‘Mum sent them. Lardy cakes.’

‘That’s very nice. How many’s Dan eaten then? Be a good girl, look in on Tom Harker on your way home and tell him I need him as a beater tomorrow starting at eight to beat the park clumps into Badger’s Wood before the shooting starts. Will you remember that? Eight o’clock sharp, Batty Clump.’

‘Tom Harker?’ said Dan, shocked.

‘There’s no one else. I’ve a hundred men out tomorrow, nigh on. It’s the biggest day.’

‘You said you wouldn’t have Tom Harker again, not after the last time you caught him.’

‘Can’t be helped. I don’t like it. Why should I give him a free look at where the best game’s to be had? But he knows what’s he doing. I need a reliable stop if John’s not with us.’

‘I can do that.’

‘You’ll be the other end of the line. Besides, what if Sir Randolph wants you to load for him again, like he did today?’

‘I wish he would. But Charlie’ll be all right tomorrow. He only put his foot down a rabbit hole. Where any fool could have seen it.’

‘Any fool doesn’t see all you see, young Dan,’ said his father.

Flo laughed admiringly; then heard her own laugh and thought it sounded silly, so stopped abruptly. But it was true that Dan was the most observant person she knew; he always had been. They were the same age, fourteen.

‘He only poaches for the pot,’ said Glass. ‘At least I hope he does.’

The head-keeper’s cottage was some little way away from the village, on the edge of the woods. It stood back from the road, beside a gate leading into the woods. There was a semi-circle of grass in front of it, where the cart-horses which pulled the long timber-waggons could turn or wait. An oak tree stood on the green, with a stone water-trough beneath it. Flo paused there, to light her lantern. She had not lit it before leaving the cottage because she knew that Dan would never have bothered with a lantern on a night like this. There was a moon, even though at the moment it was obscured by cloud, but Dan anyway knew his way around so well he hardly needed to see; he knew where he was by smell or sound, like an animal. Flo liked the lantern for the companionship of the flickering candle rather than for the light it shed. She knew her way almost as well as Dan; each tree that grew up from the hedge was familiar to her, each gateway, ditch and patch of copse between the keeper’s cottage and the nasty little place – or so she considered it – where Tom Harker lived. It was a one-storeyed redbrick building, of which one end was an outhouse – pigsty or stable – and the other contained two rooms where Tom Harker and his mother had lived until the old lady died, ninety at least and not a tooth in her head, two years ago; since when Tom had lived there alone, his lengthy unexplained absences less frequent than when his mother had been alive. He was a thatcher by trade and had presumably wandered in search of work, or perhaps just from love of wandering – there was usually enough work on the estate. Rumour had it that he had a wife in another village, whom he had never brought home for fear of old Mrs Harker’s temper, which was known to be fearsome. Some expected that after his mother’s death the wife would be seen at last, and some thought that even her non-appearance was not necessarily conclusive – maybe after all these years she’d had enough of him.