The rock-face of Keeper Hill at least keeps the rain off them on the way home, but the noise of the gale is loud in their ears and they’ve to shout to one another across the dark.
          “Any luck on the grant then, Blackie?”
          “Sure you know I hadn’t. Doesn’t everyone know in this place – before I know myself, even?”
          “There’s great money to be had, Blackie, if you can get your foot in. Great money. Sure they’re throwing it at us.” He laughs then, into the wind, a hoarse hating laugh. “It’s just a question of phrasing, Blackie, phrasing. Though of course they call it ‘ethics.’ ‘Ethical farming!’ Well.”
          “Ah, that’s rich. That’s rich alright.” Blackie laughs in turn. “A new name, just. A new name for the same old thing.”
          Through the cluster of oaks swaying across the way now a glimpse of the Manor roof comes into sight, then again goes away. Every night – every night – their walk brings them by the Manor walls.
          “They think,” says Grace, still smirking at it, still mocking, “we’re going to sort the planet out for ‘em. Just by keeping on doing what we’ve always done. A couple of grants out of Europe and they think it’s the problem solved. And we’re the heroes. That’s as good as what they say. May as well come out and say the truth, what they said about the grandparents two centuries ago. It was ‘peasants’ that time they called us. Couldn’t put a foot wrong, then as now. Sure they used think the peasants were a ‘fine folk’ to do their bidding. Spent our lifetimes dancing at the crossroads, waiting for Bridget with the fine red hair to come of age! Celibate till the night of our wedding. Good honest thoroughgoing people, us…”
          They both crack up at that. The dark’s gotten heavier around them. So that they can sense now rather than see the old Manor house as they get closer. The battlements. The stained-glass windows. In living memory, the flags.
          The house whose life was spared.
          “Well let ‘em,” says Grace, bringing to a close his talk, for the turn is less than twenty yards off now and he’s a mile yet to walk, into the rain. “Not one to look a gift-horse, am I?”
          “O certainly not,” says Blackie. “Certainly not.”
          In silence Grace takes his road, but turns around before he’s gone too far.
          “Will you be up to give a hand for the shearing then, Blackie?” says he. “Agnes and I could use you.”
          Blackie stops, waits his second, then laughs. “Well I’ll have to get my look in at this gift horse somehow, won’t I? I can be up this week,” he says, “if you want.”
          “This week. Right you are,” says Grace, concluding, stepping away.
          But Blackie shouts it after him, needing to say to him one last thing. “We can leave the saving of the world, sure, to men such as himself!”
          A cackle is all Grace manages: something grim and glaring. “And I wish him the best of it,” says he. “For he’s never going to save that house.”
          It sounds as he says it almost like a threat. Thrown into the dark. Together they turn, facing where the house should be, and when it goes quiet, even after they’ve gone and no-one is left to hear, it seems as though the threat were still left there hanging. Grace the aggressor, challenging some midnight duel. And the old house, half-concealed but impassive, grand, and silently taking him up.

End

 
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