“Darian and Django are to invite their friends from the camp into the forest. Make it look like a summer gathering. Let them hunt, light fires, make noise. Anyone watching from a distance sees nothing but a gaggle of kids playing at being feral.”

The ones in the wrong shoes

They come to the gate claiming they are lost. Some on foot, some in cars. They ask for directions, ask to see the grounds, and their shoes are wrong for the mud. At the market, women nobody knows ask the housekeeper about the lady of the manor: who visits, who stays, whether anything interesting is happening up there. She says they smell of office carpet and cheap perfume.

Overton is being watched. The writer who lives there does not lock the gate.

The twentieth stratagem

Chinese readers will know the move before I name it. Among the Thirty-Six Stratagems, the twentieth is 混水摸鱼, muddy the water to catch the fish. In clouded water the fish lose their bearings, and whoever stirred it takes what they like.

At Overton the stratagem is turned inside out. The writer muddies her own water so that the watchers catch nothing. Fires in the forest, Traveller children on borrowed horses up and down the lanes all day, too many tracks, too many faces. Every report sent back to an office will be accurate, and every report will be useless.

The old gatekeeper will grumble for weeks. That is part of the cover too.

Illegible on purpose

The anthropologist in me recognises this. James C. Scott spent a career describing how states try to make people legible: counted, mapped, named, sorted into tidy columns. He also described the people who refuse: hill peoples, nomads, Travellers, anyone who survives by being hard to read. Their resistance is rarely a wall. More often it is a crowd, a shifting camp, a story told differently to each visitor.

Hiding draws the eye. Noise is a better curtain than silence. A woman who has spent her life arranging what readers see on a page knows exactly where to put the fires.

“Time to make sure they see only what I want them to see.”

[Start the series here →]

© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange, published by CYcrds OÜ