Greybeard tucked the leather sling of the rifle over his left shoulder and turned to Towin, who stopped gnawing the top of his cudgel to look up.
“Strike the alarm gong if you want me in a hurry, and not otherwise. Remind old Betty it’s not a dinner gong.”
The woman cackled as he moved towards the door, buttoning his baggy jacket.
“Your grub’s just on ready, Algy. Why not stay and eat it?” she asked.
Greybeard slammed the door without answering. They listened to his heavy tread descending the stairs.
“You don’t reckon he took offence, do you? He wouldn’t report me to old Mole, would he?” Sam asked anxiously. The others mumbled neutrally and hugged their lean ribs; they did not want to be involved in any trouble.
Greybeard walked slowly along the middle of the street, avoiding the puddles still left from a rainstorm two days ago. Most of Sparcot’s drains and gutters were blocked; but the reluctance of the water to run away was due mainly to the marshiness of the land. Somewhere upstream, debris was blocking the river, causing it to overflow its banks. He must speak to Mole; they must get up an expedition to look into the trouble. But Mole was growing increasingly cantankerous, and his policy of isolationism would be against any move out of the village.
He chose to walk by the river, to continue round the perimeter of the stockade afterwards. He brushed through an encroaching elder’s stark spikes, smelling as he did so a melancholy-sweet smell of the river and the things that mouldered by it.
Several of the houses that backed on to the river had been devoured by fire before he and his fellows came to live here. Vegetation grew sturdily inside and outside their shells. On a back gate lying crookedly in long grass, faded lettering proclaimed the name of the nearest shell: Thameside.
Farther on, the houses were undamaged by fire and inhabited. Greybeard’s own house was here. He looked at the windows, but caught no sight of his wife, Martha; she would be sitting quietly by the fire with a blanket round her shoulders, staring into the grate and seeing – what? Suddenly an immense impatience
pierced Greybeard. These houses were a poor old huddle of buildings, nestling together like a bunch of ravens with broken wings. Most of them had chimneys or guttering missing; each year they hunched their shoulders higher as the roof-trees sagged. And in general the people fitted in well enough with this air of decay. He did not; nor did he want his Martha to do so.
Deliberately, he slowed his thoughts. Anger was useless. He made a virtue of not being angry. But he longed for a freedom beyond the fly-blown safety of Sparcot.
After the houses came Toby’s trading post – a newer building that, and in better shape than most – and the barns, ungraceful structures that commemorated the lack of skill with which they had been built. Beyond the barns lay the fields, turned up in weals to greet the frosts of winter; shards of water glittered between furrows. Beyond the fields grew the thickets marking the eastern end of Sparcot. Beyond Sparcot lay the immense mysterious territory that was the Thames valley.
Just beyond the province of the village, an old brick bridge with a collapsed arch menaced the river, its remains suggesting the horns of a ram, growing together in old age. Greybeard contemplated it and the fierce little weir just beyond it – for that way lay whatever went by the name of freedom these days – and then turned away to patrol the living stockade.
With the rifle comfortably under one crooked arm, he made his promenade. He could see across to the other side of the clearing; it was deserted, apart from two men walking distantly among cattle, and a stooped figure in the cabbage patch. He had the world almost to himself: and year by year he would have it more to himself.
He snapped down the shutter of his mind on that thought, and began to concentrate on what Sam Bulstow had reported. It was probably an invention to gain him twenty minutes off patrol duty. The rumour about the Scots sounded unlikely – though no less likely than other tales that travellers had brought them, that a Chinese army was marching on London, or that gnomes and elves and men with badger faces had been seen dancing in the woods. Scope for error and ignorance seemed to grow season by season. It would be good to know what was really happening…