At Hawthorn Time Read Online Free Page B

hops; a thrush’s nest in a hedge with four blue eggs; spoil from a rabbit scrape rich with little shells from deep in the soil. He’d found an arrowhead like that a long time ago, vicious and beautiful; where it was today, though, was anyone’s guess. Perhaps it had found its way into the hands of some policeman’s child after one of his many arrests.
    Jack found it hard to keep track of all the things he owned, although in fact they were very few: his notebooks, two biros, his cooking things, some stones and feathers and a few coins. In prison he’d had nothing, not even the sad, private little collections of matches and sweets and oddments that the other men guarded so jealously, or the curling photographs they stuck to the cell walls with smears of toothpaste. And when he left he hadn’t wanted to keep anything from there, nothing that might bring with it that shut-in, musty smell.
     
    In one field the young oilseed rape had been decimated by pigeons and slugs, a victim of the wet winter and late spring. In the next, the rows of beans were small for the season, despite the pellets of fertiliser like hailstones in the furrows. A row of pylons strode away from him, their cables slack in the sunshine, and the shadows of hobby aircraft raced across the soil, their whine drowning out the wrens and great tits singing in the thickets and raising Jack’s hackles as he walked.
    As he passed under, and then away from, the big jets’ flight paths far overhead he filed his knowledge of them somewhere beyond explaining, along with the invisible lines of lost causeways or underground streams. Once, there had been none at all for more than three days, and it had troubled him so much that he had taken refuge in a derelict lock-keeper’s hut by a canal as still as glass until the aeroplanes had appeared again.
    Now he tried to prospect his way ahead for a path he knew had once been there. To walk its lost route would be to slog across a vast ploughed field in which a distant tractor dragged a disc harrow back and forth, its clanking roar borne to him intermittently as the breeze shifted. He would be exposed; but not to honour it felt to him a betrayal, even here.
    Deep down the earth was still heavy with moisture, but a few days’ sun had dried the surface to a friable crust so that it gave softly underfoot like half-baked sponge. Jack set out, crossing the shallow ridges at an angle that made stepping from one to another something he had to concentrate on, the gap between them not quite long enough for his loping stride. In the warm soil around him flints gleamed dully or glowed like bone. He knew of field edges, elsewhere, that were piled high with them, the necessary harvest of generations of children and women. And yet still the earth sent them up.
    Above Jack red kites wheeled and tumbled into sudden dogfights, and somewhere to his right the sun flashed off the windscreens of the traffic on the Roman road. A cuckoo called, and Jack froze, scalp prickling, until the soft note came again, settling lazily over the field like a pair of falling feathers. Summer’s coming in , he thought, turning a coin over in his pocket and grinning to himself. It felt like a good omen. He would write it in his notebook later on.
    In a small copse stinking of ramsons he stopped to eat. He’d netted a rabbit the night before and there was a late cabbage in his pack he’d filched from a back garden in one of the dormitory towns he’d passed through; it was a shame he had no onion, but with the wild garlic it was enough for a simple stew.
    Rabbits were easy to catch, mostly because of their curiosity: if he sat very still at dusk, downwind of a warren, and made the sound of a crying kit he could often make the does take notice. If he kept it up they’d creep closer, eyes wide, ears twitching. His net was made from knotted string; years back he’d been taught how to make them by an old poacher with pockets full of wriggling ferrets. Now he