not want to say a word about his discovery of Fria and her progress in adapting herself to her new life.

  Mr Samkin gave a little smile. He could read Smiler like a book and he could have explained to him his reasons for wanting to say nothing about Fria.

  He said, ‘I’m not going to put you in the witness-box, Samuel, and grill you. Field-glasses are as personal a possession to a sensitive man as his watch, his fountain pen, or his trout or salmon rod … even if he has to fit himself out with secondhand ones to begin with. And don’t worry too much about people around here. Most of them never lift their eyes above the horizontal. They only know the sun is shining because they feel the heat on the top of their heads. But there are some whose eyes miss nothing. Nine out of ten of them give thanks for what they may see and keep their own counsel. The tenth is a scoundrel, and damned be his name, for profit is his god.’

  Before he could stop himself, Smiler blurted out, ‘I know where she is, sir. But I don’t want to say, even to you, please, sir.’

  Mr Samkin, with a twinkle in his eyes, said, ‘You don’t have to tell me anything, Samuel. I go for long walks. I have eyes in my head.’

  April came and, as was the custom each year, Bob and Bill brought out the painted tent from the barn store and set it up on the small lawn. On fine afternoons the Duchess would sit in its doorway, with Scampi in attendance, and knit or just enjoy the sun and her own thoughts. Now and again someone would come for a consultation and the Duchess would oblige them.

  The hawthorns were in half leaf and the ashes began to show green. Spring was stirring and the early blackbirds and thrushes had already laid their eggs, though not so soon as the sparrows and the starlings which haunted the barns and the farm buildings.

  Fria was used to hunting for herself now, though she was still far from possessing all the skills of an experienced peregrine. Her condition had improved; the yellow skin of her legs was now almost buttercup-coloured and the slack, half-hardened quills of her primary, secondary and tail feathers had firmed up. She flew with a compact, powerful rhythm. She fed well, sometimes taking two wood pigeons or their equivalent each day. But she never killed without hunger. She killed only to eat, and death came swiftly as her hooked beak bit into a bird’s neck, jerked, and snapped through the neck column.

  But, now, for some reason beyond her understanding, she found herself impelled to strange moods, mostly at first light. She would fly to the tower-top or sometimes to the tall crest of a nearby oak and sit wailing softly to herself or shuffling to and fro, croaking and talking to herself, and then suddenly raise her wings and beat them in quick spasms without taking to the air. Only after she had killed did the mood leave her.

  In the first week in April Johnny Pickering got another letter. It read: LEAVE IT TOO LATE AND YOU KNOW YOUR FATE.

  Worse still, as he went out of his house to go to work, he found a police patrol car parked on the opposite side of the road. As he bicycled away the car started and slowly began to follow him. Before he could help himself he began to ride quickly, touched with panic, and his heart almost stopped as the car passed him. He waited to see whether it would draw in ahead. But the car went on and swung down a side turning. The two policemen in the car were completely uninterested in him. They had merely stopped in the road to send a message over the radio on a matter which in no way concerned Johnny Pickering. But Johnny Pickering had had a nasty moment and was far from recovered from it when he reached work.

  In that first week of April Smiler had a letter, too. It was one which sent him out to his morning work whistling his head off. Laura had written to say that there was a good chance that at the end of April or the beginning of May – by dint of much badgering of her parents – she would be coming down for a short holiday to Devon and could Smiler find her rooms or a lodging somewhere near him? ‘But I can’t give you the proper dates yet because it depends how the work goes here on the farm. And my father’s not whole-hearted convinced about me going yet (though he will be) because to hear him carry on you’d think I was a bairn in arms still and Devon as far away as Australia. Parents! (Though Mother’s all on my side I fancy.) The latest from himself is that – if he lets me go – I’ll have to pay my own railway fare, but he’ll have to reckon with Mother over that.’

  So Smiler went whistling about his work as though, Bob said, he had swallowed a canary.

  And on the Friday morning of that first week in April, the mist for which Maxie had been praying for weeks and weeks without the weather obliging, came to the moor.

  It came down at three o’clock in the afternoon. The sky was overcast with low, barely moving clouds, and there was the faintest fret of a drizzle in the air. Slowly the distant tors and stretches of the moor were lost in what seemed a thickening of the air. Then, suddenly, the drizzle fined and became a veiling of mist which changed rapidly into a grey-white blanket that cut all visibility down to a hundred yards and still closed in.

  In the quarry where Maxie was working, watched by the warder guards, a whistle blew and was followed by shouts from the warders for the prisoners to cease work and to assemble on the quarry bed to be marshalled for the march back to Princetown Gaol.

  Maxie dropped the sledge hammer with which he had been breaking up stones and began to walk towards the assembly point. As he went, the mist thickened and the warders’ calls became harsh and demanding. Maxie knew that his moment was coming. He walked slowly, judging the quick thickening of the mist and the dwindling distance between himself and the men and warders beginning to congregate in the quarry.

  He was fifteen yards from the group when a heavy pall of mist swirled slowly across the quarry and the group was lost for a moment. Maxie dropped to his knees behind a quarried block of stone, rolled over, and let himself fall off the small track into a cushion of heather and tall grasses below a small bank. He rose and stooping low began to run away from the group, following a small water gully that sloped upwards to the low crest of the quarry.

  Maxie was a strong, fit man and he had not allowed prison life to soften him. He went as fast as he could now, knowing that every yard he made before his absence was discovered would be precious, and he knew exactly which course to take. For months he had studied the quarry area and the wide sweeps of the moors around it. The knowledge was a vivid map in his mind which he followed unerringly. He had the true countryman’s gift of a feeling for his surroundings, o
f carrying in his mind small and large patterns of the twists and turns of streams and tracks, and of sensing his direction from the drift of the mist and the wind-angled lean of bushes and isolated trees.

  Behind him, suddenly, there was the shout of alarmed voices and then the blowing of whistles. He knew exactly what had happened. He had been missed. As he ran he could picture the scene. The men would be marshalled in a tight file, a couple of warders would be checking the roll-call again while another warder would already be on his radio link alerting the prison authorities in Princetown. He knew, too, that in this mist none of the warders would come after him. They had the other prisoners to keep safe and they knew that if the mist for the moment was Maxie’s friend it could also in a few hours become his enemy. To make a breakaway was one thing – and many men had tried it – but to keep going through the mist, knowingly and unerringly following a line to safety, was a task few men could accomplish successfully. Within half an hour there would be blocks formed on all the moor roads. The moment the mist lifted, search parties would begin to comb the moor, and with daylight there would be a helicopter or two to help them.

  But for the moment Maxie was safe and he was away. Within half an hour, too, rumour would run through the prison itself.

  ‘There’s one away.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Maxie Martin – the Gypo.’

  ‘Good luck to ’im.’

  Five minutes later, swinging slowly round in a circle to bring him on a north- instead of the south-bearing line of his escape, Maxie crossed the main Princetown-Tavistock road. He jumped the far ditch, found the remembered stone wall of a small field and headed along it. At the top of the field he climbed the upper wall and dropped down to the heather and short sheep-bitten turf of the moor.

  At the meeting-point of the field’s side and top stone walls, he took his line from their right angle. Loping at an easy pace he began to head steadily through the mist, the daylight fading, and prayed, but without any panic, that within the next half-mile he would hit the broad mark which would be his true route to that night’s sanctuary. After a while, although he was going steadily uphill, the ground began to fall away to his right, plugs of grey stone breaking its face and then, muted but unmistakable through the mist, came the sound of running water.

  He went caterways down the slope and found his mark, a small stream, cascading and rippling down the bottom of a boggy-floored combe. Maxie, keeping just clear of the miry ground, began to work his way up the stream. His confidence rose for it was far from the first time in his life that he had used this route. There had been a time when he and Jimmy Jago, blood brothers, had caught the small, hungry trout in the stream, had poached the odd lamb from the moor flocks and – but less often – had cut out some foal from the herds of moor ponies to take away to be sold or used for caravan work eventually. He smiled to himself as he remembered the odd times when some snorting, angry moor stallion had come charging at them to protect its progeny – though at the time it had been no laughing matter. And it was no laughing matter now. He was away and he was going to stay away. Princetown was never going to see him again … He’d sooner die first, for wasn’t that better for a real man than being shut up like a rat in a cage for years and years and the heart’s truth sounding clear as a bell that the law was one thing, but justice another?

  After an hour of slow progress the ground grew marshier. He had to stop now and then to pick up the sound of the water to his right. He came out finally on to a wide, sedgy, peat-bogged plateau from which the stream rose. He circled the bog to the west and picked up through the mist a broken stone wall, studded here and there with a twisted thorn. In its lee was a narrow track. He followed this, scaring small parties of sheep that now and then loomed out of the mist, hearing the thud of their feet as they went away into the gloom, until the wall ended. Then he swung left-handed, well above the stream’s boggy source.

  He began to climb now, edging his way up the long easy slope of a moorland tor. But he had to go slowly for the darkness had come and, although his eyes had made some adjustment to the misty gloom, he knew that one rash step, a trip over a rock outcrop, could twist an ankle or break a leg and take all chance of freedom from him. He reached the top of the tor after an hour, recognizing it, knowing where he was from times past. There was a small ring of stones enclosing a bare arena from which he heard the sound of sheep scattering as he entered it. He sat down with his back against a rock and rested. From a small flat tin which every day for months he had fixed with adhesive tape under his left armpit and worn whenever he went out on a working party, he took a small section of chocolate and ate it slowly. Then he took one of the five cigarettes the tin held and lit it with one of the red-tipped matches in the tin, striking the match against the face of the rock. He smoked contentedly, knowing himself safe from pursuit while the mist lasted, knowing, too, that he was safely on his proper route. Another two hours would take him to the cache at the bottom of Hangingstone Hill where Jimmy Jago had promised to leave provisions and a change of clothes for him.

  As he sat there he sensed that the mist was beginning to thin a little and there was the faintest suggestion of a breeze stirring. That did not surprise him. It was April and late for any heavy, prolonged mist. But the mist had given him all he needed now. Once he reached the cache and could get rid of his prison clothes he knew that he could make the rest of his journey, the first stage to freedom. He sat there, high above the moor, alone, and content with his isolation.

  But Maxie Martin was not alone. Fifty feet from him, across the other side of the small circle, sat another stranger in the mist whose ears had heard his approach; whose eyes had caught the small flare of the match; who sat, now, perched twelve feet up on a granite outcrop and, as the wind thinned or parted the slow veils of mist, could see the shadowed figure of Maxie sitting with his back to his rock.

  It was a peregrine tiercel, a full adult in its third season. It sat there, humped against the mist and darkness, looking like a spur of the rock on which it sat.

  It was a tiercel born in a Welsh eyrie. Its falcon and tiercel parents had been one of a few pairs of Welsh peregrines which, out of lingering atavistic compulsion, made the passage from their birth-place far south to the high passes and lonely peaks of the Spanish Pyrenees to winter. Adult now, the tiercel had long lost all contact with its parents. The previous year it had mated and, out of a clutch of four eggs, only one had hatched to give the world an eyas falcon which had been shot by a Welsh chicken farmer long before the time, had come for it to make its passage to Spain. The brood falcon had started her passage four days before the tiercel and had been trapped in the chestnut woods above Canterets by flying into a fine nylon net hung between two trees as she dived after a pigeon. She had been sold to a Spanish falconer.

  The tiercel that sat on the rock close to Maxie now was in passage back to his Welsh hills. He had rested the previous night on the cliffs of Belle Ile off Quiberon in the Bay of Biscay. In the morning he had beat up three thousand feet and, aided by a mild southerly wind, had crossed the Brittany peninsular, meeting the coast at St Brieuc. He had winged his way north without urgency over the Channel Islands and hit the English coast at Start Point in Devon. On the southern slopes of Dartmoor he had dropped to a small river and had drunk and bathed and rested.

  Late in the afternoon he had taken off and, hungry, had moved up the moor, two thousand feet high, his eyes watching the vast spread of ground below him. The migrant birds were arriving. He marked the small movement of whinchat, stone-chat and warblers and, once, the hawk shape of a cuckoo quick-flighting along a shallow moorland combe. Far below the skylarks hovered and sang and he saw a covey of partridges break cover near the Princetown-Tavistock road. The tiercel watched the movement of cars along the road, saw clearly the shine on the swinging points of pickaxes being used in the small quarry by the prisoners, and the network of small streams, gathering to become rivers, that flowed from the high reaches of the moor. Over a
moorland farm, the lichens and moss on its slate roof clear to him, he saw the flight movement of three pigeons, flying high and in formation. They were a kit of three flying tipplers – a breed of domestic pigeons trained, not as homers for long-distance flying, but for endurance in the air. Flown in competition by their trainers they could circuit, sometimes as high as two thousand feet, for as long as twenty hours in the air before being called or forced down from exhaustion.

  The tipplers were fifteen hundred feet below the tiercel and flying in an inverted V formation. The tiercel winged over, dropped his head and stooped, picking up speed with a few rapid sharp-cutting beats of his wings. He came down the sky almost vertically, wings closed, legs thrust forward and close up to his breast, talons clenched, his speed increasing with each second. He struck the leading tippler at eighty miles an hour, dropping his right leg and ripping into the base of the bird ‘s neck with an extended rear talon. As the pigeon’s feathers exploded about him, the tiercel threw up into a tight vertical circle as the two other pigeons dropped, zig-zagging and panic-flighting, for the farmhouse roof a half a mile away. The tiercel, wind singing against his half-opened wings, went down after the tumbling, dead bird. He grasped it out of the air a hundred feet above ground and flew heavily with it on a long slant that took him to the top of the tor where he now was perched.

  There he had eaten it, preened himself, rested a while, and then the mist had come down cloaking him suddenly with dampness and gloom. The tiercel hated flying in thick rain, thunder clouds, or in mist. He stayed where he was, restless at first, making small cries now and then to himself, and later quietening as the night slowly joined the mist and darkness closed in.