He was no more than a silhouette to the newly-arrived couple enjoying the last of the light; a tenebrous puppet show in the whitewashed shelter above the beach. Left, left, right, left uppercut, right hook, arms in the air and dancing on the spot. On the opposite side of Trevaunance Cove, a trio of hikers scrambled down the coast path towards sanctuary in the Driftwood Spars. The first and second, eyes on their feet and minds intent on cider, failed to spot the solo boxer launching a punch across the bay. The final walker, adrenalised by the race against the night, stopped in time to see the blurry pugilist land a knockout blow on a spectral opponent. A group of teenagers buzzed around the benches in the car park less than one hundred yards from the shelter, but only one paid attention to the noise echoing below. He should have said nothing and he should have known better. It was not cool to talk about the boxer.

Contrary to their feigned reticence, theories and rumours about the St. Agnes shadow boxer had been disseminated by opportunists among the indigenous youth for over six months: he was a loner from Mount Hawke who liked to yomp across the fields and join the path as it plunged to the cove; his parents had died, but he had been allowed to stay in the house, which was rotting to nothing; he had dropped out of school – no one ever said which one – and the teachers hadn’t bothered to report his absence; he had been seen running sprints and hitting the deck for furious push-ups on the tarmac at Perranporth airfield; he was a surfer driven mad by a wave and a bash on the head from the rocks at Chapel Porth; he lived down an illegal mine excavated by a notorious ancestor, from where he could be heard wailing on still and silent nights; and he had even deputised for Guy Fawkes on Bonfire Night, where a newspaper-stuffed dummy dressed in tracksuit bottoms, hoodie and baseball cap had provided an eerily accurate facsimile. But no one ever felt the need to guess at the boxer’ identity.

Rowan Trudgeon had never had cause to withhold the name endowed him by his parents. Nor, on the other hand, had he ever been required to reveal it. Busy as they were with their café in Truro, Martin and Sky Trudgeon knew nothing of the legend inspired by their will-o’-the-wisp son. They had long been used to his silent ways and, despite their inconsistent attempts at home schooling, had at least encouraged his love of the moors and heaths and the ocean which sulked and thrashed beneath the cliffs less than a mile from their doomed vegetable plot. Neither mother nor father questioned whose genes had bestowed on Rowan his angular and wiry frame; nor did they ever wish to challenge his relaxed and happy soul. When the tea shop – with accommodation above – came up for rent at the very moment their experiment with self-sufficiency had gone kaput, each one assumed the other would consult with Rowan. But he was already lost to the hills on the morning they packed up the transit and drove the nine miles to their new life in the county’s only city. When he returned to the cottage at the end of the muddy digression from the road to the beacon, he was surprised, but not alarmed, to find it empty. After a night stargazing from his favourite spot in a neighbouring field, he discovered a letter on his unused pillow and a surprising amount of food in the larder. Some cash had been left between a single sheet of paper in the envelope, along with a promise to return from time to time to check how he was faring. ‘Seize the moment son,’ his parents might have said. ‘We’re setting you free.’

Rowan, who had until that moment enjoyed an amount and a kind of liberty most teenagers would not recognise, made his way from room to room in the ramshackle bungalow his parents had bequeathed him. He lay on their bed, but only in order to try it out for size. He sat in front of the unlaid fire and stared out of the window under which other people would have put a television. In the kitchen, he turned the grill on and off, watching the filaments glow red and then black. He opened the door to the washing machine and stuck his head inside, drawn to the gleaming metal drum. He turned on both bath taps and flushed the toilet twice. He stepped through the side door and along the drive until he reached a wooden shed which obeyed the whims of the wind. He dragged a large canvas bag and an ancient rucksack from the shed. Back in house, he stuffed his pack with underwear and found a musty sleeping bag in his parents’ room. He hid the letter and the money under his mattress and pulled the side door shut.

James Nancarrow, whose family had worked Dreynek Farm since excise men had brought its traditional occupation to a violent halt, was accustomed to seeing the wild maw traipsing across his fields. Jin had not once barked at the lad; and most things bothered James’ bitch. Not being one to ever go so far as to lift a hand in greeting, he had nodded at him once or twice from his tractor. The boy was touched, that was his thinking, but he was doing no harm and what business was it of his or anyone else for that matter? He’d seen the ‘ippy parents working their strip of land and selling greens and tettis at the market, but he doubted they knew him to be their nearest neighbour. They kept themselves to themselves just like he did and the boy did well to do that too. He’d watched the mother and father fill the old van and drive away and had assumed that was that. No one would be interested in their dwelling, if it could be found, squatting at the bottom of that clidgy track and exposed to any storm that blew in. When James saw the smoke he guessed they’d returned. He was sitting in his cab in the field by what remained of the army base underneath Beacon Hill, but he could see far enough to tell it wasn’t coming from the bungalow chimney. They were probably burning their rubbish like country folk do and god knows they had plenty of crates and boxes piled next to that lean-to. He called Jin and as they chugged in the direction of the yard he noted that the fire was coming not from the ‘ippy ‘stead, but from the unruly margin of a field that marked the eastern edge of Nancarrow land. He steered left and stopped to unlatch a gate. Rowan, who was lurking under a canvas tarpaulin, saw the tractor making its way towards his camp. He unfurled his legs and stood to pluck a soot-covered billy from a branch. He balanced the pot on a tripod above the fire and filled it with water from a dented flask. He worked a cloth around the rim of an enamel mug and untangled a second from deep within the hedge.

The farmer climbed out of the cab and spat a roll-up towards the flames. He put his hands on his hips and whistled. The boy had made a good fist of it. A small green tent was tucked against the hawthorn and out of sight to all except those who got within twenty feet. He’d fixed the tarp to the hedge above the tent and tied the other corners to two fence posts driven into the ground beyond where he’d dug the fire pit. Any rain would drain away from the camp and he was set well back from the winds. The only thing missing was a chair. It had been a long time since he had lowered himself onto a log to sit by a fire, but he wasn’t averse to giving it a try. He hitched up his overalls and ducked under the canvas. The dog made a beeline for the boy’s boots.

‘Hopin’ it’s coffee, boy. Dog’ll do without,’ said James Nancarrow.

*

Three weeks later, when Martin Trudgeon let himself into the bungalow, his breath formed a brief cloud as he put a hand to the stone-cold stove. The doors to all the rooms were closed and he had a sense that the house had lost its soul. He saw nothing different to when he had allowed himself one final look on the day they had left for Truro. Without bothering to check his son’s bedroom he yanked a blanket from the armchair and wrapped it around his shoulders. If he had taken a walk around the perimeter of the Trudgeon smallholding, he might have spotted his old two-man tent squeezed into the hedge in the field where that farmer with the noisy dog sometimes kept his sheep. As it was, he returned to the van and drove away without looking back.

Nancarrow’s tractor picked its way down Goonvrea and onto Vicarage Road once a month. To the villagers it was that farmer from above the town coming in for supplies; for the emmets it was a major source of inconvenience. If James decided to pop into the St. Agnes Hotel to drink a cider and take a bite on a bench opposite the churchyard, locals knew to switch off their engines, get out and stretch their legs. James took no pleasure from the puce faces sticking out of the windows of cars and motor homes; but neither would he knock back his pint or hurry his sandwich. Did any of the locals notice the skinny chap in well worn camouflage riding on the side of James’ cab or playing with the dog? If so, he merited little discussion. Workers drifted on and off farms all the time and even old man Nancarrow had been known to take in help once in a blue moon. It was on their way back from one such foray that the tractor pulled up against a bank to make space for the transit coming towards them. The driver lifted his hand from the steering wheel, but did not look up. Rowan tracked the passage of his father’s van and James concluded yet again that it was nobody’s affair but the boy’s.

What little the farmer did learn of the boy’s affairs was gleaned at a pace the old tractor would have scoffed at. Rowan preferred whispering to the dog and when James had his back turned or was busy elsewhere, he conversed with the cattle. He answered James’ questions with shrugs, grunts and grimaces; and three months after the coffees under the tarpaulin neither knew the other’s name. Rowan was ‘boy’, ‘maw’, ‘lad’ or ‘whelp’ to the one who did the talking; and in return, he twitched or nodded in deference to whatever questions or demands came in his direction. Not that much was said to or asked of him. He took it upon himself to follow the dog into the farmhouse three days after their first meeting. James looked up from his stew and pointed to a pile of crockery. The boy sat down with a bowl and waited.

‘Permission granted,’ said James with a chuckle.

Rowan sunk a pewter ladle deep into the pan and splashed a serving into his bowl. James leaned to his side, opened a drawer and shoved a spoon along the table. His guest looked deep into his food.

‘Meat?’ he said.

‘Meat’s what we eat,’ said James, surprised by the voice booming from the bag of bones opposite.

The boy filled his spoon, contemplated the dark lumps of beef and bowed as if in prayer. He brought the food to his mouth and ate and ate and ate. He cleared the table and skipped into the yard after the dog and farmer. James turned the key in the tractor and flicked his head to the left. Rowan leapt onto the cab and clung to the glassless frame. Jin followed on foot; not on the usual side, James noticed. The dog kept the boy within sight all the way to the sheep at Towan Top. Without bidding, the lad opened and closed the gates they encountered and he helped shepherd the sheep to fresh pasture. They finished the stew that evening, after checking on the cows. When he went to bed later than was his habit, but nowhere near as exhausted as usual, James left Rowan asleep in what had been his mother’s chair, wrapped in the woollen shawl that she had hung on the peg on the back of the kitchen door. Jin was warming his feet.

Most nights after that the boy slept in the kitchen. James, who took to sleeping in socks to warm the feet abandoned by the dog, wondered if bed and board was fair payment for the work Rowan had taken on. It didn’t matter that the lad asked for nothing, even if he often faced his new landlord with a look that said ‘What next?’ He was a willing helper, but the Nancarrows had always paid their debts before they were due. He promised himself that he would not let the boy go without, but before they could figure out wages it was lambing time. He pointed Rowan towards a barn one morning with instructions to clear it out and to make a bonfire of anything that would burn. He saw the flames from the beacon and reasoned the boy had found the diesel; but all was calm when he returned with Jin, and the barn was so clean it put the farmer to shame. Rowan was sitting on a huge sack which James hadn’t thought about for years. Stuffed with wool and straw, it had once hung from a beam at head height. The sack looked in better shape than the lad’s clothes.

They built pens along the length of the barn, heaving hurdles from the shed on the other side of the yard. Under James’ direction, Rowan ran around scattering straw for bedding. He had more energy than the dog, which was struggling to keep up. When they had done as much as James’ bones could take, he sat on the sack and rolled a cigarette. He ran his free hand along the hessian and looked up to the beams above him. He lit his roll-up and got to his feet.

‘Wait here, boy,’ he said.

Rowan wandered through the pens, checking for gaps between the hurdles. He stumbled over a bale and Jin joined him on the floor. They were still wrestling when James returned dangling two leather boxing gloves from a craggy fist.

‘Found ‘em in Father’s things,’ he said. ‘Come on; stick your ‘ands out.’

Rowan advanced as though submitting to handcuffs. James dropped one of the gloves between his feet and prised the leather apart on the other. He forced it over the boy’s wrist, which dropped to his side. He raised his arm to let James tie the coarse laces strung between the leather. After fitting the second glove, James remembered the sack which lay inert on the barn floor.

‘First lesson, we hit the wall,’ he said.

They settled the ewes in the barn the following night and for his second lesson, Rowan skipped forward and back – a mite clumsily, James thought, but not without promise – and jabbed at the stone wall. The weight of the gloves made him appear sluggish, but after three further sessions he boxed with more speed and purpose. Thereafter, the lambs kept them busy day and night for two weeks and the gloves sat unused next to the sack. Rowan took to the demands, rhythms and joys of lambing as James had expected. When only two ewes were left to deliver, James seized the chance to take to his bed. He returned to the barn the following morning to find the lad and the dog asleep in front of neighbouring pens where two new sets of twins trembled beside their mothers. He let them all doze as he threw a rope over a beam and lifted his feet from the floor to check the timber would take the weight after such a long time. Jin opened an eye as James struggled with the sack, but Rowan did not wake until the farmer’s cursing rose above the dissonance of a barn full of hungry lambs. He pushed himself up and complied with the instruction to hold the sack while it was secured to the rope.

‘We’ll check the stock first and then we’ll break fast,’ said James. ‘Then there’s a tale needs telling.’

Two letters had been scratched into the hide below the left thumb of the boxing gloves James Nancarrow had inherited from his father. James Nancarrow Senior had taken up the gloves after his father John had thrown them into the corner of the barn where Rowan had discovered the old punch bag. John had used a shipwright’s awl to etch a coarse J and N into the leather and after that had tallied his victories with a nail or whatever sharp came to hand. After a third consecutive defeat – unknown and unthinkable in a family bred to scrap and scrape – to a giant from upcountry, John dug himself from the barn floor and unlaced the gloves using the few teeth remaining in his bloody gums. A silent and sullen crowd, most of whom had bet their savings – and more – on the local champion who had boasted of a return to form, watched John stagger bare-chested from the barn. When he slung the gloves into a dark and threatening corner, his intention was for them to rot alongside the family’s former glories.

‘’s why to this day some don’t like us in the village. Too many lost horses or dogs or homes. They saw us as bad luck and they’re a long time forgetting.’

John was not surprised when suppliers refused him credit; some would not trade at all, as though to be seen doing business with the Nancarrows was to have colluded in the financial disaster that hit St. Agnes on the day of his final fight. He transported his stock to unfamiliar markets where traders sensed his desperation and bargained hard. The family, which had once kept the liquor flowing in the taverns and had put plenty of silver into the pockets of the many local men who were prepared to work the coves and beaches, no longer enjoyed privileged status in the parish. The fisherman betrothed to James’ sister, on finding his nets rotted, blamed the misfortune on the family and cancelled his promise. John, who had witnessed his family’s fortunes wax and wane several times over, told his wife and children to be patient and all would be well, in time. But young James, who had observed several men block his father’s way into the Miner’s Arms and had yet to gain entry himself, hit upon a plan to restore the Nancarrows’ good name.

‘It was Father who made up the bag.’

James had spied the faces of the men who held the wagers from behind bales and through a hole he had drilled in the barn wall. He didn’t recognise them as local, but from their voices he knew they hadn’t journeyed far. He walked through the night to Newquay and later to Truro where he let it be known in the markets and taverns that a new Nancarrow was seeking a fight. He waited two months before a stranger called to arrange a match. One month after that, with his father’s gloves swinging from his neck, he walked along the cliffs to a farm outside Portreath.

‘No good comes of fighting,’ said James to Rowan. ‘You can sweat away your troubles with the gloves and the bag, but you mustn’t fight.’

The shame of defeat dogged James Senior for the rest of his days. His father, whose fortunes turned again after some of his neighbours had regained their savings by backing his son’s opponent, nursed James back to health without ever looking him in the face.

‘Father was a laughing stock for some, but a good man to me. He bore his shame with his chin pointing skywards until he could no longer bear to think on it. He never fought again and counselled me against it. I never wanted no part of it, but I seen something in your eyes.’

Rowan sat with the lambs until late that evening; the bag swayed with the gusts and ghosts that blasted through the barn, but it endured no punches. When James lumbered from his bed the following morning, the kitchen was empty and Jin was guarding the sheep alone. The boy wandered into the barn hours later carrying his rucksack and wearing a cap, not unlike the one – a gift from a feed rep – that never left James’ pate. He stepped out of his boots and rags and into dark track pants. He took off the cap to pull a black hoodie over his head. James marked the logo on the hat as Rowan turned the peak to the back of his neck: a surfer besting a wave. The farmer watched the boy dance shoeless around the bag; his bare fists struck with poise and grit. How did those drippy ‘ippies raise such a natural?

*

The shadow boxer was first sighted by Peter Davy, a Coast Watch volunteer who had broken from his duties to relieve himself against the rear wheel of his Land Rover. As he backed away from the vehicle he heard footsteps clomping along the path. He told his quiz team in the Railway Inn that he had expected horse and rider, but had turned to face a determined sprinter whose visage was indistinct in the twilight. The watch hut was passed all day by runners, riders and walkers; but this one had been so swift and yet so heavy footed. The suspicion that he was wearing work boots was confirmed when a group of surfers, reviewing the day’s swell around an illicit blaze above Chapel Porth, were surprised by an inky smudge that passed in and out of the firelight before any of them could take a proper look. They argued as to whether the arms had been outstretched and the fists clenched, but they all agreed that the sound that had echoed from the cliffs could only have been that of boots on rock. A third report, delivered by a kayaker who had risked a crepuscular tour of the caves beyond Trevellas Cove, provided the thrilling detail of the gangly silhouette, backlit by half-moonlight, bobbing and weaving on the edge of a fragile headland. The myth travelled from taverns to kitchens, to bedrooms and bus stops, where teenagers brought to life a convenient bogeyman. Laundry went missing from lines overnight; allotments were plundered; sheds were burgled; and once a tractor was turned on its side. The blame for all of these and more was laid at the boot-clad feet of the boxer and eventually the story completed its passage from cliff top to beach to cove to cave to pub to kitchen table to pub again and to Dreynek Farm.

‘There’s talk in the town,’ was how James Nancarrow broached the subject.

He no longer bothered to wait for Rowan to return from his nightly wanderings. The boy had itchy feet; that was plain to see. And he was as much animal as man; so why would he not be curious about the earth and the ocean at night? He had witnessed him dispatch an injured bird with such gentleness that he was sure he could do no harm to anyone or thing. But what about the other way round?

‘It’s words and glances you can’t defend yourself from. You don’t want a bad name. It don’t matter, but it do. It followed Father and in the end it did for him,’ said James, recalling the bloody end of the rope his father had used.

James could never ascertain what mark his words made on the boy. They were spoken over his shoulder, into the cab. Rowan was riding the hitch and holding the back of the seat. His breathing hadn’t changed, but he might have grunted. They finished their tasks and returned to the farm content to listen to the tyres squelching through the ruts. The boy swapped his clothes in the barn and as was his habit, battled the sack until called to eat.

‘Don’t bring trouble upon yourself,’ said James, as Rowan brought plates from the dresser. ‘You don’t need it and we don’t want it.’

The plates clunked onto the table and Rowan flattened his palms against the wood. His knuckles were red and cracked and his wrists had twice the girth of the night they had first felt the weight of John Nancarrow’s gloves. His lips opened and James held his breath; but Rowan closed his mouth as though he had thought better of whatever it was he had been about to say.

The newly-arrived couple clinked glasses as the third hiker launched into his story about the figure in the shelter above the beach. Two locals at the bar raised eyebrows but held their tongues. The barmaid smiled as she handed the hiker his cider. Outside, the shadow boxer of St. Agnes finished his bout and picked up his rucksack. He found his rhythm as he rounded the teenagers in the car park. A delivery driver making an early-morning drop at Wheel Kitty later told his workmates about a wisp of smoke making its way out of the scrub along the lane. And at Dreyneck Farm James Nancarrow was woken before dawn by Jin who was straining at the leash which had been tied to the back door. Inside the barn, the sack lay on the floor. A scrap of paper had been nailed to one of the gloves. No trouble, sorry. Rowan.