Firefly Gadroon (10 page)

‘I borrowed it.’ Maud’s tone was quite cool and detached.

‘But why, dear?’ Mrs Hepplestone was in command but Maud was not going to be put under. ‘You knew I was seeking an expert to open it—’

‘I see you’ve found one.’

I went red. Bitterness from women always makes me do that. I wish I knew how to get myself cured. ‘I opened it for you,’ I said defiantly.

Maud’s eyes glinted. ‘So you did, Lovejoy. But the question is, did you detect some compartment that you are keeping quiet about?’

‘Don’t be daft.’ I rose, reaching for the cages, intending to show Mrs Hepplestone. ‘It’s too small—’

‘Then you won’t mind if I do this, will you, Lovejoy?’ Maud stepped the few paces to the fire and threw the cages on, watching my face. The crime took a split second. Don reached out for her, sensing quicker than me what she intended, but the cages were among the flames.

‘You stupid . . .’ I was scrabbling dementedly in the fire but Don and the gardener dragged me back. I ran round to windward, eyes streaming smoke and coughing like a veteran. The serf ran with me and rummaged with a rake but the heat pushed us off. The fire was one of those steady garden fires, hot centre and lopsided flames. Two gardeners were holding me still after a minute. I think I could just see the outline of the coal cage beginning to lick with flames and glowing. There was a curious sparking flash of colour, one single brilliant flash from it. Then it sank into the red hot core. Gone. The antique bamboo firefly cage must have burned instantly.

‘Well,’ Maud was saying sullenly to Mrs Hepplestone when I came to. ‘If Uncle’s box had nothing inside . . .’

‘It was a keepsake, Maud,’ her auntie was reprimanding frostily. ‘You had no right—’

‘Some keepsake! A piece of
coal
!’ with scorn.

‘That’s not the point, Maud, dear. And look how you’ve upset Lovejoy. He’s white as a sheet.’ Mrs Hepplestone’s hand took my elbow. ‘Do sit down. You’re quite shocked—’

I pulled away. No good staring at a bonfire all day, is it? Maud and Don were standing there so I stared at them instead. Don knows I can get nasty. He stepped back uncertainly. ‘That was none of my doing, Lovejoy.’

‘What’s all the fuss?’ The crazy bitch was actually sneering at Don. I admit he’s not much of a dealer but he’d never have done what she had. ‘You’re scared of him! Of
Lovejoy
!’ She pealed laughter.

‘You burned a genuine antique,’ I managed to croak at last.

‘It was mine,’ she said, ice. ‘None of your business.’

‘Oh, but it is.’ I try not to let my voice shake but it always does when white rage takes hold. I never sound convincing. ‘Antiques are everybody’s business.’

She laughed again. How I didn’t chuck her on the bloody fire I’ll never know, iron willpower I suppose. ‘Then I’ll hire you to buy Aunt Maisie a replacement, seeing you’re practically penniless. On commission, of course.’

I gazed at her, appalled. Some people just have no idea.

‘Maudie,’ I said into her eyes, ‘I wouldn’t piss on you in hell.’ And I turned away. Now that both cages were gone, literally in a flash, they could all get on with it.

I was plodding a mile on the road out of Lesser Cornard village when the familiar black Rolls came alongside. The chauffeur said nothing. I climbed in and got carried home silently but in style, to find the electricity and telephone were cut off for non-payment of bills. That’s our bloody government for you, selfish swines. But in my mind was wonder at a mob of antique thieves who hit Mrs Hepplestone’s manor house time and time again, but who missed a precious glittering suit of armour – worth a fortune – in the hallway.

I spent the last hours of daylight furiously trying to do the Reverse Gadroon on sheets of tin and finished up in a blind mania hammering the whole bloody lot into an unrecognizable mass, finally slinging the hammer against the wall in a temper. Then I went in and read by candlelight till so many shadows loomed on the walls that I snuffed it out and went to bed fast.

End of a perfect day.

And it really was – compared to the blood-soaked days that came after, though I didn’t know it then.

Remember where I said I’m resilient, never miserable for very long? Well, I take it back. I’d never felt so down. Maybe I sensed it was going to be one of the worst days of my life.

I deliver morning newspapers for Jeannie Henson when I’m broke. Not far, only round the village and pedalling like a lunatic to get round before my back tyre goes flat again. It isn’t as boring as it sounds. You’d be surprised how many people are up before cockshout. Farm men off to the fields, lads driving cows, women clustering for our first dozy bus, a gasping jogger or two. And, I thought jealously, people in well-lit warm-looking cottage kitchens making lovely meals for each other, seeing they could afford those luxuries.

Doing a paper lad’s job is embarrassing but it helps to keep me in the antiques game. I called on my way back for some bread and a tin of beans with my wages. The luscious Jeannie Henson was adding it up when our post-girl Rose came in for a packet of tea.

‘Fancy meeting you, Lovejoy!’ Rose said, mischievously glancing from Jeannie to me and back. She’s a pest.

‘Morning, Rose.’

‘I mean,
rising
so early to
serve
Jeannie!’ I went red and
mumbled something while Rose fell about at her sparkling wit. She put the money on Jeannie’s counter.

‘That’ll do, Rose.’ Jeannie was a bit red, too. ‘Time you finished your letters.’

‘I like your skirt, Jeannie. New, isn’t it?’

‘Get on with you!’

Rose slung up her postbag and went, grinning. ‘Make sure Jeannie pays you
in full
, Lovejoy. Andy’ll be back soon.’

I loaded my stuff while the doorbell clanked to silence.

Jeannie smiled apologetically. ‘That Rose. Your change, Lovejoy.’

I gazed at the money thinking, one paper round isn’t worth all that. ‘Er . . .’

‘No.’ She pushed the money in my pocket. ‘Lovejoy. Andy’s been on about an extra hand in the shop lately. Don’t misunderstand.’

‘Oh, I don’t.’ We assured each other of this for a minute or two. ‘Thanks, Jeannie. But it’s antiques, you see.’

‘I know.’ She pushed a wisp of hair off her forehead. ‘Well, look. They’re firing Wainwright’s fields today. It’s good money. Andy and Claude are helping. You’d get there in time.’

I thanked her, promising to do a free paper round.

‘When you get round to it,’ she added with a crooked smile that puzzled me. That explains how dawn found me pedalling along the river dykes between the fens while a blustery wind tried to blow me into the surrounding marshes. It’s not my scene, but a few hours’ work would keep me for a week, at my high rate of living.

I got to Wainwright’s fields and found where the straw lines lay. A small cluster of folk were already huddling on the farm’s rise, ready for firing the fields before the ploughing. Everybody helps out in some way hereabouts, harvest
in East Anglia being no time for differences. Even penniless antique dealers have been known to lend a hand, I thought bitterly. Andy and Claude the blacksmith were putting people’s names down and allocating us bits of the fields.

‘Morning, Lovejoy.’

‘Wotcher, Claude, Andy.’ I slung my bike under the hedge and joined them. The lovely Hepzibah Smith our choir mistress was there in her headscarf and gardening gloves, with three or four choristers in tow. They looked as glum as I felt. Wainwright was in the distance on an enthusiastic horse, ready to signal. Wainwright’s our local lord of the manor, a cheery, beery bloke I’m rather fond of. He’s famous for doing the exact opposite of what the government says. ‘Can’t go far wrong doing what they tell you not to,’ he often remarks in the pub when people ask what he’s playing at. Like when the Minister advised all East Anglia to automate and share combine harvesters, Wainwright sold all his that week. Now he uses these huge horses like in the olden days. ‘Saved my neck in the energy crisis,’ he told me, laughing. I wish there were more like him. A couple of stragglers arrived while we stamped and tried to keep from freezing to death. A whistle sounded somewhere signalling the start of the day’s jollity.

‘Glad you could come, Lovejoy.’ Claude grinned. He knows what I think of the countryside.

‘Men on the high fields,’ Andy called. ‘Women on the low. Places everybody. Get ready.’

Hepzibah gave me a long smile at my hatred of it all and we thinned out, one of us at two-stetch intervals across the harvested fields. I watched with some reluctance as the women went while Claude saw we lined up right and the distant mounted figure of Wainwright checked us in a slow wave. I made the traditional corn dolly, folding the
straws into a nice thick handle and sheaving its head up lovely and loose. There was a lad next in line to me, new to field work but vaguely familiar. I made his dolly and showed him the trick of coiling the bottom of the handle so you don’t get your hands burnt to blazes. People collect them as endearing knick-knacks but they have a grim history best not gone into. Antique examples are very costly – and unbelievably rare.

I asked the lad, ‘You’re Joe Poges’ youngest, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, mister. Alan.’ He waved the torch experimentally. ‘You’re Lovejoy. Saw you with Drummer. Dad said I could come as long as I did what the blacksmith says.’ I grinned. Catch any of us disobeying Claude, I thought.

‘Shouldn’t you be helping your brother Eddie with the oysters?’

‘Yes,’ he said, quite unabashed. ‘He has a big order today for the party on Mr Devlin’s boat.’ To go with the caviare and champagne, no doubt. That explained Devvo’s disappearing trick with Maud. They hadn’t vanished into thin air, just got on to a boat. I was about to enlarge on Devvo’s many charms when a horn blew and Andy came haring along with his torch flaring.

‘See you don’t go slow like last time, Lovejoy,’ Andy panted as I took fire from his torch.

‘Okay, okay.’ I’d deliberately let my lines of stubble take their time burning last year to give the rabbits and voles an extra escape route. So Wainwright had noticed after all, the shrewd old sod. You have to scuffle your feet about to make sure your straw lines don’t ignite before the rest from your torch’s drips or your name’s mud with the other burners.

Two blasts of the horn came now, and the whole line of us bent on the run touching torches to the straw lines. Smoke rose in an ugly cloud, greyish white. It’s a desperate business
because the flames take hold and sprint ahead of you. Joe’s lad got into difficulties and I had to run across and help him now and then. The great thing is to keep an eye across the other fields and see the wind’s not done the dirty by veering. The village women wear showy coloured headscarves easily seen but we’ve not the sense. The great trick is to look for bobbing torches where the other men are. Women keep in better lines, calling if one of them gets behind.

I don’t know if you’ve ever helped with field burning, but it’s a filthy game. It’s supposed to clean the fields for ploughing. A real laugh. You start clean at one end of lovely golden parallel piles of straw stretching over domed fields, and finish up kippered in acres of charred ash.

The odd thing was I wasn’t excited by it all even though it’s an exciting happening. Maybe I was in an odd mood. I don’t know. But the running fires caught my attention then as never before. They are erratic, sometimes pausing and seeming likely never to move, the next minute flinging flames along your rows until everybody’s yelling you are out of line. I kept looking at the flames, bright reds and golds against black soot. When Maud had chucked that marvellous little cage of carved coal into her aunt’s bonfire I had caught a flash of bright green so brilliant it had stayed on my retina a whole minute afterwards. But coal burns red and gold or smoky. Whoever heard of a piece of burning coal flashing green? Yet when I’d opened the cage and shone the pencil torch into the aperture there had been a distinct bluish
mauve
gleam at the bottom. No green. I caught Alan laughing at me.

‘Chucking earth won’t put it out, Lovejoy,’ he shouted.

‘Shut up, you cheeky little sod.’

He’d seen me dropping handfuls of pebbles into my burning rows. I tried twigs, a couple of buttons which had strayed on to my jacket, saliva, soil, various stones, a
hankie, half a shoelace and anything else I could rip off me and stay respectable. No greens. Assorted colours, but no greens. No mauve. Odd.

All that day we scurried on among the flaming rows of stubble. By the end of the afternoon I was knackered. A great pall of smoke was swirling seawards from the fields. I’d run miles up and down my rows, leaping the rushing fires which splattered and crackled. We did well. The women had been slow for once and came in for a good deal of ribbing when we assembled for teatime nosh. Wainwright fetches grub on a farm wagon. The women bring baskets and add to it. Andy and Claude take over while us burners rest. By a sheer accident I found myself sharing Hepzibah’s pie. I’m happy to report that Claude was half a mile off.

‘I hear you’ve been at Mrs Hepplestone’s, Lovejoy,’ she said innocently.

‘Me?’ I asked, wide-eyed. I can be innocent as her any day of the week.

‘With Maud, wasn’t it?’ she pressed.

‘Signed on for her ploughing team?’ Wainwright put in, to general hilarity.

I joined the chuckles though they were at my expense, assuming Wainwright meant that time I’d overturned one of his tractors years ago.

‘Claude will win again,’ Wainwright continued confidently, taking a chunk of cheese flan. ‘Best in East Anglia.’ He smiled at Hepzibah.

One of the sooty men spoke up with a headshake. ‘Ar; but only since Gulliver left the farms.’

‘Aye. Gulliver was a great champion ploughman.’ Wainwright rose to tap the cider barrel. ‘Word is he’s gone to the dogs.’

I listened to the idle country banter. These casual gossip sessions are fascinating if you’ve time, but I was beginning to feel decidedly odd, and it wasn’t Hepzibah’s pie. The smoke was ascending seawards. I turned to watch it. It would be hazing the estuary. Maybe it was the unaccustomed effort of the morning but I was uneasy. Or maybe it was the terrible night’s dreaming of shadows. Or being so close to Hepzibah’s lovely shape yet daunted by thoughts of being beaten senseless by her giant blacksmith. Maybe it was the pall of smoke. Fire. Perhaps the little firefly cage and its coal copy which Maud chucked on the bonfire seemed some sort of omen. I found I was on my feet heading for my bike.