The Painted Tent

by Victor Canning

  The next morning in Bristol a letter arrived for Johnny Pickering before he went off to work. Inside was the familiar sheet of paper and on it was written: THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO AVOID THE DARK DAYS AHEAD.

  His father, sitting across the table from him, saw the paper in his hand and said, ‘ What’s that, then?’

  In surly tones Johnny Pickering said, ‘ Never you mind. It’s my business.’

  His father, bad-tempered and with a headache from too much beer the previous night, leaned across the table quickly and gave him a smack on the head which sent Johnny from his chair to the floor.

  ‘Add that to it, then,’ said his father.

  It was a good beginning to the week, thought Johnny as he cycled to work. But, anyway, he was used to taking the odd clout from his father and he certainly wasn’t going to let the letters upset him. Yet, tell himself what he may, he was upset by them. Knowing what he did about Smiler he couldn’t see them as being his style. Somebody else was doing it. Suddenly the alarming thought struck him that maybe the police suspected him and someone at the station was trying to frighten him into telling the truth. He was so absorbed by this thought that when a small van drew up rather sharply ahead of him, although he braked hard and in reasonable time, his front wheel hit the back of the van and was too much buckled for him to ride it. As he dragged his bicycle to the pavement he remembered the words in one of the letters: NOTHING WILL GO RIGHT UNTIL YOU ARE RIGHT WITH YOURSELF.

  And at the breakfast table at Albert and Ethel’s house, Ethel, in her dressing-gown and with her hair in curlers (a sight which Albert could not bear but had to), said ‘Well, have you decided yet what to do about that letter for Smiler?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘But you’ve got to. It’s important.’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to do? Put an advert in all the papers all over the country? Have an S.O.S. broadcast on the radio. Will Samuel Miles, wanted by the police, please contact his brother-in-law where he will hear of something to his advantage. I don’t think. Not with a copper waiting on the doorstep.’

  ‘Oh, sarky, aren’t we, this morning,’ said Ethel.

  ‘Sorry, luv,’ said Albert, who was really a nice-natured man. Monday morning was always bad for him because he was suffering from Sunday when he was made to go to chapel twice a day and tidy up and dig in the small garden which he hated and then no television in the evening because Ethel didn’t hold with it on a Sunday.

  ‘Well, something’s got to be done,’ said Ethel practically. ‘Nobody’s going to turn up out of the blue, ringing our doorbell to tell us where he’s hidden himself.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Albert.

  And on that Monday morning a prisoner at Princetown Gaol was marched out with a working party under the guard of warders to do quarrying on the moor close to the prison.

  He was a tall, solidly built man in his forties. He had short, sandy hair, blue eyes, and a tanned craggy face creased with good-humoured lines. Cheerfulness was second nature to him and self-reliance went with it. Bitterness he had known once but it had been burned from him.

  He looked up at the rain-washed sky and, because he had always lived an open-air life, sensed at once the quarter the wind was in, knew from the look of the day whether it would shift and what changes might come. On this morning he knew for sure that the likelihood of there being a sudden, cloaking Dartmoor mist was something he wouldn’t bet a farthing on.

  He walked along in the ranks of prisoners and watched the long slopes of the moor, caught the white-barred flick of a snipe’s wings as it rose from a ditch, and half-whistled, half-hummed a tune to himself. The man at his side – one of the trusty few who knew his secret – winked at him and said from the side of his mouth, ‘ No excursion ticket for sale today, Maxie.’

  Maxie winked back and grinned. Life was long, life was earnest, and patience was a good thing – but best of all, he told himself, was faith. His day would come. The mist would come and all he would need would be a hundred yards start, and he would be away towards the high tors he knew like the back of his hand, and streaking like a hare for freedom. And why shouldn’t he? A man had to do what his heart and his nature told him was just. But justice was one thing and the law was another. He grinned to himself and then, seeing a wood pigeon in flight across the road ahead, he fell to thinking of the time when he had been a very young man and had kept pigeons … brown and white and black and white West of England tumblers that fell through the sky in a madness of whirling wings and somersaults that cut the air with a sound like tearing calico … the beauties, the little beauties …

  And that morning Smiler sat at breakfast without much appetite. The Duchess, with Scampi on her lap, eyed him over the table and knew exactly what his trouble was and, because she was a good-hearted woman, though easily severe when she felt it was wise, she said, ‘If you square it with Bob and Bill and work all day next Saturday, you can take today off to look for that blessed Fria of yours.’

  ‘Oh, thank you very much, ma’am. I would like to do that.’

  Smiler had no trouble arranging things with Bill and Bob because more than once he had done them good turns. So once more he set off on his bicycle with his map and his glasses, and as he rode along he settled his plan of campaign if he should be lucky enough to find Fria. He didn’t want to capture her. All he wanted was to know where she was and then keep an eye on her. She was free now and he had a good idea that hunger would force her to find some kind of food for herself, even if she had to scavenge for it. All he wanted was to be on hand while she learnt to look after herself and – if it was a slow process – to be able to leave her a dead rabbit or wood pigeon now and then to keep her going. On no account, he told himself, was he going to take over full provisioning because that would be a mistaken kindness. Fate had set her free and now – if she still survived – she would have to learn the hard lessons of a life of liberty for herself. If she had been brought up naturally in her parents’ eyrie, they would have done the teaching for her. He knew, for instance, from his reading, that the great skill of a peregrine stooping vertically from hundreds of feet on to its flying prey, slashing past it and killing it with the rear talons of one or both feet was something which had to be taught by the parents. Maybe, if Fria survived long enough, she would learn that great manoeuvre of speed and timing for herself.

  As he rode through the countryside, stopping now and then to sweep the landscape with his glasses, Fria was already learning some lessons for herself.

  She woke at first light In the grey dawn she flew up to the tower-roof and drank some water. The rains had gone, but the sky was overcast with low, heavy clouds that broke now and then to show patches of blue sky from which a watery sun briefly bathed the land in its light. Her thirst satisfied, Fria went back to her recess. Hunger was a tightening knot inside her. On the bricked face of the recess a brief movement caught her eye. It was a small spider which had crept to the mouth of a funnel-shaped web it had made in a crack between the bricks. Its movement brought a quick reflex action from Fria. She stabbed at it with her beak, caught, and swallowed it. She moved around the recess and found another spider which she caught and ate. The acts of catching and eating stimulated her. Within the next half hour she had taken four wood lice that had moved from under the dead ivy leaves which littered one corner of the recess. The amount of food was negligible and the taste faintly disagreeable. Having, for the moment, exhausted the insect life of her recess, she walked to the edge and looked down into the garden. After a few moments she flew down and settled in the damp, overgrown tangle of grasses and dead bracken. She began to stalk slowly through this miniature jungle, her eyes alert for any movement. She took a worm that writhed, half-dead, at the edge of a puddle and ate it. She spent an hour scavenging through the wild garden, took three more worms, four spiders, and a fat dor-beetle. The knot of hunger in her slackened a little, but not enough to come anywhere near satisfying her. Because she was a bird of quick tem
perament the slow process of feeding irritated her to the point where once or twice she gave an angry call … yek-yek-yek.

  She launched herself and flew up twenty feet and began to quarter the ground, hovering like a kestrel. Her move into the air sent a thrush that was cracking a snail on a loose masonry slab by the old house flying fast and low into the cover of a thicket of dead old man’s beard which trailed in a tangled mantle over a stunted hawthorn bush. Fria, alert and reflexes working sharply, went after it like a sparrow-hawk. But she was far too slow and the thrush found sanctuary easily. Fria soared up a little at the end of her chase and hovered briefly over the hawthorn and its creeper tangle. A pair of magpies coming over the roofless house saw her, and recognized the menace of her shape and poise, sharp-tipped wings flicking, tapping at the air as though they quivered in some fine ecstasy. They dived for the cover of the dark labyrinths of the overgrown rhododendrons by the old driveway.

  Fria beat up to the top of the tower and settled there above her recess. She sat there for ten minutes slowly bobbing her head up and down irritably as though she were giving herself a good talking to. She saw the movement of dozens of birds in the great arc of her vision, caught the black and white fidgeting of a dipper on a post down by the flooded river and, once, the streak of blue fire as a kingfisher went fast downstream. She watched a handful of people waiting on the platform at Eggesford Station and the movement of sparrows quarrelling on its roof. Then, much nearer, in the rough pasture which had once been well-kept parkland, she saw something move at the base of a large chestnut tree. Its lower trunk fanned out in sloping grey buttresses and the ground around was bare and mud-trampled by the feet of sheltering cattle. Fria’s eyes focused sharply. A wood pigeon was sitting on one of the exposed roots of the tree. Fria saw its eye colour, saw each feather and the dull burnish of its breast and – though it meant nothing to her – a dried red stain on its gorget, close to the lesser coverts of its right wing. A farmer shooting the previous day had winged the pigeon and there were three or four pellets lodged in the shoulder girdle of its right wing. The bird could fly but only clumsily.

  Fria recognized the bird. She knew the white patches either side of its neck and the white bars on its outer wing coverts as it flapped awkwardly from the root to the ground. She had been fed pigeons in the barn and she knew their flight from her beam-post above the loft. And she knew the succulence of their flesh. The hunger drive in her took her into the air. Maybe the ancestral memory of the peregrines’ age-old craft operated independently in her. She slid away down wind in a half circle and then came back into the wind and with swift wing-beats rose and gained height. She flew fifty feet above the wood at the rear of Highford House. Down wind of her now, three hundred yards away, the pigeon moved slowly over the trampled ground close to the chestnut tree.

  Fria gave three or four quick beats of her wings and went down wind fast in a long shallow stoop. A jay shrieked a warning to the world as she went over. A rabbit at the edge of the wood flattened to the ground. Fria knew nothing except the pulse of air against her as she gained speed and the figure of the pigeon growing in size as she neared it. She swept into the shadow of the tree and, although the pigeon saw her late and jumped clumsily into flight and there would have been no escape for it from an experienced peregrine, she made a complete mess of her first real attempt to take food for herself in flight. An experienced bird would have come down with its legs extended forward and tight up against its breast, the three front toes of each foot drawn up and the long rear toe daggering below, and an experienced bird would have swept close over the pigeon’s back, and the deadly rear toes would have sliced into the bird. The peregrine’s wings would have gone up at the moment of strike and the pigeon would have died of shock or its wound.

  Fria, when she was within three yards of the pigeon, dropped her feet so that she could grab the bird with them. The movement slowed her flight and threw her off line. She grabbed at the bird as it went away below her, hit it clumsily on the left wing with a harmless, already clenched foot, and tumbled it over on its side in the air.

  They came to the ground together in an untidy, flapping whirl of wings. The pigeon jumped clear and, flying low and awkwardly with its damaged right wing, headed across the pasture towards the woods. Angrily Fria went after it, flying fast and easily overtaking the injured bird. She grabbed at it again and missed as the pigeon swerved in panic and tried to gain height. But its damaged wing had no power to take it up. It skittered across the grass, hit the ground and rolled over. Fria followed and, raising her wings like a kestrel, dropped on to it.

  The pigeon flapped its wings and struggled. Fria sat on it, grasping it with her strong talons, and then, instinctively to still its movements, she stabbed at the bird’s neck with her beak. More by luck than design, she got a hold of the pigeon’s neck and, with an angry twist of her head, broke it and the pigeon died. Fria had made her first kill.

  She ate it where she had killed it, out in the open so that she would have been aware of the approach of any danger. From the pigeons she had been given in captivity she had learned how to pluck and plume them, tearing out the breast feathers. Sometimes in the past she had plucked them properly and sometimes had only made a token show before tearing at the carcase meat. Today, impatient with hunger, she plucked and ate and then plucked again as the pigeon lay on its back and she held it steady with her feet. She ate for more than half an hour. When she had finished the pigeon lay on its back in the wet grass, its wings outspread and untouched. The flesh had gone from its breast and legs. Its back was untouched, and the flesh had been cleaned from the neck. It lay there cleared down almost to the framework of the bird it had been.

  Gorged, Fria rose at last from her kill and flew heavily and leisurely back to her tower and then sat in her recess and cleaned and preened herself. The experiences, clumsy and fortunate, of her first kill passed into her memory and the small store of her natural knowledge was increased.

  Smiler was lucky. His last place of call before going home was, as usual, Highford House. This time he went to it along the road that crossed the Taw by the old stone bridge at Eggesford and climbed the hill below whose crest lay Highford House. He pushed his bicycle along the lower drive that ran back from the hill road. Clear of the trees, the drive, grass-grown now, and almost vanished, crossed the pasture which had once been the park.

  The light was going fast, but the patch of loose plucked feathers and the spread carcase of the pigeon stood out sharply a few yards to the right of the drive. Smiler crossed to it and knelt down. There was an immediate excitement in him. It was the first remains of a peregrine kill he had seen in the wild, but he had no difficulty in recognizing it because he had cleared such carcases away in the barn after he had fed Fria. He was delighted that Fria had to be around here somewhere and that she had – no matter how – managed to make a kill. From the way the bird had been stripped he knew that Fria must have been very hungry. In her greed she had even nipped out small pieces of the breast bone.

  He gathered up the pigeon’s remains and stuffed them down a rabbit hole. Left in the open, although it might have been scavenged by fox or rat, it might also be seen by a keeper. For the moment – if Fria was lodged in the vicinity – he was not keen that any keeper or farmer should find evidence of her presence.

  He hurried to the old house, climbed to his vantage point and in the fading light swept his field-glasses around the close neighbourhood. He scanned the woods and the isolated tree clumps and found nothing. Most peregrines, he knew, were not keen on lodging in trees so he gave the top storeys of the old house and the red-brick tower a careful survey, but he could find no sign of the falcon. Actually, he had his glasses on the ivy-screened, bramble overspill of the recess for a few seconds, but in the dim light the opening of the recess was no more than a broken patch of brickwork. Fria, bodily content, and well back in the recess, saw him as he crouched on the top parapet of the old house.

  Smiler finally gave u
p his search as the light went. He returned to the farm, but he said nothing about finding the kill. He wanted to find Fria before he said anything to the Duchess or Bob and Bill. He could not get the next day off to search for her again. He would have to wait for the week-end. In his diary that night he confided a small doubt that had risen in his mind.

  He wrote:

  … of course, until I’ve actually spotted Fria up there I can’t be sure. The kill might have been made by some other peregrine. Mr Samkin tells me that there still are a pair or two out on the cliffs near Ilfracombe. But would they have come so far inland to make a kill. Hope not. So roll on Sunday when I can have another look for her. I’d go up at night with a torch but that might be seen by people.

  After Mr Samkin’s tonight, that Trevor Green was waiting outside to take Sandra home. Her face! If looks could kill he’d have been a gonner.

  During that week the education of Fria progressed. She caught her first field-mouse from a hovering pitch like a kestrel, her talons clamping on it through the grasses and killing it immediately. She took a starling which was running up and down the roof parapet of the old house prospecting for a nesting-site by launching herself downwards from the tower top. The starling saw her coming, panicked and, instead of diving for cover, flew upwards. Fria flicked her wings rapidly three or four times, increasing the power of her shallow stoop and then, with her momentum, threw up easily, rising almost vertically under the bird, and half-rolled and grabbed it from underneath with one foot. As she flew back to the tower she took its neck between her mandibles and broke it, the tooth in her upper mandible which fitted into a notch in the lower, biting through to the vertebrae and snapping the bird’s spinal cord. She was learning fast and every day discovering her latent powers. But she was still far from the perfection and smooth co-ordination of muscles, strength and deliberate intent which could take an adult peregrine at fifty or sixty miles an hour in level pursuit and at over a hundred miles an hour coming down in a vertical stoop from a height.