Long Summer Day (40 page)

‘Well, I’m damned if I’ll let you and that’s final,’ he said, and Rudd thought, ‘Maybe he’s beginning to learn how to handle her! Well, good luck to him, but this is no place for me,’ and he made as if to go but she called sharply, ‘Don’t leave, John! That wouldn’t be very brave of you!’, and he stopped, his neck reddening, and said, ‘Surely this is something you have to settle between yourselves, Mrs Craddock?’

‘Fundamentally, yes,’ she said, ‘but not simply as regards Potter’s fate. There will be other issues like this and Paul needs your advice as much as mine. You’d better say exactly what’s in your mind.’

‘Very well,’ he said, turning back, ‘what’s in my mind is clear. I think Paul is complicating the issue and you’re sentimentalising it! Potter caused a man a serious injury while that man was doing a job he was paid to do. It doesn’t matter to me who that man was, or who was paying him. The law is there to protect every one of us and Potter, who derides the law, got himself into this mess and must now take his chance with the magistrates! We’ll do all we can to get him off lightly and I think Paul is right to want to provide him with a lawyer but beyond that I wouldn’t go an inch, not for my own sake, or the sake of good relations hereabouts.’

She said, looking at Paul now, ‘Well, there’s your answer! You’d best do as John says, Paul.’

He looked at her appealingly. ‘But you still don’t agree with us, do you? You still think it a shabby trick on our part to deny him a sporting chance?’

‘He’s had one sporting chance and if it were left to me I’d give him another, that’s all!’, and she left the room.

Rudd said, as her steps had ceased to sound in the hall, ‘It’s a pity you told her, Paul.’

‘I didn’t,’ he said, ‘but I’m glad she knows. Better this way than have her thinking we said nothing until it was all over.’

‘Does she know where he’s hiding?’

‘Yes, Ikey told her. Are you suggesting I should lock her up?’

‘You might do worse,’ Rudd said, trying but failing to make it a joke. ‘I’ll take a stroll there right away and tell Potter to come here after dark, shall I?’

‘Yes, and tell him I’ll leave the garden door of the office open.’ He paused and the agent saw that he was still not wholly convinced and that Grace’s attitude had shaken him badly.

‘You’re doing right, Paul,’ he said, ‘and I believe you know that in your heart.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know it, John, but it’s hard on both of us to have to face this situation so soon. It was working out, John, in spite of your misgivings and you did have them, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Rudd said, ‘I did and it is a pity because I was beginning to lose them, Paul. I should like you to believe that,’ and because he felt his presence only increased the man’s unhappiness he went out, turning east along the terrace in the direction of the woods.

VI

S
mut’s case came before Mr Justice Scratton-Forbes, at the Devon Quarter Sessions in mid-July after he had appeared before the Petty Sessional Court at Whinmouth, where a procession of witnesses went into the box to testify against him. Kitchens had promised Rudd he would do his best to limit the charge to one of assault whilst trespassing in pursuit of game, but either Kitchens was a broken reed, or the authorities were otherwise inclined, for in the end Smut was charged with wounding so as to cause actual bodily harm and only the original charge of attempted murder was withdrawn. Yet Paul did not give up hope that something might be done to improve the situation when the trial opened. It was only when he saw the judge, a dry, withered nut of a man, that he realised that Grace had been right after all and Smut’s chances of leniency were slim. There was so much to be said on one side and hardly anything on the other and the same procession of Gilroy witnesses, five in all, swore to Potter’s murderous assault upon a man seeking to restrain him from carrying away the buck. The inevitable distortion of facts made Paul feel slightly sick, for it was soon clear the Gilroy team had been carefully rehearsed, and although the barrister he hired for the defence did his best to present another aspect of the case, arguing that Smut acted in panic when about to be assaulted by armed men, the story sounded lame in the dock, where Smut cut a pathetic figure, far removed from the spry young rebel Valley folk recalled. A month of soul-searching in his cave, followed by another month’s confinement awaiting trial, had cut him down to a bewildered young man with frightened eyes and the tan fading from his cheeks, clearly at a loss to know what was going on around him. Under his barrister’s probing he told the truth in so far as he knew it and the testy little prosecutor did little to shake him, so that for Paul at least a true picture of the incident began to emerge at last—that of a man gripped by fear and fighting back with the first weapon that came to hand before taking refuge in flight. The picture was confirmed when Rudd leaned towards Paul and whispered, ‘He’s right, Paul! They’re after his blood! If things had turned out otherwise it would be Kitchens and his mob in that dock!’

The case excited a great deal of local interest and during the period the jury were out Paul saw Meg Potter and went across to her, against Rudd’s advice.

‘I should like to say how sorry I am about this business,’ he said, ‘and that I won’t hold it against Smut if he comes back to the Valley,’ and she replied, to his astonishment, ‘It was in the cards and the only way he could have run contrary to ’em was to run faster! He couldn’t bring himself to do that, Squire. There’s less gypsy in him than I reckoned on. A real gypsy would ha’ run and kept on running, but the Potters baint gypsies, except mebbe my youngest girl, Hazel. They others, they’re their father’s seed, although time was when I thought differently o’ Smut!’, and she walked away with her slow, stately gait, without waiting for the verdict. It was as though, by allowing himself to be netted, Smut had sacrificed her sympathy.

The verdict, as foreseen by everyone, was guilty and Mr Justice Scratton-Forbes settled down to indulge himself in a little homily before pronouncing sentence. Dry and crisply righteous phrases issued from his lips like a shower of darts … ‘malice in your heart’ … ‘despoiling property with the heedlessness of a savage’ … ‘must be taught a severe and lasting lesson …’; the sentence was five years’ penal servitude so that the limit of Grace’s prophecy had been achieved.

Paul, and Rudd too, were appalled. Paul had resigned himself to eighteen calendar months and the agent would have been relieved to have seen the poacher go down for two years, but five seemed to them a savage and unwarranted penalty and others presumably shared their view for there was a murmur of indignation in the court that was instantly repressed by the ushers. Paul said, as they sought the castle yard, ‘Until now I never really believed there was one law for the rich and another for the poor, John!’ and Rudd replied. ‘Well, perhaps we ought not to be shocked. Scratton-Forbes is a big landowner himself and we ought to have pressed for a trial outside the county. At the worst he would have got away with three years.’

He glanced at Paul shrewdly, knowing that the young man’s mind was not entirely monopolised by the memory of Smut Potter’s blanched face, as he had stumbled from the dock with a policeman at each elbow but was trying to adjust itself to the prospect of facing his wife waiting at home. He said, slowly, ‘I still think you did right persuading him to come in, Paul, and this doesn’t really change things you know. The law is far from perfect, but it’s the only law we’ve got and without it where would any one of us be? You’ve got to make your wife understand that, for if you don’t then what you’re trying to achieve back there won’t amount to much. Would you care to see Smut before he’s sent off? I expect it could be arranged.’

‘Yes,’ Paul told him, gruffly, ‘I owe the poor devil that,’ and Rudd went back into court, leaving Paul to look down on the city basking in the afternoon sunshine. John’s reassurance regarding the rightness of his decision brought him no comfort. There was, he realised, a direct link here between his decision to coax Potter out of hiding and his own tenuous relationship with Grace, who seemed only to respect him as long as he was waving a rebel banner under the noses of authority. She would, he felt sure, back him every inch of the way if he resolved himself into a kind of Sorrel Valley Robin Hood, contemptuous of even such social reforms as those advocated by progressives like Grenfell. She was really, he reflected, a kind of anarchist who welcomed turmoil but he had no wish to live like that. He favoured steady, ordered, constitution progress, where tolerance and education for the underprivileged promised hope of justice and stability but she had no faith at all in this dream. Her sympathies were with people like the Pankhursts, still raising hell up and down the country and it was on this cleavage that their relationship, fragile from the beginning, seemed likely to founder, for what was that she had said when he told her Smut Potter had agreed to give himself up? ‘I was badly wrong about you, Paul. You aren’t a rebel at all and could never be! That scene with Gilroy and Cribb was just a flash in the pan. Perhaps you knew I was listening and hoped to make an impression!’ He thought it a bitter thing to have said and realised now that she regretted it but they had been strangers to one another ever since, with Grace resisting all his attempts to put this stupid business into its correct perspective and stop her using it as a looking-glass held in front of his character.

John came back and said they could spend a few minutes with Potter. He looked around for Meg but she was not to be seen, so they followed the police sergeant down a long, gas-lit corridor under the court and were shown into a waiting-room where Smut sat with his hands on his knees, wearing the same dazed expression as he had worn throughout the trial. His pale blue eyes kindled when he saw Rudd, whose approach to him had always been that of a jocular schoolmaster, dealing with a wilful but not unlikeable scholar. ‘Well, it was a lot more’n I reckoned, Mr Rudd,’ he said. ‘It was like I tried to explain, they’d ha’ done fer me if I hadn’t got one in first!
You
believe that, dornee, Mr Rudd?’

‘Yes, I believe it but it’s too late to think about that now, Smut! Mr Craddock is here to say you can come back to the Valley when it’s all over.’

The eagerness of the young man’s expression as Rudd said this touched Paul more deeply than anything he had witnessed in court. He said quickly, ‘That’s true, Smut, and I’ve told your mother the same. I’ll find a place for you somewhere and perhaps give you a job like Sam’s, where you could use your skill with the gun and all you know of the Valley.’

A flicker of humour crossed Potter’s face, ‘Me, a gamekeeper? That’ll zet the boys laughing all right, Squire, but I’d like to come back some time. I’d like that, Mr Craddock, Squire, and it’s good o’ you to tell me. It’ll give me something to think of where I’m going.’

‘You’ll get time off if you watch your step, Smut,’ Rudd said and Paul envied the ease of the agent’s approach.

‘Yessir, they told me that,’ Smut said, and then, hesitantly, ‘Do you reckon one o’ you gentlemen could spare the time to look in an’ give me news once in a while? I’d like to know what’s goin’ on back there and letters baint no gude. I never could read much more’n me own name!’

‘I’ll come and see you,’ said Paul, and felt better for saying it. ‘Good-bye and good luck for now, Smut, and don’t worry about the family. I’ll see they’re left alone in the Coombe.’

They shook hands and went out, walking into the hot sunshine of the castle yard and down the hill to the livery stable where they had left the trap. As it was being brought out, and Rudd was already on the seat, Paul felt his arm jogged and turning looked into the face of James Grenfell. ‘I heard about it,’ he said, ‘and it was a damned shame in the circumstances! It won’t do Gilroy any good about here, if that’s any comfort.’

‘It’s no comfort,’ Paul told him, ‘but I tell you one thing, Grenfell. From now on, I’m your man! I’d like to help to break the crust around here and I think I can promise Rudd and my wife, too, will back me up.’

‘Well, we can certainly do with your help,’ Grenfell said, and then, with a smile, ‘But it won’t always be this way, you know! It’s going to change sooner than you think!’, and he nodded and went on down the steep street, a small, insignificant figure among the lumbering farmers and draymen discussing the trial outside The Mitre.

It was in Grace’s heart to be sorry for him in the days that followed the eclipse of Smut Potter but she found it difficult to forgive pedantry on his part, and on John Rudd’s, that had resulted in a man being shut behind bars for five years, and yet, she realised how humiliated he was in being proved so wrong so quickly.

The shadow of Smut Potter seemed to linger in the Valley and harvest prospects, which had looked so good, were cut back by heavy summer storms that left wheat and barley in disarray and put everyone’s temper on edge. The semi-estrangement between them persisted because Paul seemed almost to nurse his defeat like a sulky boy but in the end it was his sulkiness that encouraged her to find a way of breaking the tension in the house. It was odd and a little pitiful, to see him fling himself into a frenzy of work alongside Honeyman’s Home Farm team, to come home tired and skulk in the library, trying to lose himself in pamphlets James Grenfell had sent him, as though he sought there a means of reversing Smut Potter’s sentence by social upheaval. Then a way out of the ridiculous impasse presented itself, for the certainty that she was now carrying his child persuaded her that two adults could not, after all, spend an entire summer brooding about a man in gaol.

Her own feelings about her pregnancy surprised her. She would have thought that it would compensate her for the life she had chosen to lead here in this wilderness, where every man, woman and child was a slave to the march of the seasons and men half-killed one another over the ownership of a buck, but this was not the case. The child, she reasoned, would be one more anchor, final proof of submission to men and their chattels and the only satisfaction she derived from the prospect was a conviction that, all things being equal, it was likely to inherit a world that was changing at speed and where ideas were likely to blow up under the noses of people like Gilroy.