Long Summer Day (39 page)

They did not refer to it again until they were going to bed. The implication that he was unqualified for his responsibilities rankled with him but he was too unsure of himself to make an issue of it.

‘We don’t have to quarrel over this, Grace,’ he said, when he blew out the lamp and was getting into bed beside her.

‘No, we don’t, Paul,’ she said, ‘because, luckily for all of us, the issue has resolved itself already. Smut Potter is clear away by now and they’ll have to take it out of the next poor devil they catch contravening the Ten Commandments and the landed gentry’s Enclosure Acts! Good night, Paul,’ and she turned away. He lay awake a long time listening to the night sounds of Priory Wood and the muted hunting clamour of the river banks, dismayed by this unforseeable rift that had opened between them but wondering, with the detached part of his mind, how much of his land and Gilroy’s across the Teazel had once been common pasture, available to everyone in the Valley.

Grace was wrong in her estimate of Smut’s margin of safety. At the moment, and every night until Midsummer Eve, he was no more than two miles away, and far less as the heron flew from the river to the edge of Shallowford Mere. When the Valley worked he slept and when the Valley slept he was at one with the foxes in the glades further east and the otters fishing under the logs near his hideout.

He could have been gone by now, up the country, over to Ireland, to America even, for Meg had begun scraping money together the moment Hazel brought news of his whereabouts, and by now she somehow accumulated enough to spirit him out of reach of everybody, providing he travelled by night. But to her dismay he was still there, lying all day in his holt under the fallen beech and drifting about the woods all night, living on what he trapped and the food that Hazel floated down to him according to instructions given the day after he had gone into hiding. None of them had actually seen him, for even when he first made contact with Hazel he remained out of sight in the foliage that grew down to the water’s edge and told her how to keep in touch with him by using the stream that flowed past the mouth of his lair. She had obeyed his instructions to the letter so that now he had most things a man could need, a blanket, a stewpot, tobacco and trap wires, with bread, salt and a stub of blacklead on which he could scrawl messages.

Yet it was not comfort that kept him here or fear of the Gilroy keepers and police, nor even the news that Nick Buller was now out of hospital, with a lopsided jaw and a slight impediment in his speech, caused by the passage of two teeth through his tongue. He was still there because he could not bring himself to turn his back on the fields and woods that had enclosed him all his life or separate himself from his kin in the Dell. He knew every bush and tree in the thirty-odd square miles about the Coombe but never once, not even for a day, had he travelled further afield, or wanted to and now that he was faced with the prospect of leaving it all and perhaps never coming back his resolution faltered and he hung on, waiting for some miraculous turn of fortune that would make everything the same as it had been before that unlucky incident in Heronslea plantation. He had never been called upon to make a decision as final as this, that would shatter the rhythm of his life and throw him among strangers, an act that would, in a sense, not only deprive him of his means of livelihood but compel him to come to terms with people who worked from dawn to dusk, lived in brick houses, raised families and paid rates and taxes. And so it was, in the end, that the decision had to be made for him by others, after news of his whereabouts leaked outside the clan.

Discovery of his hideout came through Ikey Palfrey, whose wits, always keen, had been whetted to a very sharp edge by his association with Hazel Potter, after she had found him lost in the snow. He had seen her several times a week since then and she had revealed to him most of her secrets of the wood but although he was an apt pupil, and learned all she had to teach him at remarkable speed for a boy reared in a city, he remained in awe of her, regarding her as someone paying a brief visit from another planet. He marvelled at her strength and agility, at her ability to imitate bird calls and animal noises, from a moorhen skimming across the mere to draw an intruder from her nest, to the steady scrunch of a badger’s claws enlarging a set. There was nothing, it seemed, that she did not know about the woods and the countryside, about the weather and the whereabouts of plants and insect colonies. She showed him, at one time or another, each species in the wood at work and at play and about these things she could invent orations that seemed to him (familiar now with all Mary Willoughby’s favourite ballads) an almost miraculous deluge of sounds, part monologue, and part chant, and delivered in a mixture of broad Devon and gypsy argot that contained words he had never heard uttered before. Her appearance bewitched him too, for it had little in common with that of any of the children who sat at lessons in Deepdene schoolroom. She was invariably dirty and unkempt but somehow strikingly beautiful, with eyes that seemed to change colour according to the strength of sunlight, with long, supple limbs, half naked now that it was summer, and a great mop of tangled hair sometimes chestnut and other times bleached the colour of ripe barley. Her teeth intrigued him, so white that they shone like the underside of a cloud when she laughed at him, as she did when he stumbled or lagged behind her long, skipping strides. But the association was not quite so one-sided as it might have been, for slowly, as their friendship ripened, she began to show more interest in his background and ask him to tell her about ‘thicky gurt, smelly plaace’, from which he had, by a miracle, escaped. And because this was all he had to offer at that time he was glad to tell her, painting heroic pictures of his struggles in the metropolis, where he had often seen carriages bowling along without horses, and had once cheered Queen Vicky in a carriage surrounded by her lifeguards.

All that spring, whenever he could escape from school or his work, he sought her out at their meeting place opposite the old pagoda which she continued to call ‘The Niggerman’s Church’, and together they ranged the woods and slopes as far as the railway line (but never over it) and the long curving shore of Coombe Bay. For him she was a kind of priestess and he told no one of his association with her; for her it was a taste of dominion over another soul, in whom she sensed a kind of worship that warmed her like June sunshine, so that it piqued her to sacrifice his company in the interests of clan loyalty, and to observe him waiting for her by the mere when she was on her way to or from her brother’s hideout.

One still evening, when she was descending the long wooded slope carrying a sack containing a supply of tobacco and fresh vegetables, she weakened and called to him, saying that she was on her way to ‘a beastie in a caave, yonder’, and dumb with curiosity he had followed her, not knowing in the least what kind of pet she had hidden in the wood but guessing it was this that had kept her from him all these long sunny days. It was only when she emptied the sack and poked among the bushes beside the swift-flowing stream that flowed into the western margin of the mere, that he realised her beastie was a man and could be none other than her fugitive brother, Smut, and at once his heart sank, for he now saw himself faced with a choice of loyalties, to her, who trusted him, and to his other idol, Squire Craddock, who was rumoured to have quarrelled with his wife and with Lord Gilroy on Smut Potter’s account. For the moment, however, he was too interested to worry over what he should do with the information but watched her fasten a carefully-wrapped parcel to a small, raised plank, attached to a long coil of parcel string and set this little raft adrift on the current, paying out the string until it was taut. The plank sailed out of sight through a clump of harts tongue ferns and when, after an interval she began to wind in, it reappeared without its parcel. He said, goggling,
‘It’s Smut, ain’t it? He’s holed up down there?’,
and she smiled and laid a finger to her lips, saying, ‘Arr, that’s zo! Us dorn mind
you
knowin’ for youm different. Come on, us’ll go an’ zee they badgers, shall us?’ But he was not interested in badgers now, or anything else she could show him, and as soon as he could he escaped pleading extra chores at the stable, and here entered upon a terrible battle with his conscience for it seemed to him that he was obliged to betray one of them, the girl who had shared her terrible secret with him, or the man who had given him the keys to his new world.

He lay tossing and turning in his hayloft that night and in the morning, red-eyed and yawning, he made his decision. It would have been different, he told himself, if Smut had been hiding in neutral territory but his presence here, inside the estate boundaries, involved the Squire in the poacher’s crime, and the police had not yet ceased to search for him east of the river. Ikey was not unfamiliar with the police, regarding them with an inherited distrust. Police always meant trouble for someone and police here meant bad trouble for the Squire; it was therefore in his master’s interests that he get rid of them and once Smut’s whereabouts were known Squire would manage that one way or the other.

He went through the kitchen and taking advantage of Mrs Handcock’s back slipped into the hall and thence to the library. Paul was at work in his office and Ikey braced himself to cross the room and tap on the closed glass door but as he did so he heard a step behind him and swung round to face Mrs Craddock and for a moment he faltered, looking furtive and guilty. Then his expression cleared, for he knew Grace Craddock shared the Squire’s interest in him and it occurred to him that the Squire would be certain in any case to pass information regarding Smut’s whereabouts to his wife. He said, before she could ask him what he was doing, ‘I know where Smut Potter is, Ma’am! I was comin’ to tell Squire.’

He was startled by the expression of alarm that crossed her face and by the nervous manner in which she slammed the library door, leaning against it, with her hands behind her.

‘You’ve seen him?’

‘No, I ain’t seen him, Ma’am, but I know where he is orlright. He’s ’iding aht, the far side of the mere.’ He decided to skirt Hazel’s involvement and the fact that his knowledge was shared by the Potter tribe as a whole. They could find that out for themselves if they wished. His responsibility ended with passing on the fact that the fugitive was still here, on the estate.

‘You’re quite sure of this, Ikey?’

‘Yes, Ma’am.’

‘You could take us there?’

‘I wouldn’t need to, Ma’am, it’s opposite the little island, in a kind of cave under a fallen tree.’

She stood thinking for a moment and then, it seemed to him with an effort, said, ‘Very well, wait a minute, will you?’ and went into the office, closing the door.

He heard the rise and fall of their voices and presently both came out, Paul looking bewildered. ‘Go and fetch Mr Rudd, Ikey,’ Grace said, ‘but don’t mention this to a soul, you understand?’

‘No, Ma’am.’

He went out, shutting the door softly. Without exactly understanding why he realised that his news had shocked them and he had a sense of becoming involved in events that could bring trouble and discord and was already regretting having told them. He found Rudd at the lodge eating breakfast and the agent received the news phlegmatically. ‘I always had a notion he hadn’t run far,’ was all he said and told Ikey to go back to his work and keep his counsel, even from the groom.

When Rudd entered the library a few minutes later he was at once aware of the tension in the room but for all that he went straight to the point. ‘The best thing we can do is to urge Potter to surrender to us tonight,’ he said, ‘then we might be able to persuade him to give himself up to Sergeant Price first thing tomorrow.’

‘That’s what I’ve been saying, John, but Grace is very much against it.’

‘What does she suggest?’ he asked, as though Grace was not present, and she snapped, ‘That we send Ikey to tell him to clear out and take his chance as soon as it’s dark! Are we to play thief-takers for the Gilroys?’

‘To send Ikey would involve the boy,’ Rudd said, quietly. ‘If it came out, as it well might, he could be taken in charge himself and I’m not sure it wouldn’t lay your husband open to being an accessory.’

She did not seem impressed by this but smiled her tight little smile.

‘Why should it come out?’

‘Don’t forget, there’s a warrant out for Potter, Mrs Craddock.’

‘For attempted murder?’

‘For malicious wounding and that carries a severe penalty.’

She was silent for a moment and Rudd felt desperately sorry for Paul, who opened his mouth to say something but closed it again. Presently she looked up, first at Rudd, then at Paul, and when she spoke her voice sounded flat and defeated.

‘No matter what I say you’re both determined to give him up, aren’t you? It’s the law, isn’t it? It’s safe, for everyone but Smut Potter!’

‘Damn it, you’re twisting the facts, Grace,’ Paul burst out. ‘I wouldn’t “give him up” as you say, and neither would John. We want him to give himself up, in his own interests!’

‘His own interests? Three to five years in a stinking gaol!’

‘He won’t get three to five years,’ Paul said, ‘he’ll more likely get six months and less if the case is dealt with summarily, as one of poaching and common assault.’

‘Can you guarantee he’ll be so charged?’ she asked, and Rudd said no, they couldn’t, but if he came in voluntarily his chances were far better than if he was arrested out of the district and committed for trial at the Assizes.

‘I said in his own interests and that’s precisely what I meant!’ Paul argued. ‘Any other way, what are his prospects? He goes in fear of arrest every day of his life and can never show his face here again! I don’t think he’d want that, not when he understands all it means and the fact that he’s stayed so near home all this time proves as much, doesn’t it?’

‘It might prove he hasn’t any money?’ Grace said.

‘And you’d have me send him money?’ Paul said.

‘Yes,’ she said deliberately, ‘I would and if you wouldn’t I would.’