Flame-Coloured Taffeta

  Damaris nodded. Something ached in her at the thought of the vixen going but she understood what must happen almost as well as Genty. ‘Just a few more days, to be sure that her paw is quite healed and she can hunt for herself again. Then we meant to take her collar off and leave the door open.’

  Genty said something softly to the vixen in a strange tongue—Damaris thought it was probably Romany—and Lady raised her head and made a small sound of her own in response.

  ‘Love is never lost,’ said the Wise Woman, seemingly to no one in particular. She straightened up and looked once again at the wounded smuggler. ‘Sleeping like a lamb. Works quick, does ol’ Genty’s potion.’

  ‘Will he be all right?’ asked Peter, speaking almost for the first time.

  ‘Aye, but I’ll stay wi’ him through the night, just to make certain-sure.’

  Damaris looked at the young man’s sleeping face. It still seemed so grey and hollowed-out. ‘You promise?’ she said. ‘He—he won’t die?’

  Peter began, ‘Now look, Genty said he’d be all right—’

  But Genty also was gazing down into the young man’s face that looked somehow open and unshielded in his sleep. One hand fumbled up under the blankets to find the oilskin packet about his neck. ‘Aye, quite sure,’ she said, ‘when his time comes, ’twill not be here in his own land, but somewhere far off across the water. The Wildgoose mark of the Wanderer is on his forehead, an’ there’ll be no homecoming for him at the day’s end.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Peter said, when Damaris had unhitched the wet and patiently waiting Snowball, just as though she had not made her own way home from Joyous Gard often enough before now. Well maybe not so late into the dusk of such a wild night; and she was not sorry to have him trudging along beside her.

  The ruffled water of the rife gleamed mealy pale through the trees as she glanced back once to the gleam of lantern light in the cottage window; and the last rooks were flapping home, loud-voiced against the wind, to their roost in the vicarage elms.

  At the edge of Dinder Meadow, with the candlelight of Carthagena shining out across the fallow, Peter checked. ‘I’d best be getting back now—see you tomorrow, maybe?’

  They looked at each other in the last-deepening of the dusk, not speaking of what had happened. Maybe it was the kind of thing best not talked about, away from Joyous Gard. Then he disappeared back into the trees, heading the same way as the rooks, and Damaris rode on along the field dike and into the lane.

  Candlelight was streaming through the open doorway of the house, and there was a lantern bobbing in the steading yard in a golden halo of drifting rain; and just as she rode up to it, her father came out through the gateway, with Caleb and a couple of the farmhands behind him.

  ‘Here she is,’ he called back to Aunt Selina who was hovering in the house doorway, and then he turned his attention to Damaris. ‘Where in Heaven’s name have you been, Dimmy?’ (he was the only person who called her Dimmy, and he did it even when he was angry.) ‘Have you any idea what o’clock it is? We were just coming to hunt for you.’

  He lifted her down from Snowball’s back, none too gently. ‘All right, Caleb, take the pony. Now as for you, Miss—’

  ‘Not out there in the rain, John,’ Aunt Selina protested from the doorway. ‘Surely to goodness it can wait till we have the child indoors?’

  And Damaris found herself being run up the garden path and through the candlelit doorway, with her father’s hand clamped uncomfortably tight on her arm. She had known that there would be explanations to be made when she got home, and had wondered if she could say that she had been with old Mrs Farrington. That had happened more than once, but always by invitation, and Aunt Selina would only have to mention it to Mrs Farrington for the whole story to fall apart. But by the time she was confronted by her family in the parlour, she had come by a better story to tell. ‘I was with old Genty,’ she told them. That much was true, anyway. ‘My tooth started to ache again, and I was near her cottage, so I went in to ask her for something to make it stop; and she was there making a cordial for Granny Mason’s chest, and she let me stop to watch. It takes a long time to make, that cordial, and I did not notice how late it was getting. And I’m sorry, Father. Sorry, Aunt Selina.’

  She knew that Genty would not betray her or her smuggler; but she did hope Peter wasn’t telling some story that would contradict hers. They should have thought that out on the way home. Then she decided that Peter would be most unlikely to be having to tell any story at all. Apart from the Latin lessons, his family were used to him coming and going at all hours.

  Father seemed about to say something very terrible, while Aunt Selina hovered and clucked in the background. His eyes got worried and he breathed loudly through his nose, but he was never very good at dealing with his daughter; he might have been better with sons. In the end all he said was, ‘Selina, this is for you to deal with. Do what you think proper.’ And he strode off to his counting-house.

  ‘You’re a bad girl, and I should give you a sharp scold!’ said Aunt Selina, doing her best. ‘Such a bad girl, frightening us all like that! One cannot expect Genty—Oh dear, such a good creature, but not quite—I daresay she never thought to feed you—’

  Damaris thought quickly, and decided that a lie was the honourable thing. ‘Oh yes she did, Aunt Selina, we had bread and cheese and a sort of herb soup, and’ (if you were going to lie, you might as well do it properly) ‘and elderberry conserve.’ And then, for she was human and hungry after all, ‘but it was quite a long time ago.’

  ‘There’s some cold roast beef left from supper,’ said Aunt Selina, ‘and raisin tartlets. Go and get washed and comb your hair, child; oh dear, I can’t conceive what your mother would have said: you really do look as though you had been pulled through a furze-bush backwards!’

  Chapter 5: Tom Wildgoose

  NEXT MORNING DAMARIS woke before anyone else was astir—except of course Caleb and Dick in the stables, and Sim Bundy in the lambing fold who had probably never been to bed—and as soon as she had huddled some clothes on, she slipped down stairs and got busy in the larder and dairy. She was used to gathering scraps for Lady, but this was a more serious matter. It would have been easy enough if she could simply have cut a large wedge of cheese and another of game pie and taken a loaf from yesterday’s baking. But Hannah the old maid would certainly notice that, so she finished up by taking just a little of everything in sight, and bundling it all in a clean pudding-cloth, cold beef and raised pie and stale bread and cheese and a raisin tartlet all together. Then she filled a stoneware bottle with milk—like enough ale would be more welcome, but milk would be more suitable for someone with a bullet hole in him—and stowed the lot together with Lady’s scraps in her own egg-basket, slipped out by the kitchen door and hid it at the back of the brushwood pile. That safely done, she came in, carefully putting the bar up again and behind her, and creeping upstairs, was back in her own room in time to get up when the rest of the household did.

  The very first moment she could escape from Selina and her lessons, she was away, with the precious basket retrieved from its hiding place, safe under her cloak, heading back for Joyous Gard.

  The rain had passed in the night, and there were wet gleams of sunshine lancing through the woods, and the birds singing in the tone of freshly washed surprise that belongs to the first days of springtime. And when she reached the ruined cottage, the door, what remained of it, was propped half-open, and Lady, her chain loosed to full length again, lay along the threshold, nose-on-paws in the thin sunshine.

  Damaris knelt down beside the little vixen and began to feed her, fondling her dark-tipped ears and beautiful bracken-red neck the while, and talking to her very softly. ‘Soon now, but not just yet, just a few days more, till your paw is quite well again.’ And when the last scrap was gone, she gave her a parting touch under her creamy chin, and getting up slipped past her into the shadows of the ruined cottage beyond.

  Genty must have
long since gone off about her own affairs, and the smuggler was awake, and had heard her outside with Lady, for he was up on one elbow, his faced turned to the doorway as she came in. He was still very white, but he seemed to be properly back inside himself again, and greeted her with a somewhat crooked smile. ‘So here’s two of us on your hands to be looked after. I feel myself scarce in a fit state to be receiving ladies.’

  ‘You look to be much better than you were last night,’ Damaris told him. ‘I’ve brought you some food. Do you think you can eat?’

  He hitched himself higher onto his elbow to look down into the folds of the pudding-cloth she was by that time untying, and winced as the movement clawed at his wounded knee.

  She checked in her task. ‘Oh your poor leg, is it hurting very badly?’

  ‘Not so badly as it was,’ he said quickly. ‘Little Mistress, may I put this aside for a while? Your brother was here earlier, and I am well filled with bread and cheese.’

  ‘My brother? Oh you mean Peter.’ Damaris put the bundle on the flat log. ‘He’s not my brother, he’s Peter Ballard from the vicarage.’

  ‘And you?’ said Damaris’s smuggler.

  ‘I’m Damaris Crocker from Carthagena Farm.’ She smiled at him, glad that they were getting to an exchange of names. ‘This is our secret place.’ She hesitated a moment, afraid that he would laugh at her. ‘I call it Joyous Gard, after Sir Lancelot’s castle in the Morte d’Arthur. You know.’

  A smile flickered into the young man’s eyes. ‘I know.’

  ‘But Peter says that’s too flowery. He just calls it Tumbledown.’

  ‘Peter has no imagination,’ said the young man. Then he grew serious. ‘And you found me and got me here to your secret place.’

  ‘It’s not far, and we had my pony.’

  He frowned. ‘I can just remember—in a kind of fog. It seems I have to thank the two of you for my life. . . . You and the old woman who was here. . . .’

  ‘That’s Genty the Wise Woman. The bullet was still in your leg and we had to find someone to get it out. We didn’t dare risk the doctor because we don’t know how he feels about smugglers.’

  The young man’s brows flicked up. ‘And you know how Genty the Wise Woman feels about smugglers?’

  ‘She doesn’t—I mean—she only feels about people. People and animals and the woods.’

  There was a little silence; only Lady’s chain chimed faintly as she moved, and the light fluttered as the wind stirred the willow branches beyond the great hole in the thatch, and somewhere along the rife the sandpipers were calling. After the silence had lasted a while, Damaris said, ‘Now I have told you all our names, but I do not know yours.’ And then as still he did not answer, she added, ‘But maybe you don’t want to tell?’

  ‘I crave your pardon,’ said the young man, ‘that was very discourteous of me. My name is Tom: Tom—Wildgoose.’

  Damaris saw and heard the tiny hesitation, and remembered Genty’s words last night. ‘The Wildgoose mark of the Wanderer is on his forehead,’ the Wise Woman had said. Maybe he had not been as deep asleep as he seemed, or the words had reached down to him where he was, however deep. They looked at each other, the young man not asking to be believed, Damaris not believing, but knowing that she must not ask beyond the name he chose to give.

  ‘Tom Wildgoose,’ she said, and then, ‘Are you a sea-smuggler?’

  ‘Why should I be?’

  ‘I don’t know. Peter and I thought you looked more like a sea-smuggler than the land kind.’

  ‘I am flattered,’ said Tom Wildgoose. ‘The seamen always consider themselves the aristocrats of the trade—but the fact is that I am not a smuggler at all.’

  ‘Not a Customs House man? We thought it was one of them that shot you.’

  ‘It was. But I’m not a smuggler for all that. I was, as one might say, part of the cargo. The Fair Traders carry other things than brandy and lace.’

  ‘What things?’ Damaris asked.

  He did not answer at once; and when he did, his voice was becoming woolly at the edges as though with sleep. ‘Oh—spies, secret letters—news that never appears in the news sheets nor the Gentlemen’s Magazine.’

  She waited for more, playing with a dry brown frond pulled from the bedding bracken; but no more came, and when she looked up he was lying with his face turned away from her into the shadows. Well, sleep was probably the thing he needed just now, more than anything else, even food or someone to talk to. She sat quiet beside him for a little while. Then she got up, and stowed the food and milk in the square wall recess that had maybe once been a cupboard, well above his head where Lady would not be able to reach it, and pulled up the rugs that he had thrust down, seeing as she did so that his hand had gone back into the breast of his shirt and was closed over the oilskin packet on its grubby white ribbon.

  Lady was standing in the doorway on all four paws, as Damaris checked to stroke her head in going out. Tomorrow might be the time to let her go. Meanwhile she would be company for Tom Wildgoose.

  Damaris was in time for midday dinner in the big kitchen, which was just as well, for her father was not in the best of tempers. Young Mr Farrington from the Big House and some of his fine London guests that he was for ever having down to stay with him, had been out riding, and crossing the seaward-stretching tongue of Carthagena land had left a gate open so that some of the bullocks had got into the winter wheat. It was not the first time that it had happened.

  ‘Maybe you should be thankful they used the gate, John dear,’ said Aunt Selina, trying to soothe him down. ‘It is not as though they had broken through the hedge.’

  ‘’Twouldn’t have been the first time, if they had,’ growled one of the farmhands into his pease pudding. (All the farm ate together in the kitchen at midday, according to the old custom, except of course for the horsemen, who did not eat until the horses had been brought in from work a couple of hours later.)

  John Crocker was not to be soothed. ‘Him and his fine London cronies. You’d think none of them had ever seen a field or a field gate before!’

  ‘They’re young,’ said Aunt Selina, ‘just young and thoughtless.’

  ‘Old Mr Farrington was young once, but I don’t remember that he ever left gates open. He was a proper countryman, of course—knew about the working of a farm instead of leaving it all to his bailiff as his fine gentleman son does!’

  John Crocker snorted, and began to carve slices off the mutton as though he was carving them off young Mr Farrington.

  It was afternoon before Damaris managed to get away, the day after that, and just short of Joyous Gard she met Peter bound in the same direction. Genty was already there and pouring some sharp-smelling herb brew down Tom Wildgoose. The young man was flushed and restless, with eyes that looked too bright and too far sunk into his head.

  ‘Oh!’ Damaris ran in, forgetting even to greet Lady, and squatted down beside him, ‘Oh, he’s worse!’

  ‘’Tis the wound fever,’ Genty said. ‘’Twas a’most bound to come upon him. Now that you’re here, I’ll be off back to my own place, for there’s things I need. Do ’ee bide here while I’m away; I’ll not be long.’

  ‘Tell us what we’re to do while you’re gone, Genty,’ Damaris said.

  ‘Naught to do. ’Tis just that there should be someone here. Do the two of ’ee just sit outside where ye can hear him if he rouses, and give him a drink from the pipkin if he asks for it. But he’ll not rouse, wi’ the draught I’ve given him, and he’ll be best left to himself.’

  So in a little, when the Wise Woman was gone, they settled themselves before the sagging doorway in the March sunshine. Lady, full of household scraps, lay nose-on-paws between them.

  They did not talk much for fear of disturbing the wounded man sleeping restlessly in the shadows behind them. Damaris had already told Peter what little she had learned of Tom Wildgoose the day before, and anyhow, they were comfortably used to being silent in each other’s company, especially in the woods.
But after a while Damaris asked at half breath, ‘If he’s not a smuggler, what do you suppose he is?’

  Peter shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘He could be a spy.’

  Damaris felt a small sudden chill inside herself. ‘That packet round his neck? Oh Peter—no—’

  Peter was fondling Lady behind the ears, and his hand checked in the caressing movement until she muzzle-tipped his hand for more. ‘I don’t know,’ he said again, soberly, ‘but I suppose we ought to try and find out.’

  ‘No!’ Damaris protested, ‘I don’t suppose we ought to try and find out! Anyway we’re not at war with France, now!’

  ‘No, but we mostly are,’ Peter said. ‘They could be getting ready for the next time.’ Suddenly he turned and saw her anxious face. ‘Little goose! Let’s forget about it. There’s nothing we could do this afternoon, anyhow.’

  And the silence settled between them again. But in a little while something happened that pushed the question of whether or not Tom Wildgoose was a spy into the backs of their minds for the time being.

  Peter said very softly, ‘Look—over there beyond the big thorn tree.’ And following the direction of his eyes, Damaris saw a flicker of red-brown movement in the undergrowth. And as she held her breath, a few moments later, out from the tangle of furze and bramble and hawthorn trotted a big dog fox. Just for an instant he checked, muzzle raised to smell the wind, and the sunlight kindled his coat to the brilliant hot-coal colour that had always seemed to her to be the colour of joy itself.

  Only a moment the magic lasted, then he doubled back into the mazy bramble thicket, and was gone. ‘Oh-h!’ she whispered, ‘Oh he was beautiful!’

  Lady did not seem to have seen him, and still lay contentedly between them, nose on paws. But a minute or so later Damaris felt a kind of faint thrill running through the vixen; and at the same instant, Peter took his fondling hand away. ‘He must be upwind of us, and she’s getting his scent.’

  Lady came to her feet, and stood with up-raised muzzle in her turn, sniffing the wind, her head turned in the direction where the dog fox must be.