With the gate as wide open as the protesting catch would allow, Gideon slipped back past the two mouse-coloured beasts and advanced upon them once more, waving his arms up and down and slapping his thighs. They regarded him warily but refused to budge, so he ran at them, pulling off his jacket and walloping the nearest animal with it to great effect. They both took to their heels, one giving voice in its terror, and rocketed straight past the gateway.
Gideon could have screamed his frustration. The next moment, however, the two fleeing donkeys were met by another coming equally fast in the opposite direction. They turned back again and the three of them, faced with Gideon once more, diverted into the field and relative safety. Hoping that there were no more donkeys heading his way, Gideon dragged the gate shut but didn't attempt to lift it back on to its hinges. He'd no idea how many donkeys might be running loose around the farm. He'd already seen three more than he'd expected to see.
He sprinted for the car, which he'd left with its door open and the engine running. A quick shunt to and fro straightened it up and with wheel-spinning acceleration he resumed his interrupted journey.
The yard was in chaos.
Gideon left Pippa's car well away from the buildings, where he hoped it would be both safe and out of the way of the emergency vehicles when they arrived.
There was so much smoke it was difficult to see which part of the buildings was actually ablaze. The wind blew it everywhere in choking black clouds, and every now and then a tongue of flame would shoot skywards with a roar and a shower of sparks. As a gust of wind lifted the dark veil momentarily, Gideon saw with a sinking heart that not only the newly renovated farmhouse but also the mobile home and both blocks of stables were well alight.
He could hear someone shouting, possibly Naomi, and pausing only to dunk his cotton neckerchief in the water trough and tie it over his nose and mouth, he headed for the long gravel walkway between the animal quarters.
Halfway across the yard, and with a feeling of unreality, he almost collided with yet another donkey. Where were they all coming from? In the next instant though, all thoughts of donkeys were abruptly driven from his mind as something tangled around his running feet and brought him crashing to his knees. The ,something' turned out to be a child's bicycle.
Jez's bicycle?
My God! Gideon begged silently. Please don't tell me she's here!
`Jez!' he yelled as he scrambled to his feet. `Jez!'
Someone loomed out of the gloom, too tall to be the child. `Naomi! Where's Jez?' Gideon shouted urgently, his relief at seeing his sister quickly overwhelmed by his fear for the child. 'Gideon!' Naomi's face was partly covered by what had once been a white tea towel and her eyes, above it, were red-rimmed, watering and wide with surprise at seeing him there. `Thank God you're here! Tim's trying to catch the owl in the end cage and I don't know where the donkeys have gone, I just let them out. They could be anywhere!'
Filthy dirty and trying to subdue the frightened struggles of a rabbit she held to her chest, Naomi sounded desperate but Gideon had no time even to reassure her about the donkeys.
`Where's Jez?' he repeated, grasping her arm and speaking close to her ear.
`She's not here. She's gone home,' Naomi shouted back. `Look, can you help Tim? He won't leave that bird and I'm afraid he'll be trapped. The fire's awful down there. Where the hell is the fire brigade?'
`They're coming, I could hear them. But are you sure Jez has gone home? Her bike's still here.'
Naomi stared uncomprehendingly. `It can't be! I saw her go. She said Joey was picking her up down the lane.'
Somewhere along the row of buildings behind her a roof timber gave way with a crash and a shower of sparks. She jumped and turned instinctively to look.
Gideon shook her arm once more to regain her attention. `Then she's come back. Where would she have gone?'
A look of utter horror crossed Naomi's face. `Oh, my God! The fawn!' Then as Gideon started to move, `But you can't get down there. Beyond the owl house the whole place is ablaze. It's just too hot!' The rabbit kicked again and she started to move away. `I've got to put this somewhere. There's more to get.'
Gideon stood for a moment, undecided, then headed for the owl house and the old stables beyond.
Naomi was right. Beyond the owl house, which was thankfully empty, the heat was so intense and the smoke so chokingly thick that it was plainly impossible to go any further without breathing apparatus. Gideon withdrew a step or two, shielding his face with a forearm and desperately trying to remember whether the old stables had windows at the back. Surely they did. High, and possibly too small, but there - surely.
Sprinting back as fast as he dared in the reduced visibility, he rounded the last building and ran the few yards down the lane to the gate that led into the field behind the stables. He half-vaulted and half-fell over the dilapidated gate, landing on his knees in the tangled mass of brambles and scrap iron on the far side. The flashing, shrieking clamour of the approaching fire engine was appreciably closer now but not near enough to wait. He'd have to rely on Naomi telling them about Jez and the fawn.
Beside him as he scrambled hastily to his feet was a rusty iron bath, listing heavily but nevertheless half-full of greenish water. Gideon tugged his neckcloth loose once more then paused, recalling the shocking intensity of the heat from the burning buildings. Without giving himself time to think, he stepped into the trough, sat down in the icy water and then leaned back to immerse himself completely. The shock of it, as the water closed over his head, took his breath away and he swallowed a mouthful before he surfaced, gasping, into the icy wind.
Along the back of the row of Victorian brick buildings, Gideon could see that there were indeed windows, lit with a warm glow that was not, under the present circumstances, either welcoming or comforting. Gideon suppressed a groan. Surely the fire had claimed two or three more stables than it had when he'd approached from the other side. He loped along the row, frantically trying to remember how far down the fawn had been housed. Why, oh, why, hadn't he counted them from the top? `Jez!' he yelled. Jez! Can you hear me? Where are you?'
If there had been a reply it was doubtful whether he would have heard it. Down this end the fire sounded like a hot-air balloon burner. The windows were high, too high to see through from the ground, but luckily, because they were so high, they weren't barred, there being no chance that their Victorian occupants could have accidentally broken the glass and injured themselves.
Gideon paused, trying to picture how far down the row he would be if he were the other side, and as he did so a timber inside the nearest stable collapsed, causing a shower of tiles to fall from the roof and shooting a jet of flame and sparks skyward. Gideon's instinct was to retreat to a safe distance but a thin, terrified scream halted him in his tracks.
Could it have been the child? When in acute pain or terror, animal screams could sound amazingly like human ones. Was it Jez?
Gideon stepped closer and yelled once more.
He was answered by a faint but unmistakable cry for help and experienced a rush of relief, instantly smothered by the knowledge that his troubles were far from over. The lower edge of the window was about level with the top of his head and although it appeared to be large enough to admit his rather bulky person, it would be a squeeze. Through the broken panes he could see the fierce orange blaze of the remaining burning beams.
There was no time to waste. Hunting around amongst the rubble and scrap iron that was scattered all along the back of the stables, Gideon found a piece of rusty angle iron with which he cleared the rest of the broken glass from the window. A couple of well-aimed swings took out the centre of the rotten wooden frame, and tossing the iron aside, he launched himself at the opening.
His initial leap left him with his head and shoulders in the aperture, resting his weight on his elbows and scrabbling at the brickwork with his boots. Luckily, the old bricks were crumbling in places and consequently very uneven, so it wasn't too difficult
to gain purchase and push himself further through.
There was no easy way to climb over the sill. If he tried to sit on the ledge to get his feet through he was afraid he'd get stuck,
but quite apart from that, the hot air rushing out through the opening felt like a blast furnace and what paint was left on the window frame was melting and burning his hands. As it was, he took advantage of a toehold in the bricks to continue his forward progress and sprawled almost head first into the stable.
A bale of smouldering straw broke his fall and he bounced off it to land on his knees on the floor. Glancing quickly about him, he discovered that although the beams overhead were blazing, at ground level the main fire was still one stable away. It could only be a matter of moments though, before falling debris ignited the thick golden straw underfoot.
`Jez!' he yelled, scrambling to his feet. That was a mistake. At head height the smoke was considerably thicker. It caught in his throat, stinging his eyes, and he dropped to his knees once more. To his right, in the other back corner of the stable, a wooden cross-member had fallen from the roof and lay smouldering, one end on the straw bales that lined the base of the walls. Beneath the beam he could see a flash of colour that could only have been blue denim.
He scuttled across on all fours. Behind him, in the next stable, another part of the structure gave way and the fire roared in triumph. Gideon resisted the urge to look back. It wouldn't be good news and there wasn't a moment to spare.
The beam trapping Jez was, thankfully, not a main one but quite big enough. The child was lying, face down, in a strange, unnaturally hunched position under the lower end of it, trapped by her legs. Gideon could hear her coughing; a painful, racking sound that shook her whole body.
He put a hand on her shoulders. Jez! Can you hear me? It's Gideon.'
'Gideon?' she managed incredulously, between the coughs. `I can't move my legs ... It hurts. I've got Kizzy. Help me!'
She'd turned her head to try and see Gideon as he knelt beside her and through the swirling smoke he could see the helpless tears pouring down her face as she began to cough again.
`Steady, Jez,' he said, much as he would to a panicking horse. `We'll have you out of here in no time.' The words caught in his throat and he too began to cough, taking in more of the thick grey smoke as he inhaled convulsively, and making it worse. `I'll lift. You slide out.'
Eyes streaming, Gideon grasped the end of the beam and heaved. Where it had rested the straw was already alight and the wood was painfully hot to the touch. In these circumstances the pain was incidental. Speed was everything. The heat from the approaching blaze was unbelievably intense and the suffocating, energy-sapping pain in his chest left no room for any other considerations. He had to get the child and himself out while he still had the strength to do so.
The beam came up more easily than he had dared hope and he was able to move it sideways away from Jez before he let it drop, which was lucky because the girl showed no signs of being able to slide herself out from under it as he'd suggested. Without further ado, Gideon scooped her up and turned towards the window, forcing himself to ignore her whimper of pain. She was no heavier than a medium to large dog but almost immediately began to thrash about in his arms, making his task twice as difficult.
`No!' she cried in his ear. `Kizzy!' Then she hit out at him with her fists before collapsing weakly in a bout of combined coughing and sobbing.
Suddenly Gideon realised what she'd been lying on and why she'd been hunched in that strange way. In the urgency of the situation he'd completely forgotten the reason the child had been in the stable in the first place. The munt.ac fawn; Kizzy.
`You first,' he shouted, in a voice that hardly sounded like his own, his throat was so sore. 'I'll come back, I promise.'
The child was racked with coughing once more as he stumbled across to the window, seeing with heart-stopping horror that the straw bed was well alight now and their way almost blocked by the leaping flames. Beneath the window he paused, desperate to lift the child up and out into the life-giving air but doubled up and incapacitated with the torture of his own smoke-filled lungs.
Jez was much quieter now, ominously so. Repositioning her in his arms, Gideon stood on the crumbling straw bale and posted her through the window feet first. Still holding her, he hitched himself up by his elbows until his head and shoulders were outside the building, then let her slide through his grasp until she was hanging by her wrists with her feet perhaps eighteen inches above the ground.
The broken wood of the window frame was digging into his torso but he hesitated momentarily. He couldn't be sure whether one - or even both - of her legs weren't broken and his heart quailed at the thought of her landing on them.
He leaned even further out. Her head hung back and her eyes were almost closed, feet nearly touching the ground now. It was the best he could do. He opened his fingers and Jez slid down and fell sideways into the long grass at the base of the wall.
Gideon's legs, still hanging inside the stable, felt as though they were on fire and in a moment of panic he almost dived out of the window head first, but the certain knowledge that his falling body couldn't fail to land on the child, lying limply below, held him back. And then there was the fawn. He had promised. He wriggled back to stand on the straw once more.
The heat was fearsome. Somewhere within ten feet or so of him was a muntjac fawn, helpless and terrified. Ten feet or so, that was, of burning straw, thick smoke, and the possibility of being brained by a falling beam. Ten feet that stretched away like miles.
Hardly believing what he was doing, Gideon stepped off the fast-disintegrating straw bale and plunged back through the grey and orange chaos to where he had found Jez.
The fawn was still there, cowering in the corner against the bales that lined the walls. Coughing almost non-stop and struggling to see through the tears that threatened to blind him, Gideon could nevertheless tell that the animal was in a bad way. It pressed against the straw as if hoping that a gap would appear to allow its escape. It blinked terrified, watering eyes and gasped for air through an open mouth but Gideon could see that even were he to get it to safety it would be to no avail. The fawn was scrabbling at the ground with its front legs but its hindquarters dragged uselessly in the straw. In trying to save it, Jez had fallen with the fawn beneath her and broken its back.
The falling beam had brought with it a quantity of other woodwork and, groping in the debris around his feet, Gideon found a short piece that was not too badly burnt. Pausing only to aim as accurately as he could, he hit the stricken animal hard behind its left ear. To his relief it dropped immediately, kicked a time or two, and then lay still.
Above him, something gave way with a crack like a pistol shot and a shower of burning laths and tiles rained down upon his head and shoulders. The wind rushing over the hole in the roof drew the fire upward like a chimney and it roared with renewed vigour. The heat made the skin on Gideon's face feel unbearably tight and there was an acrid smell of singeing hair; whether his or the fawn's he wasn't sure.
He shook like a dog to rid himself of any clinging embers, worrying as he did so about Jez lying unprotected beneath the window. He should have taken the time to drag her away from the danger of falling debris.
What if the wall collapsed? What if she stopped breathing?
At the same time, he knew that if he'd left the burning stable, he would never have had the courage to climb back in again, fawn or no fawn.
He stumbled through the smoke towards the window, glad of the protection of his heavy-duty motorcycle boots. The layer of straw bedding had burned away to just so much ash now but he could still feel the heat of it, even through the thick soles. With a flash of sick humour he pictured a fireman saying `We couldn't find the rest of him, I'm afraid, but his feet are fine.'
The next moment, humour of any kind was extinct.
The window wasn't there.
Gideon groped his way sideways along the wall on a rising tide of pa
nic. It had to be there. He couldn't see more than eighteen inches in any direction. It could be just an arm's-length away.
But which way? It was all taking too long.
His chest and throat were contracting from lack of air and as he paused, trying to think logically, his overwhelming urge was to sit down and rest for a moment.
Move, damn it! he scolded himself. You've got to move, for Jez's sake. She can't be left where she is.
Coughing hard now, he forced his leaden limbs into action, trying not to give room to the thought that pushed insistently at the edge of his mind, whipping up panic once more.
What if it's the wrong wall?
It had to be the right one. He'd always had a better than average sense of direction and this was definitely not the time to start overriding it. And, given that it was the right wall, he must be nearer to the right-hand end of it than the left. So, if he worked his way to the right and couldn't find it, then he'd just have to work his way back left-handed until he did. No point in admitting that the smoke was almost certain to beat him before he completed this methodical search.
No point at all.
Such was the woolly state of his mind that he'd moved two arm's-lengths sideways before he remembered that the window was just above head height, and if he carried on feeling his way along as he was, he would miss it anyway. Cursing his stupidity, he stretched his left hand upward and felt - nothing!
It took another long moment for this to penetrate his senses, and when it did, the surge of joy was stifled by a sudden frustrated despair. He may have found the window but with the straw bale stepping-stone just so much crumbling ash beneath his feet, and limbs that felt as though they were weighed down with lead, the aperture might as well be six feet above his head as six inches.
Every time he coughed he inhaled another lungful of smoke and it was steadily killing him.
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