‘Don’t worry, boy,’ I began. ‘Trust in the Lord and…’ But the verse failed on my lips when he cowered at the sound of my voice, and I wondered at what he had witnessed that morning.
I returned to the tack room and put my head through the door. The room was clean and dry, the lime on the old stone walls still white and not speckled by mildew. An old ladder was propped against a wall, a single vest hung out to dry on the rungs, and I fancied that the shirts and trousers I had seen flung on to the fences had started that morning clean. On the floor was a rectangle edged in dust where the mattress had once lain, and a sodden blanket that trailed towards the door.
On the small windowsill was a little tin bowl, a milk can with some milk at the bottom that still smelt fresh, a loaf that was only just stale and some kind of herb with frilly green leaves that I took to be parsley planted into an old tin can. By the doorway were Sam’s boots placed neatly side by side, as if waiting to be put on.
I went back outside to the little plank bench by the pump and sat down heavily, resting my aching joints. None of what I had seen was Sam’s doing and, as I looked at the chaos that the constables had caused, I learnt a little more of what had happened that morning.
I felt that I could see the police car as it had swept in through the gate, its tyres cutting a crescent in the mud, and the doors flying open as the constables ran across the yard. I imagined the blanket dragged from the bed and then Sam in his nightshirt, pulled up between the constables without even the chance to put on his boots. I looked at the marks left in the mud – the circling footprints and skids – and I fancied that I could understand some of the tussle that must have followed the ambush, one so desperate that a brazier of hot coals had been toppled in the fray. Sam was only a small man but he was strong and wiry and would struggle like a rat in a trap. As Sir Howard had said, he had managed to escape from the clutches of three strong men.
Yet there were other things in the yard that could not be explained by an arrest attempt that was in any way fair or decent.
I imagined the mattress tossed between two excitable constables and then slung into a puddle, and the shirts and trousers grabbed from where they aired in the tack room and thrown on to the fences to deter Sam from returning. I knew that Roy could not have taken part in such destruction but it saddened me to think of him standing back and watching silently.
A second set of tyre tracks crossed the first and I pictured the car reversing, leaving the tack room and yard destroyed and empty, and the boy I had once known scared and alone in the cold of the morning without even any boots on his feet.
‘Oh, Sam,’ I said aloud. ‘I am sorry.’
I picked up the blanket and squeezed the mud from the trampled fabric, hanging it out to air on the stepladder. I fetched a pair of trousers from the fence and wound it round my hands as I righted the brazier, then I lifted the mattress from the mud and wrestled it back inside the tack room, leaning it up against the wall, so that it would get some of the last heat from the brazier. I took the little potted plant under my arm and put it on the bench by the pump, together with the loaf and milk can. Then I shut the doors behind me so that rain would not blow in.
I tore a couple of pieces from the loaf and put them in the little tin bowl, pouring the milk carefully on top of them. Then I approached the dog, holding the bowl out in front of me and he strained towards it, whimpering, as I set it down in front of him.
‘Here, boy,’ I said gently as his tongue lapped the metal so hard that it rattled against the wall. ‘I know what you must have seen here but do not worry.’ I reached up to the metal ring and started to unknot the rope. ‘I have a nice warm cottage not too far from here. You can come and live with me and I can walk you on the green. You shall have so much more than bread and milk – I can make us beef stew and dumplings, with parsley. You can sit with me by the fire and we shall keep each other company and neither of us shall be lonely anymore and…’ But as I loosened the last knot, the rope snapped through the ring and the dog bolted through a hole in the fence.
My thoughts of the dog with his head in my lap in front of a glowing fireplace had been the first happy thoughts I’d had for a long time. But, as I watched him disappear over the common, the rope trailing behind him, I realised that my plans had been nothing but false hopes. Now I was back in the real world again, and it was cold.
5
The rain started just as I left Waldley Court and I regretted my decision to take Sam’s little potted parsley home with me as I feared it would slow my journey. I was sad at how little I had been able to help Sam and, after the dog had bolted, I felt that minding the parsley was the least that I could do for him. I hoped that I would be able to give the plant back to Sam when he returned – to a tack room that was warm and tidy with freshly washed clothes airing on the ladder and the dog curled up on the dry mattress – but it was not an easy thing to hope for when I could not get the picture of his ransacked home out of my head.
I had thought of cutting back across the common on the way home but now I feared the wet fronds of bracken licking at my stockings and mud seeping through my shoe leather. It would be quicker to take the cart track, but that would mean passing by the Blood Elms – a place I did not like to go.
I turned up my collar and kept my head down, walking along the track as fast as my stiff joints would allow and trying not to think of what I had seen at the stables. I regretted setting out that morning. Such a journey was a foolish thing for a lady of my age to undertake and I feared every breath of damp air bearing pneumonia or bronchitis.
By the time I approached the elm thicket I was wet through, but the sight of the trees’ low canopies made me hesitate. There were no more than ten stunted elms, nestled together in a little hollow next to the track, their trunks bent by the wind and their branches reaching low across the earth. Their twisted roots clutched at the thin soil, foxholes sunk between the knots of wood. It was the kind of place that you could come upon suddenly, the leafy branches hiding all from sight and casting a deep shadow over the track.
I forced my tired limbs forward, determined to pass the thicket quickly, but when I glanced up, I saw a figure sheltering among the branches – a woman, her arm extended over the track and her palm facing upward as if she was feeling the weight of the rain.
When she saw me, she muttered a greeting.
I nodded back for I feared that I did not have the breath to answer her. I took a few more steps but the woman did not look away and suddenly I realised the reason for her stare – I was an elderly lady who was clearly out of breath, carrying a heavy potted plant, with mud on my stockings, and I thought that if I continued into the rain she might think me insane. I forced a polite smile and took shelter under the trees, sitting down heavily on one of the low branches.
The woman raised her eyebrows because any comment on the weather would have been too obvious, I thought. She was a plump woman only a little younger than myself, and wore some kind of dark uniform, her hair drawn back from her face in quite a severe style that was not in fashion and probably never had been.
‘Are you here for the girls?’ she asked.
‘The girls?’ I echoed.
She pointed to the little can I was holding. ‘Are you leaving the plant here in their memory?’