Inevitably, the talk was of the shoot—the birds, the near-misses, the triumphs, and underneath it all, the numbers. It would not do to boast too openly, but everyone knew before the plates were before them how many Darling and Ivo Hughenfort had taken. It was Alistair, with Marsh playing the role of audience, who introduced the subtly superior bag of Marsh’s wife. By the time he finished telling Marsh about her shooting, no-one there, even the two German wives, retained the illusion that numbers were of any importance when it came to judging skill. Alistair was, in a manner both polite and devastating, very nearly contemptuous of the two men’s superior numbers—and, by implication, of the two men themselves. He was eating an apple, and his voice carried as he spoke to Marsh, until by the end, everyone including Ogilby was glued to him.
“—and I am quite certain it was twenty-five, because I was behind her watching the birds fall, so that when that dog of Spinach’s carried one of Iris’s in, I brought it to his attention. I don’t know if he counted it as his or not.” All innocence, he popped a slice of apple into his mouth and carved another one off.
Sidney Darling had gone pale with anger. “I hardly think I need to steal someone else’s birds to pad out my count,” he objected, truthfully enough.
Alistair looked around, surprised. “Oh, hullo, Darling. Did you think I was talking about you? Don’t know why you’d assume that. No, I was telling Marsh about Ivo’s numbers. Ivo always has a way of looking good at whatever he’s about.”
Everyone there looked to see the cousin’s reaction. It was the first time I had really focussed on the man, who was something of a nonentity physically, and I had no idea if Alistair’s words were meant—or would be taken—as a friendly jest or a deadly insult. For a heartbeat, Ivo Hughenfort just looked at his cousin, without expression but for the abrupt tightening of his hand around his cup frozen mid-air. Then he put on a smile—a rather forced one, indicating that the jest had not been altogether friendly. “As my cousin Ali has a way of looking too superior to join in at any competition. Saves face, don’t you know? Not having to lose.”
Before Alistair could react (Ali would have had his apple-slicing knife at Ivo’s throat) Darling was on his feet, signalling the end of the meal—and of hostilities. “Good thing there’s no competition here, then, wouldn’t you say?”
To my interest, he was addressing Ivo, staring him down until the Hughenfort hackles subsided.
“I agree,” Hughenfort said after a moment, trying to sound hearty. “Couldn’t agree more. And honestly, Iris, I’d never have deliberately taken off with one of your birds. My man may have been overly zealous. I’ll have a word with him.”
“Heavens, Ivo, take all you like,” Iris replied sweetly. “I’m only here for the hard ones; that’s where the fun lies.”
If Alistair had set the man up for an insult, Iris had bowled him down, all but accusing him of choosing easy numbers over skilled challenge. And this from a woman, to whom he could hardly retort in kind.
I thought Marsh and Alistair would burst from the effort of containing their glee. It was the most cheerful I’d seen Marsh yet.
We abandoned Ogilby and his assistants to their dishes and scraps, and made our way, with our numbers now swollen by a captive gallery of females, across the stretch of the high lawns and onto the other side of the park. The ground here was lower and spotted with bog plants, with a small lake glittering below.
“Mrs Butter likes duck,” Iris told me in explanation, although I could also hear the beaters starting up in the woods across the lake from us. We worked our way up the end of the wet area, where a tiny stream trickled clear and cold over a tumble of water-rounded stones. Waiting for the action to begin, I picked up a handful of the smaller stones, thinking to skip them over the face of the lake; then I realised that the others might look disapprovingly on such a frivolous, and potentially bird-distracting, entertainment. I slipped the stones into my pocket and took up my gun.
This drive was not as untarnished a success as the previous one. Some of the birds, faced with open water before the safety of the next trees, even managed to double back over the beaters’ heads. Bloom’s voice rang out harshly, berating his hapless men, and the birds when they came flew raggedly, in fits and starts.
Which did not stop them from dying. The two Gerard boys, both of them now armed and Marsh behind one of them looking on, had great success. At the end of the firing the dogs were loosed to retrieve in the water.
One of Marsh’s retrievers swam eagerly past me, its whole being focussed on the wet lump of fallen pheasant at Iris’s feet. I watched the sleek thing pass, marvelling at the propensity of dogs to go with joy into ice-cold water to fetch a bird they would not be allowed to eat. Then I thought of the humans, arrayed across the half-frozen ground for the opportunity of shooting birds that might as easily have been raised in a pen, which would not in any case be on the table until long after their shooters had left, and I decided that we were not far removed from the dogs, after all. I thrust my free hand into my pocket to warm it; just as my fingers came into contact with the smooth rocks I had gathered and forgotten, a bird exploded up from a patch of reeds, panicked by the retriever’s passing. Without thinking—as a joke more than anything else—I pulled out a stone and sent it flying after the bird.
The two splashes were nearly simultaneous, rock and bird, dropping into the water at the same place. They were followed an instant later by a flash of brown and white and a larger splash, and then Marsh’s other dog was paddling energetically out into the lake. Half the men and women there were gaping at me, the other half at the bird or each other, and I tried furiously to decide whether throwing objects at game birds might be considered more, or less, sporting than using a firearm. Should I apologise and creep away, or claim a rather queer triumph?
The dog had the bird now, and turned to swim back with it to his master. Every eye watched as the dog gained the bank, paused to shake off a spray of drops, then trotted up to drop the feather bundle at Marsh’s boots. The thing lay there, well stunned by my rock. This was too much for Darling; he shoved his gun at one of the loaders and stalked over to examine the bird. As did we all.
It was not just stunned, it was dead, without a mark on it but with its neck neatly snapped.
“Now, that’s a first for me,” Sir Victor said. “You boys ever seen anything like that?”
The two boys looked as stunned as the duck had. The adults did as well, until Iris, coming up behind me, took one look at the bemused duke with the dripping, limp-necked duck cradled in his hands, and began to chuckle. Soon the rest joined in, pressing forward to see what must be one of the odder kills a shoot has produced.
It was not, I noticed, strung up with the other birds on the game-cart, but was carefully set apart for the appreciation of the below-the-stairs residents of Justice. I sighed: The whole county would know of my feat by the end of church tomorrow. So much for Marsh’s proposed darts match.
We finally dispersed, most of the women towards the house, the rest of us heading to the next and no doubt final drive of the afternoon. Before we had left the bog ground, however, Bloom came up to consult with Marsh. Darling quickly joined them. I could not make out their words, but Bloom gestured with his thumb at the sky, which I noticed was not only taking on the purple shades of early dusk but was also showing signs of mist. Darling shook his head and made calming gestures with his hands. Marsh stood figuratively back from the discussion, nearly an argument, until Bloom turned physically away from Darling to appeal to the master of Justice. Who shrugged, opting out of authority.
Immediately, Darling turned to signal to his loaders, and Bloom, disapproving but obedient, jogged off to urge his beaters towards their last drive of the day, leaving behind him two men and their dogs to gather the remaining birds.
We guns followed at a more leisurely pace, since it would take the men a while to drive the birds to us. As we went, I had to admit that the conditions were fast becoming far from ideal.
The evening air was drawing moisture from the wet ground, the mist coalescing in patches and drifts which the low angle of the fitful sun caught here and there. Visibility was tricky in these circumstances, and the mixed woodland, cedars, firs and the occasional dark holly interspersed with deciduous trees, contributed its own share of half light. Darling placed us, then Marsh came through and shifted each gun farther apart from its neighbour, for greater safety. He and Alistair disappeared down the line in the direction of the boys and Sir Victor, and I heard the first whistle of the beaters drawing near.
Bloom must have ordered them to sacrifice artistry and numbers for the sake of speed, because the whoops and crackles came towards us at a brisk walk rather than a controlled stroll. The peculiar noises, the weird light, the near-dusk, and the culmination of the day’s competitive excitement into this last drive had us all kneading our gunstocks with tension. Iris, again off to my right, coughed with the damp; the Germans and Londoners beyond her had gone quiet; to my left, strung out unevenly, were the twins with Sir Victor, then Darling and Ivo Hughenfort, and invisible to me at the far end, the Marquis and Sir James. I could hear men moving off in the woods behind our line—not the loaders, who would be gripping the spare guns at the shooters’ elbows, but probably unneeded beaters, here to watch the final event of the day, or a couple of the women who had stuck it out. It might even be Marsh and Alistair coming back up the line, having spread the guns to their satisfaction.
The birds broke over our heads, and I ceased to speculate. I was pleased to notice that Bloom’s men had, by accident or intent, concentrated the birds along our end of the woods. Iris’s gun sounded steadily, and I was kept busy as well, although to my left the normal continuous fire of the two top-scoring men seemed sparser than it had been.
The cold wet air was filled with the sound of shouts and shot, with rising lead and falling birds, cordite smoke blending with drifting mist. The pheasants seemed to burst out of a white curtain. They were nearly impossible to track, requiring hairsbreadth reactions, the finger jerking the trigger before the eyes had a chance to register what they saw. Mist and the smell of guns and autumn leaves; death and an extraordinary sense of vitality and challenge; competition and camaraderie.
And then down the line out of a sudden volley of shots rose an eerie cry and simultaneous bellow that froze every person in earshot, raising the hair up the backs of our necks. Before the sound faded, I had broken my gun, clawed the cartridges out, dropped it to the ground, and set off running through the trees. Branches snatched at my clothing; people moved around me, bent on the same task; men’s voices shouted, nearby and at a distance, as the birds were forgotten.
Half hidden in a clump of holly, two men huddled together. The colour of blood was shockingly bright amidst the grey light and the dull green foliage; brilliant spatters had travelled all the way up—but no, those were berries, the same startling crimson as the stuff on Alistair’s coat.
Marsh half lay in his cousin’s arms, bleeding freely and grimacing with pain, but not dead. From the sound of his curses, he was far from death, and I felt suddenly faint with relief.
Darling reached them first, put his hand out to seize Marsh, and found himself looking cross-eyed at the shiny blade of a knife. Not the long and wicked blade Ali had carried in Palestine, but still plenty sharp enough to slit a man’s throat.
“You touch him,” Ali snarled at Darling—and it was Ali, even to the accent—“you die.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Darling stumbled back; the others began to collect in a wide circle around the fallen man. Alistair looked like a mother wolf, teeth drawn back and murder in his eyes. It took a deliberate effort to approach him, but I did, warily.
Iris had no such hesitation. She elbowed the men aside and dropped to her knees in front of the bloody tableau. I joined her, moving deliberately so Alistair would not feel threatened. Only when her outstretched hand was inches from it did she notice the knife.
“Ali! Put that away,” she commanded, and pushed his wrist away in order to peel back Marsh’s thick jacket. Alistair hesitated, then the knife was gone.
“Are you shot, too?” I asked him. “Or just Marsh?” He had blood on him, but I couldn’t tell whose it was.
“No. A few pellets, maybe. He walked in front of me just as the gun went off.”
“Whose gun?”
After a moment, he tore his eyes from mine to look over my shoulder at the others, then back to me. “I did not see.”
Iris had excavated the clothing layers enough to determine that the pellets had buried themselves into Marsh’s left side fairly evenly but that there were no torrents or spurting wounds; his injuries would be painful, but not life-threatening. She turned her head to look for Darling, but just then Bloom came pounding up, white-faced and gasping. She spoke to him instead.
“We need to get him to the house, and to ring for the doctor. He’ll be all right—nothing vital seems to have been hit.”
I thought Bloom would collapse at the news, but he pulled himself straight and then leapt to do her bidding. I caught up with him before he reached his men, still drifting in confusion from the woods. “Mr Bloom,” I said. “Don’t let any of your men go home yet. The police will want a word.”
He stared at me. “The police? But it was an accident.”
“Of course it was. But they will want to be thorough.”
“I need to let my men go home before it gets dark.”
“Yes. Well, do what you can. At least write down the name of anyone who has to leave. Please?”
“Very well, mum.” He trotted off, summoning runners as he went.
Back at the holly trees, Iris had wrapped Marsh back into his clothing and was in the process of extricating him from his cousin and checking Alistair’s “few pellets.” She was trying to, anyway. Alistair was none too pleased at being prised from his wounded comrade. Not until Marsh spoke quietly in his ear did Alistair allow himself to be pulled away and given a cursory examination.
I was close enough to hear Marsh’s low words, and although my Arabic had gone rusty with disuse, I had no doubt that it was in that forbidden language that Marsh had spoken. The key word, my mind eventually translated, was “accident”—but the phrase in which it was embedded had not, I thought, been merely “It was an accident.” As I turned the words over in my mind, the conviction grew, underscored by the uncharacteristic and blatant relaxation of suspicion on Alistair’s part, that Marsh’s actual phrase had been, “It must appear an accident.”
I glanced up again at the audience, and noticed how many guns there were, all pointing in our general direction.
“Are those weapons unloaded?” I snapped. Most were, but the Marquis and one of the twins flushed with oddly identical embarrassment, broke their guns, and emptied them.
“Did anyone see what happened?” I asked more mildly.
My answer was in the small movement the embarrassed boy made away from his father and brother. Sir Victor’s arm was across the boy’s shoulders, and looking at them, I noticed for the first time that the lad was rigid with something more than the general horror. When he felt my eyes on him, he began to tremble; his father’s arm tightened. I stood up and went over to have a quiet word with them, but the boy spilled out words for the benefit of the entire gathering. He looked terribly young.
“I was on the end, just next to a clump of trees, and I knew this would be my last chance for a bird, and then I saw one out of the corner of my eye—I saw movement in the branches.” I must have winced in anticipation of an admission of carelessness, of firing blindly into a moving bush, because he began to protest. “I didn’t shoot—I wouldn’t want to hit one of the beaters—but I started to bring my gun around and this pheasant took off, beautiful and low. I think it must have been winged earlier, because it was clumsy and slow enough for me. I’m not a very good shot,” he confided painfully. “I came around and pulled the trigger, and then out of the corner of my eye I saw His Grace and
Mr Hughenfort. Even when I saw them, I thought I was all right—that is, they were all right—because I thought my shot was well clear. I just didn’t know how wide the spread was, I suppose. And I’m sorry, I’m really awfully sorry.”
In a moment he would begin to sob, and humiliation would anneal itself to horror to make this day a burden for the rest of his life. I bent to look him in the eye, desperately trying to recall his name (Roger—or was that the brother? Damn, I thought, I’ll have to go for formality, pretend I’m a schoolmaster).
“Mr Gerard, His Grace is going to be all right. If there weren’t ladies in earshot he’d be swearing up a storm, and I can only hope the doctor who has to dig the shot out is very hard of hearing. But he’s going to be fine in a week or so, and perhaps you’ve taught him a valuable lesson concerning the stupidity of wandering about where men are shooting.”
The reference to cursing, the suggestion that the duke might have had some responsibility for his own injury, and the inclusion of this teary boy among the “men” made the tears recede and had him standing a fraction away from the comfort of his father.
“Show me where it happened,” I suggested.
He glanced at his father, but readily led me to one side to illustrate how the mishap had come about. “I was here, you see? Father and Roger were by that log.” Discarded cartridges still marked both boys’ positions.
“Which way were you standing?” I asked.