The Painted Tent

by Victor Canning

  That evening Smiler wrote in his diary:

  Spent the whole day with Mr Rhodes. I think the Duchess must have told him to rub my nose in it – and didn’t he by half! But it don’t make no difference. Bother – any. I’m going to be a vet. The beer at the Fox and Hounds was good. I think I could get to like it as much as cider. Letter today from Laura. Only two mingy pages and most of that about somebody’s funeral she went to. Fria just the same.

  5. Some Hard Lessons to Learn

  The mild weather hastened Spring to the Taw valley. While Smiler went on with his work at the farm and his studies with Mr Samkin – who now had Smiler groaning because he was insisting that he should learn some Latin and was hinting that very soon Smiler would have to take a proper series of correspondence courses with some educational institution so that he could prepare for his first examinations – things were happening in other places which would eventually shape Smiler’s destiny.

  In Bristol Albert and Ethel had received a letter from Smiler’s father by airmail from Australia. The relevant part of the letter which concerned Smiler read:

  I don’t know what the police and the shipping company have been playing at in not letting me know what’s been going on. They say they’ve sent me stuff but I never got it. Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge and I can’t get back yet to do anything about it. There’s a dock strike out here and we’re stuck till the lads decide to unload us – and could you see the company flying me home? Not B. likely.

  But that don’t worry me because I know my Samuel M. You just give him the letter what I’m enclosing and he’ll know what he’s got to do. But I don’t want you or Ethel to do or say anything about this to anyone, mind, until Samuel M. gets the letter.

  Ethel, who was sitting holding the sealed letter to Smiler while Albert read to her, made a sour face and said, ‘Just like him. Putting it all on to somebody else. Out of sight, out of mind.’

  Albert gave an inward sigh and said mildly, ‘Well, dear, it isn’t quite like that. What else could he do? And my bet is that he’s given Smiler some sound advice.’

  ‘That Smiler – the trouble he’s caused.’

  ‘Not to us, dear. To the police, maybe – but then they’re paid for it.’

  Ethel held up the letter gingerly by one corner as though it might contain poison and said, ‘Well – and what about this? We get letters from him – but no address and postmarked all over the place. How we gain’ to get this to him?’

  Albert sighed again, audibly this time, and said, ‘I don’t know. But I’ll find a way.’ He rose and took the letter from his wife. Looking round the prim front parlour where he was not allowed to smoke and always had to wear carpet slippers, he went on, ‘I’ll just go out to me workshop and think it over for an hour. Something’ll come to me.’

  After half an hour contentedly smoking in his workshop, nothing had come to Albert. But he was not downhearted because Albert was a philosopher and he knew that most problems had a way – if you waited long enough – of solving themselves. He only hoped that this one would not be so long in coming that it would be too late for Smiler to take whatever advice his father was giving. He locked the letter away in his little workshop desk for safety. Ethel, he knew, had the curiosity of a jackdaw. She was well capable of steaming the letter open and reading it.

  In Bristol, too, Johnny Pickering was becoming a little frightened and puzzled. He was getting letters recently from all over the place – Southampton, London, Manchester, Glasgow, Durham – and seldom a week passed without one dropping on to the front door-mat.

  They were all printed in ink in the same hand without address or signature and there was never more than one sentence in them. The first five had read:

  confession is good for the soul you did it

  and the innocent suffered

  own up and avoid bad luck

  nothing will go right until you are right

  with yourself.

  the black hand is over you and the green

  eyes are watching

  only three more warnings before fate strikes

  At first Johnny Pickering had tried to take no notice of the letters. But he could not keep it up. Things suddenly did seem to have started to go wrong with him. He slipped on the pavement and badly twisted his ankle. His girl friend told him she wanted no more to do with him and found herself another boy. He began to get in trouble at work breaking things in the china shop where he was employed as a counter assistant. He knew perfectly well what all the letters were about and he thought they came from Smiler. But he couldn’t work out how Smiler could be dodging about all over England posting them. He said nothing to his parents, but his slowly changing manner, making him irritable and rude, often brought him a smart backhander from his father. There were times when he heartily wished he had never stolen the old lady’s handbag and put the blame on Smiler.

  And while Albert pondered what to do about Smiler’s letter and Johnny Pickering swore, less and less convincingly, that he was never going to be daft enough to go and make a clean breast of things to the police, Smiler was facing his own problems; some minor – like the way Sandra still hung around and foisted her company on him whenever she could; and one major – his disquiet over Fria who still sat on her beam and did little more than fly down to the shallows most days to bathe and was quite content to take food from the loft ledge.

  He talked his major problem over one day with Mr Samkin who had become, in a way, more of a confidant for him than the Duchess who seemed to go about the farm now preoccupied and – Smiler guessed – clearly worried about her rift with Jimmy.

  Mr Samkin said, ‘There’s nothing you can do but have patience, Samuel. In the wild state Fria would have been taught everything by her parents. Animals have to be taught. But she was taken before all that could happen. Now, if she wants to live free, she’s got to learn everything herself. Imagine if you woke up one day on a Pacific island beach – ten years old, and you couldn’t speak, knew no language, had never climbed a tree or peeled a banana, couldn’t swim. How would you feel?’

  ‘Pretty lost.’

  ‘Well, that’s Fria. She’s pretty lost. But she’s got food and water and shelter of a kind. No matter what kind of spirit she’s got she’s sensible enough to stay where she is. Would you take it on yourself to drive her away deliberately? To cut off her food supply?’

  ‘I couldn’t, sir.’

  Mr Samkin smiled gently. ‘ Of course not. But something might. Some accident. If on your desert island you slipped and fell into the sea you’d make an instinctive effort to swim. If it came off – you’d have survived. If you were hungry you’d find yourself picking some fruit or other and trying it. If you didn’t like its taste you’d spit it out. If you liked it you’d eat it. Self-education forced on man or beast has only two ends – survival or death. Fria isn’t going to move from the safety of her beam until something too powerful for her to resist makes her.’

  ‘And then she might die, sir.’

  Mr Samkin nodded gravely. ‘The odds are she will, Samuel. There’s no sentiment in Mother Nature.’

  Two days later the mild weather broke. The westerly breezes died and the wind moved round to the north-east. There was a night of bitter, sharp frost and the next day the wind freshened and with it came a hard, cold rain which swept down into the Taw valley in rolling, biting clouds and came racing up the Bullay brook in veil after veil of stinging, blinding squalls. In no time at all the woods and fields ran with water and the brook rose a foot before mid-day, swirling riverwards now in a brown flood carrying winter debris and litter with it. Birds and beasts hugged their shelters. The rooks clung to their wood and were tossed and drenched on their nests, sitting close to the first eggs which had been laid. In the fields the bullocks and sheep moved to sheltered corners and turned their backs on the icy downpour. In the farm-yard the only animals who enjoyed themselves were the few ducks the Duchess kept. They puddled about over the flooded cobbles
and shovelled and dabbled their bills in the mud around the banks of the swollen shallows where Fria bathed.

  Fria had no temptation that day to bathe. She sat on her beam, well back under the little pent roof and faced the cold onslaught of rain. Had she been an entirely wild peregrine she would have crept into the shelter of some small cliff crevice or tree hole and hidden from the weather. She sat there all day until just before the light began to go. There was a lull in the cold rainstorms and she flew down to the loft ledge and ate, tearing at a small rabbit which Smiler had left for her. Over the months she had learned slowly and awkwardly now how to pluck and find the breasts of the pigeons she was given and how to tear at the skin of rabbits and find her way to the succulent flesh of flanks and hindquarters.

  Her meal done, she flew back to her beam and watched the evening darkness flood the valley while the renewed rain, heavier than before, slashed down as though it meant to drown the world. The brook was so swollen with the run-offs from the valley that it had come up four feet in a fast storm spate, a coffee-coloured foam and scud-topped torrent that beat high against the arch of the small stone road-bridge and was already spreading over the lower parts of the pasture and, within an hour, was to be over the road by the bridge.

  When Smiler went out late that night to visit the barn, the rain battered against his storm jacket and the yard water swilled around his gumboots. He flicked his torch up to Fria and saw her huddled tight back against the barn wall into which the beam was set. For a moment or two he was tempted to creep up quietly into the loft and make a grab for her and put her back into the shelter of her cage, but it was a thought that died almost before it was born. In the darkness and rain he was sure to make a muff of it and, anyway, he knew that Fria would not be sleeping. She would be alert to any noise or movement from the loft. He did his round of the barn, came back across the flooded yard to check the stable doors and then went off to bed.

  He lay in bed, reading and listening to the rain beat at his window, and finally he slept.

  Outside Fria knew no sleep. She knew only the darkness peopled by darker shapes and the noise of the rain and the higher, steadier noise of the spate-filled brook racing away towards the Taw.

  An hour before first morning-light the weather changed. The steady downpour eased off, sometimes stopped for a few minutes, and then abruptly what wind there was backed to the north-west and began to strengthen. Within half an hour it was roaring straight in from the sea and the long reaches of the Atlantic, thundering over miles of countryside and howling down into the valley from the far slope in a full gale that stripped dead branches from trees, seized anything that was loose and tossed it into the air, plucked slates from roofs and tore great patches in the old thatch of cottages. It came now not in one long steady pulse of moving, turbulent air, but in great gusty spasms that would follow a lull, and sometimes – because of the vagaries of the land over which it poured – it would change direction suddenly.

  Her body plumage tightened down against its force, her eyes half closed as she faced the wind. Fria clung to her beam and there was a strength now in her legs and talons that held her firm against the sudden vortices and vigorous updraughts that swirled against the little pent roof above her. Now from this side, now from that, now from above and now from below, the violent, invisible tide assaulted Fria, and she held her place and would have gone on holding her place had it not been for the unexpected.

  The loft door which was open behind her was held in place by a small bar on its rear side which was hooked into a stout staple which had been driven into one of the cross-beams of the roof timbers that straddled the inside of the loft. The hook and staple were strong, but the wood of the cross-beam, though its heart was a solid core of oak, had an outer lay of ancient wood which had been bored and tunnelled by woodworm. Each time the wind roared into the loft and then was drawn back like a violently receding wave, the suction wrenched at the loft door, trying to draw it shut. And each time the door jerked under the vacuum pull of the wind the staple worked a little looser.

  Finally, as the first grey light of dawn struggled through the curtains of wind-driven rain, the gale smashed against the face of the bam, shaking its roof and timbers, soared upwards, howled around the loft and then was drawn back in a fierce outgoing eddy, violent with turbulence and power. The staple was pulled from its beam and the loft door was sucked back with a speed and savagery that would have killed anything which barred its path. The door crashed into its frame, shattering and bursting it outwards. Timbers and woodwork flew out into the air and the door, torn from its hinges, followed on the heels of an explosion of sound like a crack of thunder. The wind took the door, lifted it, and sent it slicing high through the air as though it had been a sheet of paper. (It was found two days later by Bob and Bill in a field of young wheat at the top of the hill road at the brow of the valley.)

  And with the door went Fria.

  The great crash of the door slamming into and through its frame six inches below and behind her was like the report of a cannon being fired close to her. She jumped with fear on her beam and half spread her wings in panic. The wind took her. Wings wide, her long tail-feathers spread, the wind sucked her up like a straw and she was whipped across the face of the barn and then swung round its corner. As though the gale were some living, malicious personality treating her like a new toy in its old, old game, it flung her skywards on a great updraught of eddying and coiling currents of air. She went up five hundred feet in a few seconds and, as she went, she was pitched and somersaulted out of control.

  A fully mature and experienced peregrine with all its powers could have ridden the wind and would have known better than to fight the impossible. A fully mature and experienced peregrine would never voluntarily have put to flight in such a wind and – if caught in one – would have gone to ground, to eyrie or to shelter as quickly as it could along the line of least resistance, stooping with the wind’s direction and flattening its line of dive long before sanctuary was too dangerously near.

  Fria had no such wisdom. In a panic she fought the air with her wings, and the wind took the resistance she gave and flipped her over and upwards in a ragged series of back-somersaults. When Fria righted herself she was a thousand feet above ground, though she could see little of it in the pale morning light because of the scuds of driving rain that charged across the land in rolling onslaughts.

  Fria wailed with panic, caught sight of the bam far below her, and automatically, since it represented shelter, half rolled, closed her wings and began to dive towards it as she had once come down from high above the rookery to her bathing-place. The manoeuvre did her no good at all. The power of the wind, rising almost vertically beneath her, held her where she was for a moment and then lifted her and rolled her over and over. She was swung up another five hundred feet, and the howling and roaring of the wind around her filled her mind with a greater panic.

  For some seconds the gale threw her about the sky in its updraught and then spewed her out of its ascending vortex into the gale-force main stream of its south-easterly path. There, from luck, chance, or some dim ancestral bodily memory that informed her muscles and wings, she found herself doing the right thing. With three-quarter-closed wings, her tail feathers tight in a narrow wedge shape, her head lowered, she found herself going downwind fast and slowly losing height.

  Her panic eased a little with the discovery, and she leaned on the back of the wind, increased her glide to a faster dive, and came down through the rain and saw the earth coming up to her fast. She saw trees, woods, fields, the dark shine of a flooded river and then, away to her right, the rain-darkened stonework of a building that reminded her of the barns and Bullaybrook Farm.

  Full of fear, but calmer now that she was under some sort of control, Fria leaned across the wind and wore down the gale in a fast, curving arc and – because she wanted to do it – her natural flight powers obeyed her and she began to flatten her descent though she did not slacken it much. She fl
ashed dangerously low across the tossing, waving tops of a wide expanse of fir plantation, dropped below its far edge into shelter from the gale, and found herself heading fast for the sprawling bulk of the grey stone building she had seen. She curved across the building ten feet above it and, now in some primitive control of herself, threw up sharply and then had to fight the upsurging momentum of her own body with rapid brake-beats of her wings. A few seconds later she landed clumsily in tall grasses fifty yards from the building. She sat, hidden in the wet grasses, the rain beating down on her. She sat, half crouched, her wings half spread, the rain striking down at them, and she wailed three or four times like a lonely, unhappy, lost child. But as with an untutored, immature child one emotion moves on erratic impulse rapidly to another, Fria felt sudden anger in herself. Her wailing ceased. At this moment, since her eyes never missed any movement, she saw something stir in the tall grasses a couple of feet from her.

  It was a little shrew that had been flooded out of its earth burrow. Fria jumped forward and angrily grabbed at it with her beak. Her powerful mandibles clamped across its tiny neck and killed it. For a moment Fria sat with it in her beak. Then with a toss of her head she jerked it from her.

  Smiler was full of dismay when he discovered that Fria had gone. The manner of her going was no mystery to him or to Bob and Bill.

  ‘That old door, Sammy, must have come out like a shell from a gun. But if she was up on the beam it wouldn’t have hit her,’ said Bill. ‘Don’t you worry. She’ll be back when she gets hungry.’

  But Smiler was far from content with that. Fria was not a homing pigeon. The gale could have blown her miles away, and the gale was still blowing. She might, perhaps, have been injured, broken a wing or something, and be somewhere in the nearby woods and fields. He decided that he just had to try and find her. If she were uninjured and wanted to stay free … well, that was all right with him. But if she were injured … well, then he had a duty to try and find her.