Free Kept by D. J. Taylor Page A

from the trees and the receding jingleof the cart that had brought them from Watton—now on the point of vanishing beyond the bend in the road—all was silent.
    “Will he be expecting us?” Dewar went on. His eyes were red and inflamed from want of sleep. “This Mr. Dixey.”
    “There was a wire sent saying the goods shall be delivered,” Dunbar told him. “Just that. Rather neat, don’t you think? But, see, we must be getting on. There is a gate here, to my recollection. And have a care for that d——d casket.”
    They passed on along the road under the high trees, to a point where a five-barred gate, secured to its stanchion with a piece of rope, broke the wall’s uneven course. Behind it a track, no more than a few feet wide, led away through the wood. Dewar would have climbed the gate, but Dunbar, gesturing at the burden he held under his arm, jerked at the rope and opened it to let him pass.
    “I saw a man drop a sea eagle’s egg,” he explained, “on the doorstep of the clergyman that was booked to buy it.”
    “This Mr. Dixey,” Dewar went on, whose curiosity had been pricked. “What does he do?”
    “What does he do?” Dunbar stood for a moment with his hand on the topmost bar of the gate while he looped the rope-end around its post. “Why, he is a squire. Owns the land around here. That village where we put up our traps too, I shouldn’t wonder. What does any gentleman do? Why, he has his occupations like any other man. Mr. Dixey here is great in the dog-breeding line. Keeps a whole pack of them chained up in a barn—you shall hear the noise of them presently. Why, when I was here last a great mastiff jumped a four-foot hurdle and made fair to tear out my throat.”
    “What did you do?” Dewar wondered nervously.
    “Do? Why, I dealt it a blow on the nose that had it howling for a week, I shouldn’t wonder. I never could abide a venturesome dog. But see, we are getting well on into Dixey’s estate.”
    Following the cast of his arm, his companion saw that the tall avenue of trees was thinning out into a more random assemblage of grass and outbuildings. In the distance, perhaps a half mile distant, the outlines of a substantial residence could be dimly glimpsed. To Dewareverything that he saw was possessed of great novelty, and yet he was conscious that there was something lacking in the vista that lay spread out before him. Great piles of green-coated timber lay on either side of the path, looking very much as if they wanted a woodman to come and take them away, and there was rank, knee-high grass in the paddock. Presently they passed a long, low barn, sheltered on three sides by banks of fir trees, from which, as Dunbar had promised, a cacophony of barking ascended to the pale sky.
    “Grim kind of a place, ain’t it, though?” Dunbar remarked, as if following his thoughts. “But there is no one lives here, you know. Just a servant or so and a man to open the hedge gates to carriages. Not that there’s many of them. The gardeners have been sent away, I believe, for Dixey don’t care about the height of his grass. As for what he owes in London, why your guess is as good as mine.”
    “And yet he’ll pay five guineas for an egg?”
    “More than that sometimes. And not just eggs. Why, I brought him a pine marten last year, which I took in a wood in Carmarthenshire, that he paid twenty pounds for. There’s no accounting for the rarey things he delights in.”
    “But he don’t keep up his estate, and the gardeners is all gone?” Dewar’s sense of propriety was offended.
    “A solitary old gentleman he is. Why”—Dunbar’s eye searched for some point of comparison—“like one of those rooks up there on the fence. You shall see. Here, we are almost in sight. That is the servants’ hall, behind the long window. Dixey’s butler is a decent old fellow, but the housekeeper is a regular tartar, so no chaff, you know.”
    They came now to a rectangle of bare, flattened earth, hedged