The Painted Tent (25 page)

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.

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.

First published in 1974 by Heinemann

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Copyright © Victor Canning, 1974

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