{"id":5402,"date":"2017-09-04T21:44:30","date_gmt":"2017-09-04T11:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/?p=5402"},"modified":"2017-09-11T13:37:43","modified_gmt":"2017-09-11T03:37:43","slug":"falconers-lure-part-six","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/2017\/09\/falconers-lure-part-six\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Falconer\u2019s Lure\u2019, Part Six"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I wasn\u2019t familiar with the song Nicola performed in the previous chapter, so I looked it up and found this beautiful version by mezzo-soprano Sophie Macrae:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Sophie Macrae - Fear No More The Heat O&#039; The Sun (Roger Quilter)\" width=\"660\" height=\"371\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2O_arKrndtc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s so sad. No wonder people kept bursting into tears when they heard it. Anyway, on with the reading.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Chapter IX: Lost Hawk<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Patrick and Nicola go chasing off after Regina the peregrine falcon, who was startled into flight by Tessa. Hours later, they track Regina down to where she\u2019s settled on a church tower in a village the other side of the Crowlands. Patrick decides they have to stay there until sunrise, but it\u2019s okay \u2013 they can spend the night with his cousin, the local vicar. First he goes off to phone his mother, who is in a panic because she thinks the children have disappeared because they\u2019ve been on the cliffs again. This seems a perfectly reasonable fear to me, but Patrick is \u201cdistinctly injured\u201d by her assumption that he&#8217;s done something thoughtless and dangerous. <\/p>\n<p>Then he goes off to talk to his cousin, who turns out to be away, replaced by an unfamiliar locum vicar with \u201cabsolute hordes of strange children\u201d, all being \u201cdreadfully friendly\u201d. Oh, the horror! Patrick runs away, pursued by a bemused Nicola:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201c\u2026 here was Patrick still flushed with embarrassment, his hands still shaking as they held the reins. Suddenly Nicola remembered something he had said that very first morning: <em>I can\u2019t meet eight perfectly strange people before breakfast<\/em>. And he never had been to Trennels, either. It came to Nicola that Patrick, more than anyone she had met so far, was genuinely and painfully shy.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I would usually have deepest sympathies for a shy character, but Patrick isn\u2019t <em>just<\/em> shy. He\u2019s also got a massive superiority complex, is completely self-centred, and seems to have very little interest in understanding other people\u2019s motivations or emotions. But I do think this scene demonstrates how empathetic Nicola is \u2013 that she feels for him, even though she has almost no fear of anything herself.<\/p>\n<p>Nicola is also happy that she\u2019ll get to sleep under the stars for once. Patrick sends her off to get milk from a farm (&#8220;<em>You<\/em> go. You look younger and more in need of milk.&#8221;), and they find a river to water the horses and have their own Famous-Five-style picnic supper on the grassy bank (but draw the line at whittling themselves toothbrushes out of twigs, as people do \u201cin books\u201d). Then they find a haystack to sleep in, which means actually burying themselves neck-deep in the hay. I like all these little details, including Bucket the dog looking \u201cmildly surprised\u201d when he\u2019s told the hay is his kennel for the night. I did find myself thinking, &#8220;But \u2026 snakes! And spiders!&#8221; until I remembered this was tame English countryside, not the Australian bush, so there was unlikely to be any deadly wildlife lurking about. <\/p>\n<p>Patrick and Nicola also have a philosophical chat about death. Patrick discusses what he wants to do with his life, \u201cprovided one really got one\u2019s three-score-and-ten\u201d and Nicola, remembering Jon, says, \u201cI suppose one ought to do all the things one most wants to first, just in case.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Patrick also reveals that an invisible ghost walks up and down the corridor outside his bedroom, and that one night he went out to meet it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201c \u2026 then it \u2013 got awfully cold suddenly. I\u2019ve always thought it must have walked through me, but it may just have been me being petrified [\u2026] But \u2013 well, I\u2019ve never told anyone this before, because I don\u2019t really believe it myself. But the next day I fell off Leeper\u2019s Bluff.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Spooky! (Except possibly he talked himself into a state of anxiety before and after the \u2018ghost\u2019 encounter, which meant his sleep was disturbed, and it made him so distracted and fatigued that he fell off the cliff the next day. Which is how you\u2019d interpret this episode, if you were a boring rationalist like me.)<\/p>\n<p>The next morning, Regina flies off and Patrick seems calm and resigned about it, to Nicola\u2019s surprise. He admits that it was \u201cmadly stupid\u201d to expect anyone to keep Regina at school, and that he\u2019d only chased after her yesterday because \u201cyou know how one goes on with a thing, until you\u2019ve simply got to stop because it isn\u2019t there any more.\u201d But luckily, they find her caught in an old wartime camouflage net, so they\u2019re able to remove her bells and jesses and then off she flies, completely free, not even recognising Patrick any more.<\/p>\n<p>Now there\u2019s only sweet little Sprog left in the hawk-house. Nicola wants to keep him, but Patrick is adamant \u2013 Sprog must learn how to hunt properly and then he\u2019ll be set free, too.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Next, Chapter X: High Diving<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wasn\u2019t familiar with the song Nicola performed in the previous chapter, so I looked it up and found this beautiful version by mezzo-soprano Sophie Macrae: It\u2019s so sad. No wonder people kept bursting into tears when they heard it. Anyway, on with the reading. Chapter IX: Lost Hawk Patrick and Nicola go chasing off &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/2017\/09\/falconers-lure-part-six\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">\u2018Falconer\u2019s Lure\u2019, Part Six<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-5402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-antonia-forest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5402"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5408,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5402\/revisions\/5408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}