The Blood-Dimmed Tide by Rennie Airth

assuaging these periodic bouts of guilt by engaging in the hardest manual work he could find – ditching and hedging, scything grass and baling hay – returning home on those evenings with blistered hands and aching muscles, exhausted but happy, to the raised eyebrows of his wife.
    ‘Mr Madden, sir! I was hoping to see you today.’
    Joe Goram called out from the steps of one of his caravans as Madden rode into the encampment. A burly, dark-haired man with unshaven cheeks, his face bore a scowl that seemed permanently fixed until he caught sight of Lucy, who was wearing a blue dress with a ribbon in her hair, riding perched on the saddle in front of her father. The gypsies’ camp lay at the bottom of the farm beside the stream that ran along the foot of Upton Hanger. Madden had parked his car at the stable yard and ridden down.
    ‘Good morning to you, young missy.’ Waving to her, he came down the steps. His broad grin showed he had several teeth missing.
    ‘Hullo, Mr Goram.’ She gave him a dazzling smile. ‘May I see the puppies, please?’
    ‘Of course, m’dear. They’re tied up over there, behind the caravan.’
    The little girl slid to the ground and ran off.
    ‘Don’t offer her one, Joe, I beg you,’ Madden said hastily. ‘We’ve two dogs at home, and one of them’s just had puppies herself.’
    Dismounting, he shook hands with the gypsy and passed him the reins of the old mare he used for getting about the farm and which Goram inspected with his usual disparaging eye. He’d several times offered to replace it with a better animal from his own string, but Madden, no horseman, had suggested instead that he look out for a suitable mount for Lucy at some unspecified date in the future.
    ‘And don’t mention the pony, either. Please. We’ll talk about that next time you’re here.’
    Goram didn’t hide his disappointment. ‘There’s no harm in spoiling them while they’re young,’ he ventured.
    Since this was an argument Madden used himself on occasion, and one on which Helen poured particular scorn, he thought it best not to respond.
    Instead, he gazed about him, taking note of the signs of bustle and activity in the encampment. The various members of Joe Goram’s family – his wife and two sons, his daughter and son-in-law – were all busy collecting and stowing items in the trio of caravans that were parked at the edge of the clearing in the shade of a beech tree. One young grandson, eyes fixed to the ground, was quartering the area, picking up bits of paper and other rubbish and depositing them in a sack.
    ‘You were hoping to see me, you said?’
    ‘Yes, Mr Madden, sir. We’ll be pulling out first thing tomorrow and I wanted to thank you again for letting us stay.’
    The gypsies had first appeared four summers before. Joe Goram had presented himself to Madden, greasy cap in hand, and asked for permission to park his caravans on a patch of tree-shaded land by the stream and to graze his horses in the lower paddock, which he must have seen was empty. Over strong objections from George Burrows – gypsies had a well-deserved reputation for being light-fingered, he’d argued, it was asking for trouble to allow them on your land – Madden had agreed to let them remain. In spite of his policeman’s conditioning, he clung to the belief he’d grown up with: that people, by and large, behaved according to how they were treated.
    In the course of the next few days two bridles and a set of stirrups had vanished from the stables and George had found one of his scythes missing. At the end of the week they had miraculously reappeared in the places where they had been before, and Joe Goram had dragged his elder son, Sam, by the collar into the yard and made him apologize to Madden in front of Burrows and the other two farmhands. Sam, sporting a black eye and a loose tooth, had sworn it would never happen again.
    The family had returned every year since, accepting the hospitality that was offered