The Painted Tent

by Victor Canning

  From the moment the tiercel had streaked across the parkland, Trevor Green had watched the whole manoeuvre. He was a countryman and, recently, he had heard rumours that some people had said they had seen a pair of peregrines around the district. He was quick-witted enough, too, to wonder if one of them could have been the falcon which he had set free in the barn. He remained where he was, watching the tower and Smiler.

  Half an hour later Fria came out of the eyrie, her young fed, and launched herself into the air. She flew up lazily towards the big chestnut in the centre of the parkland. Trevor watched her rise higher and higher on quick wing-beats. When she was far up in the air, the tiercel came down from the heights above her, stooped past her playfully and called. Fria turned over and chased after him and for the next few minutes the peregrines played and wheeled, dived and stooped in the pale violet light of the thickening dusk.

  Smiler watched them through his glasses, standing up on the roof in full sight of Trevor Green. And Trevor Green watched them, too. In the one was a surge of joyful delight at the heart-stopping aerobatics of the two birds, and in the other delight, too, but of a dark and revengeful kind. Wounded by Sandra’s treatment of him, the farmer’s son sought now only the satisfaction of wounding someone else in his turn. He moved away, back into the woods, knowing exactly what he would do. He would shoot both the birds. That would take the smile off Sammy Miles’s face.

  On the Sunday morning Smiler had an early breakfast and was away to Highford just as the dawn was beginning to break. He was early because he had promised Mr Samkin – who in conversation with him had learned that Smiler had only been to church about four times in his life – that he would go to church with him in the village. Smiler wasn’t over keen about it, but since it would please Mr Samkin he felt he had to do it. All those dreary hymns and things, he thought to himself as he walked along, and someone spouting away about saving your soul…

  On this Sunday morning, too, Trevor Green was up early and making his way by a different route to Highford. Under his arm he carried his father’s twelve-bore double-barrelled, shotgun. The tower was only about thirty yards away from the roof-top. It was a good bet, he felt, that the peregrines had young. He’d shoot the male bird as it came with food, first barrel, and then, second barrel, blast a shot into the recess and finish the rest off. If he knew Sammy Miles, that would break his heart. Anyway, the birds were a pest, taking partridges, pheasants and young chicks. Good riddance to bad rubbish, and if anyone asked him about it he’d just keep a straight face and say he knew nothing.

  On this Sunday morning, too, Maxie Martin was more reluctant than ever to return to his vault as the dawn began to break. Four days previously Jimmy Jago had turned up, climbing down ta to the vault just as darkness had set in. He’d arranged for Maxie to be taken aboard a small coaster that plied between Bideford and Ireland. Maxie was to be aboard before first light on the Monday morning – no questions asked. His only risk was reaching Bideford across country during Sunday night. Tonight, thought Maxie. Tonight he would walk out into the darkness and the vault would never see him again…

  He lingered just inside an empty window-space of the house and looked across at the tower. The light was coming fast. There was no dawn chorus now to greet the day with song. Daybreak signalled the resumption of food finding for the young. The silhouette of the tiercel stood carved against the paling sky. Maxie watched as the light strengthened and brought the bird’s plumage to life. As he did so a movement away to his right caught his eye. It was Trevor Green coming out of the side of the woods with his gun under his arm. Maxie watched him for a second or two, saw the gun, knew him to be a countryman from his clothes, and guessed it was someone out for a rabbit or pigeon for the pot. He turned away into the house and made for his vault.

  Trevor Green crossed to the ruined house and climbed up on to the parapet. As he did so the tiercel saw and heard him. The bird dropped over the side of the tower and ghosted away down the hill to the river. On slow-flapping wings, a mode of flight that was awkward and cumbersome, disguising from some birds any warning signal that said peregrine, Prince flew down the river under the overhang of tall trees. The peal were in the river now, the young sea-trout which had wintered in the estuary of the Taw and the Torridge. One jumped twelve feet below the tiercel and his keen eyes marked it as it streaked away under water and lodged beneath a boulder. A dipper bobbed on a rock. Prince ignored it. He flew over and under the hanging branches, flapping along like a tired crow. Fifty yards ahead of him a stir of life at the edge of a bank of tall nettles and willow herb that overhung the river caught his eye. A mallard duck edged out into the stream followed by four ducklings. The tiercel changed from awkwardness into a flashing, steely bolt of destruction. With quick wing-beats he dropped almost to water level and closed in on the wild duck family. The duck saw him and screamed in alarm as she beat forward. Her wings and feet slapped at the water as she strove to gain height. The ducklings scattered into the bank growths as the tiercel swept over the duck, dropped a taloned leg and clutched her by the back, the long, pointed daggers of his toes needling deep into her side and reaching her heart. She was dead before he dropped to a gravel spit fifty yards farther on.

  He stood on the gravel and began to pluck and plume his kill and then spent half an hour eating leisurely. He bathed, made his morning toilet, dressing and fussing and grooming his plumage, and finally flew off to hunt for his family. Behind him a mink slid through the water and took one of the ducklings. Before the day was out they were all to be dead.

  Up at Highford House, Trevor Green was settled on the parapet, his shotgun resting in a small embrasure through which he could cover the top of the tower. He waited patiently for the return of the tiercel. The old man first, he thought, and then Mum and the young ones. He watched the recess opening on the tower, and now and then caught the stir of Fria’s head and neck as she brooded the young peregrines who now moved restlessly under her, hunger beginning to coil in them.

  Half an hour later Smiler came down the old shrubbery path. He appeared around the side of the tower and began to cross to the ruined house. Trevor Green saw him at once and anger spurted in him, but he lay where he was unmoving and hidden, hoping that Smiler would not come up to the roof. But it soon became clear that that was Smiler’s intention. He crossed to the house, scrambled through the window-space and reached up with his hands to begin his climb.

  Trevor Green was on the point of showing himself and holding the gun on Smiler to keep him from coming up, when low over the far end of the wood he saw the tiercel coming back. All right, he thought, he’d deal with the peregrines first and then let Sammy Miles make of it what he would. He watched the tiercel slide over the edge of the wood and wing downwards towards the tower-top. In a few seconds the bird would be at the eyrie. Behind him Trevor Green could hear Smiler grunting to himself and the scrape of his boots as he started the stiff climb to the roof. Trevor Green eased his gun into position covering the recess mouth. Whether the bird landed there or swung by in a slow roll to throw in the prey he had brought did not matter. He would get him. Whatever else he might not be, he was a good shot and had won many prizes for clay-pigeon shooting.

  Smiler came on to the broad roof parapet twenty yards away from Trevor Green. He pulled himself to his feet and, as he stood gathering his breath, he saw the whole scene. To him it seemed that everything was suddenly clamped into a cold, hostile immobility, freezing all movement in himself and in the world around him.

  He saw the tiercel, tree-top high, Trevor Green lying prone sighting along his gun barrel, the sun-touched lip of the recess with Fria’s head just showing … everything frozen solid as though the whole world and all life in it would never wake to action again. A wild rage rose in him and then burst from him in an angry shout The noise magically broke the spell of stillness. The tiercel came in leisurely to the tower-top, checked, and raised long curved wing-tips to drop on the lip and present Fria with the dead pigeon he carried
. At the same moment, Smiler leapt forward and threw himself on to Trevor Green’s back as the farmer’s son squeezed the trigger for the first barrel.

  The shot blasted into the morning air, echoing against woods and walls. But the gun barrel had been slewed sideways as Smiler landed, and the shot went wide of the tower. The tiercel flew up in panic. Fria came out of the recess, wild with alarm, and flew straight across the roof of the ruined house, seeing below her as she passed the frantic movement of Smiler and Trevor Green as they rolled and fought with one another on the parapet, the gun held between them as Smiler struggled to tear it away. Fria beat up and five hundred feet above her the tiercel hung, wailing and calling, circling and waiting for her. Below him he saw, too, the fighting movement on the roof parapet. The gun roared again and the tiercel saw the two bodies separate and one fall over the inside edge of the parapet, thirty feet to the rubble- and stone-filled foundations of the house.

  Circling and wailing together now, the peregrines, hanging high above their tower eyrie, saw a figure on the roof top, gun in hand, climb rapidly down. It bent over the body which had fallen, and then turned and jumped out of the window and raced away to disappear into the woods. This was Trevor Green, scared out of his wits, lost in an emergency, giving way for the moment to the simple primitive desire to put as much distance as he could between himself and a situation which he had no idea how to handle.

  Smiler lay in a trough between two piles of rubble and stones, broken woodwork and shattered pieces of glass from long-broken window-panes. His body was lying on its side and his right leg was twisted grotesquely under him. Blood streamed from a long cut down one side of his face and spurted too from the inside of his left wrist where the main artery had been slashed by a jagged piece of glass in the rubble as he landed.

  For a moment or two he came out of shock and semiunconsciousness and shouted as loud as he could, instinctively and urgently, ‘Help! Help!’ Then in front of his eyes, the sky and the ruined walls of the old house wheeled and dipped and spun round dizzily. He lapsed into unconsciousness.

  Below ground in his vault, Maxie Martin had heard first of all the sound of the two shots then, in the following silence, the call for help from Smiler. But for one simple expedient which he had resorted to he might never have heard a sound. With Summer’s coming, despite the underground channels leading off the vault, it was hot and stuffy in the chamber and he had taken to wedging a piece of wood under his manhole cover, leaving a gap of an inch or two for the hot, stuffy air to escape upwards.

  A few seconds later, though moving warily and alert for trouble, Maxie stood over Smiler. He recognized him at once, for Jimmy Jago on his brief visit had told him something about Smiler. Maxie, although an impulsive, emotional man, was also a practical man. He had been in more than one emergency in his life. One look at Smiler told him that his right leg was almost certainly broken, that he was unconscious and could possibly have internal injuries, but more than that – he was bleeding to death from the blood that pumped away from his cut artery.

  Maxie knelt beside him, ripped off his own shirt and began tearing it in lengths. Then he found a stone to bind into the temporary tourniquet which he must make to hold the pressure point on the inside of Smiler’s left elbow. He worked swiftly and urgently, but expertly, and by the time he was finished his hands, arms and bare torso were covered with blood. Easing Smiler into a more natural position but not touching his leg, he went outside and brought water in an old can from his little tank and poured it over Smiler’s face.

  The cold water brought Smiler slowly round. He saw a face swimming above him and heard a man’s voice saying, ‘Don’t try to move. Do you understand? Whatever you do – don’t move. I’m going to get help. You understand?’

  Smiler had just enough strength to nod feebly and then he drifted off into darkness.

  Maxie climbed out of the house and began to run for the shrubberies. He ran as he had never run before, half naked and smeared in blood. There was no power in his mind or his body that could have stopped him. He was running for help, running from danger into danger, into the end of a dream which he had cherished for weeks in his vault. And he ran, too, because there was a virtue in him which could not be denied.

  Twenty minutes later he was in Bullaybrook Farm explaining what had happened to the Duchess. She heard him out calmly and then went to the telephone and put in an emergency call for an ambulance. When she had finished she came back and stood over him.

  Maxie said, ‘I’ll go back and stay with him till they come.’

  The Duchess said, ‘ No. Bob’s in the yard. He will go.’ She reached out and put her hand on his head, and went on, ‘What are you going to do?’

  Maxie took her hand. ‘What can I do? I must take my chance – you’ve got to tell them something. Jimmy’s got it all fixed for tonight. Jimmy would lie for me. But I won’t lay that on you. Tell them the truth and I’ll take my chance. All I ask for is a wash and a shirt.’

  The Duchess said, ‘Sitting in the painted tent, all I saw in the crystal for you was a man running, half-naked, covered in blood No more.’ She moved towards the door then turned and went on, ‘I’m going to tell Bob. When I get back you must be gone. You know where everything is. I don’t know the justice of things. There’s only One who knows that. But there’s always prayers – and mine are for you.’

  She went to find Bob, and when she came back Maxie was gone.

  12. Envoi

  Smiler was taken to the hospital. His right leg and two ribs were broken. The rough tourniquet on his arm had saved his life. It was almost the end of August before he was fit to move about normally again and his father was home and living in lodgings in Barnstaple to be near him.

  Smiler said nothing about Trevor Green and his attempt to shoot the peregrines which had led to his fall. He said that it had been an accident, but after a week Trevor Green found his courage, made a clean breast of the whole affair, and discovered a new self-respect.

  The Duchess told the police about Maxie Martin – though not of the vault at Highford since they did not ask – and the search for him was renewed, but he still eluded them, though the Duchess learned through Jimmy that Maxie had never joined the coaster which was to have taken him to Ireland.

  Mr Samkin visited Smiler regularly in hospital and afterwards and, when he was fit enough, Smiler went on with his studies, determined to start taking his examinations the following year.

  Laura came down from Scotland for a few days, and they wrote to one another regularly and they both looked forward to Christmas when Sir Alex Elphinstone had invited Smiler and his father to spend the holiday with him in his castle on the loch.

  At the end of August Smiler’s father went off on a two-month trip. He was a working man and could not afford to stay idle, and Smiler – after a farewell visit to the Duchess, Jimmy Jago and the peregrines, went to live with his sister Ethel and Albert in Bristol, which to his surprise he found far from unpleasant.

  On his last visit to the peregrines, the young birds were flying, two tiercels and a falcon. A few local people had quietly formed a protection society to look after them. In those few hours while Smiler lingered near the tower, watching the family in the air, the young peregrines learning their flying skills from Fria and Prince, he was filled with a quiet joy at the sense of freedom and purpose that they seemed to communicate to him. He had had a tiny hand in it. Nothing could ever take that from him.

  As autumn died the tiercel adult disappeared. The watchers, who knew the family now, guessed that he had already migrated. Soon after him went the young falcon in her juvenile plumage and then, one by one, the young tiercels.

  Fria stayed for another week and would hang high in the air, circling over the tower, wailing and calling as though some urgent spirit possessed her whose commands she could not follow. She rested on the tower-top at night and during the day would hunt quickly for herself and then fly high, a speck lost against the sky, wailing and calling.


  Then, on a day of roaring north wind with high-piled clouds racing in from the sea, she rose from the tower and beat swiftly up into the wind, feeling it lift her and swing her forward on its massive power. She headed due South, over Dartmoor, over the tor where Prince had once rested, and was soon high above the grey glitter of the English Channel.

  But she left Prince, the tiercel, behind. For weeks now his body had lain out in the changing weather on the tower-top, hidden from sight except to the wailing Fria. He lay on his back, his legs stretched stiffly to the sky as though he had died struggling to reach it. He was a near skeleton, fly- and vermin-cleaned. Death had come to him, as it does to so many of his kind, through the slow poisons of man, spread over and leached out of the land, moving along the long chain of change in the bodies of insects, vermin, and birds, finally to reach and destroy the fierce heart and proud strength of the prince of birds.

  The day that Fria went, the Duchess told Bob and Bill to take down her painted tent for the winter. But before they did so she went into it alone and sat before her crystal ball. She took the silk cover from it. She looked into it and there was no desire in her to know anything of her own kind, of Maxie or Jimmy. She held in her hands a little handkerchief that Laura had left behind her on her visit and a leather belt which Smiler had forgotten to pack.

  She stared into the crystal. Slowly it cleared for her, and she saw things that would be her secret for ever, and as she watched she smiled happily and was content. Then she went out into the wild wind that had taken Fria away and her red curls swung and danced in its eddies.

  Copyright

  First published in 1974 by Heinemann