A countryside mystery for young readers

By Gareth M. Parkes

Benji almost missed the gap entirely.

He'd been following the bridleway that ran along the edge of the beechwood — that particular Chilterns beechwood, all grey-silver trunks and copper leaves and the kind of light that comes through bare branches at a low autumn angle and makes everything look slightly more significant than it is. To his left, the chalk valley fell away in a long green slope toward the village below. To his right, the wood ran on until it met something that stopped it: a wall.

Not a modern wall. A Chilterns wall — flint-and-brick, two centuries old if it was a day, the pale nodules of chalk flint pressed into what had once been firm lime mortar and was now, in places, simply habit. The kind of wall that looks permanent until you look closely, and then you see the joints opening, the courses settling, the places where a wet autumn had worked its way in and the chalky subsoil beneath had done the rest.

Benji was looking closely when he found the gap.

Not a large one. Two courses of flint-and-brick had shifted apart where the mortar had finally surrendered, leaving a space perhaps the width of a fox, or a dog with a sense of occasion.

He pressed his eye to it.

On the other side was a garden.

Or what had been a garden, perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago, when the estate on the chalk hill above had its kitchen garden tended by people who took such things seriously. The walls enclosed a space the size of half a paddock, and inside — espaliered fruit trees grown enormous and unruly against the south-facing flint, a ruined cold frame with glass long since gone to moss and weather, the skeleton of a greenhouse at the far end with its ironwork still standing but its roof half-collapsed. And everywhere: bramble and dog rose and rosebay willowherb, thigh-high and unhurried, reclaiming the kitchen beds one season at a time.

Through a gap in the brambles, Benji could just make out a potting shed — its door hanging open, a row of terracotta pots still stacked inside on a shelf, as if someone had left them there for a moment two generations ago and simply not come back.

The beechwood light came over the north wall in copper bars.

It smelled of chalk and fox.

Benji's red collar caught the autumn air as he squeezed carefully through the gap.

She was at the base of the south wall, beside the old espalier apple, and she was working.

Small. Autumn-bright. Ears slightly too large for the rest of her yet. She was digging at a section of wall rubble with everything she had, which, being a fox cub who had not yet finished growing, was not quite enough.

Benji sat down a little way off and watched.

She was good at it — quick, purposeful, not panicking. But the flint-and-brick was heavy, and the pile of collapsed masonry she was working at was not small. Each piece she moved only showed her more pieces behind it.