Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [7]
‘We’ll go back now. There are things to do at the caravan. Barnabas must water the horses.’
‘Sure you won’t dine?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can easily run up something,’ said Isobel.
‘The day is one of limited fast.’
Fiona had not explained that when the dinner invitation had been issued some hours earlier.
‘Nothing else you want?’
‘No.’
‘A bottle of wine?’
Then I remembered that they abstained from alcohol.
‘No – have you a candle?’
‘We can lend you an electric torch.’
‘Only for a simple fire ritual.’
‘Come back to the house. We’ll look for candles.’
‘Barnabas can fetch it, if needed. It may not be.’
‘Don’t start a forest fire, will you?’
He smiled at that.
‘Only the suffusion of a few laurel leaves.’
‘As you see, laurel is available.’
‘Pine-cones?’
‘There are one or two conifers up the road to the right.’
‘We’ll go back then. Take the bucket, Barnabas. The gloves are on the ground, Fiona. Rusty, carry the trap – no, Rusty will carry it.’
None of them was allowed to forget for a moment that he or she was under orders. When the crayfishing paraphernalia had been brought together we climbed the banks that enclosed this length of the stream. After crossing the fields the path led through trees, the ground underfoot thick with wild garlic. At one point, above this Soho restaurant smell, the fox’s scent briefly reasserted itself. Here Murtlock stopped. Gazing towards a gap between the branches of two tall oaks, he put up a hand to shade his eyes. The others imitated his attitude. In his company they seemed to have little or no volition of their own. Murtlock’s control was absolute. The oak boughs formed a frame for one of the blue patches of sky set among clouds, now here and there flecked with pink. Against this irregular quadrilateral of light, over the meadows lying in the direction of Gauntlett’s farm a hawk hovered; then, likely to have marked down a prey, swooped off towards the pond. Murtlock lowered his arm. The others copied him.
‘The bird of Horus.’
‘Certainly.’
‘Do you often see hawks round here?’
He asked the question impatiently, almost angrily.
‘This particular one is always hanging about. He was near the house yesterday, and the day before. He’s a well-known local personality. Perhaps a retired kestrel from a ‘Thirties poem.’
The allusion might be obscure to one of his age. So much the better. Obscurity could be met with obscurity. A second later, either on the hawk’s account, or from some other disturbing factor in their vicinity – the quarry end of the pond – the duck flew out again. Rising at an angle acute as their former descent, the flight took on at once the disciplined wedge-shaped configuration used in all duck transit, leader at apex, main body following behind in semblance of a fan. Mounting higher, still higher, soaring over copper and green beechwoods, the birds achieved considerable altitude before a newly communicated command wheeled them off again in a fresh direction. Adjusting again to pattern, they receded into creamy cavernous billows of distant cloud, beyond which the evening sun drooped. Into this opaque glow of fire they disappeared. To the initiated, I reflected – to ancient soothsayers – the sight would have been vaticinatory.
‘What message do the birds foretell?’
Even allowing for that sort of thing being in his line, Murtlock’s question, put just at the moment when the thought was in my own mind, brought a slight sense of shock. He uttered the words softly, as if now gratified at being able to accept my train of thought as coherent, in contrast with earlier demur on the subject of death and killing. Even with intimates that sort of implied knowledge of what is going on in one’s head, recognition of unspoken thoughts passing through the mind – in its way common enough – can be a little disconcerting, much more so to be thought-read by this strange young man. The ducks’ coalescence into the muffled crimsons of sunset had been dramatic enough to invoke reflection on mysterious things, and such a subject as ornithomancy was evidently of the realm to which he aspired.