The Painted Tent

The Painted Tent by Victor Canning Read Free Book Online

Book: The Painted Tent by Victor Canning Read Free Book Online
Authors: Victor Canning
first – a boy trying, as Bob or Bill said, to do a man’s work.
    Now, by the time he had finished his work, it was dark so that it was only at the week-ends he could get on his bicycle and explore the country around or go for long walks – which was what he preferred most to do. But, being young and not wedded to the habit of regular sleep, there were times when even after the day’s labour there was an itch in his limbs for movement. Sometimes, after checking the creatures in the barn at night, he would delay going back to bed and in moonlight or clear starlight go off for a tramp for an hour or two. It only took a little while for his eyes to become accustomed to the dark and he moved quietly and unobtrusively and was well rewarded. He soon found where the nearest badgers had their sett, knew the fox earths, and the trees where the kestrels and buzzards roosted. He was no longer startled when a barn owl ghosted silently by him over the short field-stubble. His hair no longer stood on end almost when a little owl shrieked suddenly. The dogs on the neighbouring farms knew him and now, when they scented him, never bothered to bark, and there were dozens of places where the pheasants roosted and it would have been easy for him – had he been a poacher – to raise a hand and take one. But Smiler preferred just to be out, to be an inhabitant of a night-time world which few other people knew. He knew the track that came down the hill by the farm which the travelling otters used when they came over country to reach the brook and so to the Taw, and the places in the clumps of cotton-grass where the jack-snipe bedded down. But the place he liked to go to most at night, particularly if there were a moon, was Highford House.
    Highford House was about a mile and a half from Bullay-brook Farm. To get to it Smiler would follow the brook up the valley for a while then cut up the valley side through rough pastures and woods, across a small lane, and through a long stretch of Forestry Commission land which overlooked the Taw valley. The house, which had been built in the latter part of the nineteenth century, stood on the top of a hill that flanked the west side of the river. Once it had been a splendid mansion standing in its own park and woodlands. Now it was derelict and only a broken shell of its former self. The roof had been stripped of its lead and tiles, the windows of the magnificent rooms were without glass, and all the grand oak staircases had been removed. The park had become pasture and the once well-kept gardens had been reclaimed by thorn, elderberry, and small saplings of beech and oak. No formal flowers remained but the primroses, cowslips and other spring flowers had come back, and in autumn it was a riot of willow-herb and balsam. Built of great greystone blocks, it straddled the hilltop with its back to the woods, stranded like the skeleton of some long-dead monster. The winding drive that led out to the road was overgrown and hard to pick out. The once carefully kept rides of rhododendrons and azaleas had become a jungle and a sanctuary for all sorts of birds and animals. The jackdaws, kestrels and owls knew its broken roof parapet and crumbling walls and nested among them. Badgers and foxes over the years had burrowed to the wide maze of cellars that lay under the fallen rubble, and grass snakes and adders in summer sunned themselves on the warm stone slabs. Just behind the house was a tall, red-brick tower, relic of some older house that had once crowned the hilltop. Parts of the stone stairway that twisted up the inside of the tower still remained. But after the first floor there were great gaps in it and anyone who moved inside was in danger of setting off falls of brick and stone from higher up the tower. It rose high above the old house and the wilderness of woods and derelict park and from its top miles of the curving valley of the Taw could be seen, a valley where road, river and railway

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