On a Making Tide by David Donachie

had to be kept in check so that only his share of the family repast made it to his plate, and that was never enough. All the whilehis father dominated the table from his position at the head. The Reverend Edmund Nelson was no storyteller, which rendered his sermons as dull as his conversation. For all that, Horatio missed his family, father, sisters and brothers, as well as the Parsonage, and had to fight now to stop himself sobbing with homesickness.
    He couldn’t recall what he had been thinking about when sleep took him, but he did know, when he woke up, that he had had the most vivid of dreams, all centred on home and family. What had been the name of that cowherd? It was ten years ago and Horatio had been only four …
    ‘That looks a likely tree, young Mr Nelson. You can see the lapwings a flying in and out, and ahovering o’er the edge building it up. Now that means there’s eggs in that there nest, an’ all it will take is a leg up from old Dan …’
    ‘Dan,’ he hissed to himself. ‘That was his name, Dan.’
    He had met him in a field close to his grandmother’s house and, with the innocence of childhood, had just started talking. Old Dan must have taken to him, because they were soon off into the woods nesting, with Dan saying that it was never too early to start a collection of eggs. That a gentleman, which he most certainly must grow up to be, should collect them, and butterflies, and press flowers in a book so that he would always have a memory of his countryside childhood to hand.
    He recalled how Dan had lifted him up on to that lower branch. ‘Now, watch how you go, young sir, allus make sure ye has a handhold, ’cause that will save you from a fall. And don’t go right near that nest when the birds are about, ’cause their flapping will see you tumbling.’
    Coached inch by inch he had made his way up several branches till he could put a hand into the nest. His size had driven the lapwings away, regardless of old Dan’s warning. It was easy to get the eggs out.
    ‘There’s four and they’re warm,’ he squeaked.
    ‘Don’t take ’em all, lad. Leave a pair for them to raise. That way there’s a nest for someone else to look into in the future.’
    Getting down took twice as long as getting up and old Dan, as he said, ‘had to go about his occasions’. Taking the boy, who now cradled his treasures in his shirt, to the edge of the wood, he pointed across a deep grass meadow. ‘See that oak tree yonder, standing solitary like it were there to hang a poacher? That be your way home. There’s a stream t’other side, which you can wade. You’ll see your grandma’s house from there.’
    ‘Can I come again, Dan?’
    ‘If you can find me, lad. I don’t stay in one field for long.’
    Now he could smell his way across the meadow, the sharp scent that tickled his nostrils as he crushed grass and meadow flowers on his passage. They came up to his chest, and as he looked back he could just see how his route marked a deep trail, made dark and obvious by the dropping sun. He was picking flowers too, a posy for his grandmother, because he knew she would be pleased. A happy grandmother meant a mincemeat tart.
    It was the stream that had flummoxed him. Old Dan might say to wade it, but to his four-year-old eyes it had looked deep and menacing, clear water that showed a bottom made up of grasses that bent in the current and, as he looked hard, the occasional darting fish. Unsure of how to cross he sat down, not unhappy since the sun was still warm, content to arrange his posy and wait for the stream to go away.
    That was how they found him, sitting there in the dark, the posy sagging sorrowfully, his father angry, and not mollified by his childish explanation that he had gone nesting with old Dan, or even the evidence of the eggs.
    ‘Do you not fear to wander off with strangers?’ his father demanded.
    ‘I don’t know fear, Papa. What does it look like?’
    No wonder his brother William had