The Painted Tent by Victor Canning Read Free Book Online Page A

kept company, parted, and moved companionably together again as they ran northwestwards to Barnstaple and the sea.
    It was here one December night that Smiler, still restless after a day’s work and an evening’s study, made his way to what he called his ‘thinking-place’. This was the wide parapet ledge of the roof at the back of the house. He reached it by climbing the stout stems of an old ivy and, once ensconced, he could look down into the rubble-filled shell of the house or across the wilderness that had been a formal garden to the redbrick tower. Though his eyes and ears were always wide awake for the movement of a night bird or animal, the squeak of a field mouse or the scrape of a rat or rabbit, he would let himself go off into a reverie, imagining the times when all his troubles would be over, his father back and he well on the way to being a vet. Sometimes, a shadow amongst the other shadows of the old house, he would just sit and dream and later hardly know what his dreams had been. Now and then he would even go over in his mind all he was learning from Mr Samkin – but not often.
    He was sitting there this night, one of sharp frost, the fields already hoared and the stars blinking icily through the cold air, warm in his sweater and storm jacket, when he heard a noise come from the inside of the house which he had never heard before. From below him, but away near one of the empty front windows of the ground floor, he heard the sound of something metallic suddenly ring out. Just for a moment or two he was startled and felt the quick prick of fear tingle his scalp. Although there was always a friendly feeling about the place, despite its ruined and lonely state, his mind leapt to the thought of ghosts and strange spirits. But a moment later he forgot them because clearly to his ears came a decidedly human grunt and a man’s voice said crossly, ‘Next time bring a bugle and blow it.’
    Two men came into view, picking their way across the rubble below, clearly lit by the wash of starlight that flooded through the gaping roof. Moving quietly they crossed to the front window and paused there, surveying the stretch of wild pasture outside. The smaller of the two men carried a sack or a workman’s tool-bag slung over his shoulder and Smiler guessed that something had probably fallen from this to make the noise he had heard.
    The man with the tool-bag slipped through the window and was gone. The other man remained, as though waiting to watch that the other got unobtrusively away before he too left. One side of his face was clear in the starshine and Smiler saw that it was Jimmy Jago. For a moment his instinct was to call out to him, but he checked himself. He knew by now something of the ways of the Duchess and Jimmy and Bob and Bill. They were circus and Romany people and their ways were secret, even magic, and they lived by different rules than ordinary people.
    At that moment Smiler was glad of Mr Samkin who was making him read Kipling and remembered some lines from the last poem they had done –
If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the
    street,
Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie,
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go
    by!
    So, Smiler sat where he was, a shadow in the angle of a ruined parapet ledge. And below, Jimmy Jago waited like another shadow. Then, from outside, there suddenly came the double note of a wintering curlew, or so Smiler thought it was until he saw Jimmy move, drop something among the rubble to the left of the window, and then slide out into the night. He knew that it had been an all-clear signal from the other man, who, he felt, might easily from his appearance have been either Bob or Bill.
    To be on the safe side, Smiler sat where he was for fifteen minutes by his birthday watch – hands luminous – the present of Jimmy. He wondered, though he knew it was