Justice Hall (22 page)

The first pheasant of the day broke from the woods, taking off high in an effort to escape the pressure of the strange noises closing in so inexorably. It took me by surprise, but Iris had her gun up and fired, and the bird dropped to the ground with a soft thud. She took the next one too, then I got one, and then the sky was full of fleeing birds and deadly lead shot. The roar of the pair at our left was nearly continuous, since Darling and Ivo Hughenfort had two loaders each and both were aggressive shots. Unnecessarily so, I thought, on the part of Darling, who was for all intents and purposes the host here. Iris and I plucked birds from their flight selectively; Darling and Hughenfort sent a killing cloud of pellets out before them; the rest did as best they could with the birds that got through. The doctrine of Ladies First was acceptable, particularly when the ladies loaded for themselves, but I could not see that the boys on the far end would get much practice today with this arrangement. Rabbits, perhaps: They’d got two already.

The pale smocks of the beaters began to be visible through the final trees; the last wily birds launched themselves into the air; the guns fell silent. The first drive of the day was over, with forty-seven limp bodies to hang on the game-cart. Three of them were mine, six Iris’s, a round dozen went to Darling, and ten to his partner. I reckoned six for a one-woman show counted as top score, and going by Darling’s dark looks, he was aware of her superiority as well. Iris seemed oblivious, merely collecting her bag with her own hands, but on the way back to the cart she gave me a wink, making it clear how conscious she was of offended male pride. I stifled a smile, and wondered if Darling would move us down the line a bit for the next drive.

Sure enough, at the next stand, which was a lightly wooded area through which a stream wandered, Darling suggested positions in a slightly different order. My inexperienced eye could see no difference between our deciduous copse and that of Freiburg and Stein fifty yards away, but either the drive or the location meant that our birds came high and fast. I pruned any number of high branches, but only brought down two birds, despite the overall superiority of numbers: fifty-three this time, two of them woodcock. Darling and Ivo Hughenfort were engaged in a mild rivalry, with fourteen each—until, that is, Iris came happily up and thanked Darling for suggesting that she stand where she had.

He looked confused, and blurted out, “But you only got five.”

“And all of them deliciously tricky,” she responded, all enthusiasm. “One of them straight overhead—I have bits of shot in my hair. No, five birds like those are worth twenty in the open. I shall thank Bloom for them.”

Darling watched her troop off to fetch another pair of birds, frowning in an attempt to decide if she was serious. I nearly laughed aloud, and when our paths coincided, I said to her, “You’re being wicked to that poor man.”

“That poor man is stacking the decks.”

“Shall I load for you on the next drive, get your numbers up a bit?”

“You don’t need to do that—if I wanted loaders, I’d have asked for them.”

“Just one drive?”

“Well, all right. It’s very naughty, though.”

“What, to stack our own deck?”

She shot me a grin of pure mischief. “I shall have a word with Bloom.”

Our third stand, near to midday, was in open ground again. We spread ourselves out across the rolling hillside, each of us backed by one or two loaders and their dogs. Except Iris and me. She took my gun and snapped it to her shoulder two or three times. She would have to compensate each time to the differences in make, length, and weight, hardly an ideal situation when the goal was a quick fire. At least hers took the same cartridge as the Purdey—I wouldn’t have to fumble too much in my loading.

The others, naturally, saw the change. Alistair abandoned Marsh and his family group to stroll back the line in our direction.

“Do you wish me to assist?” he asked.

“No,” said Iris briskly. “Thanks, old boy, but we’re fine.”

As a loader I was far from professional, but we quickly reached a rhythm, Iris thrusting the hot gun back to me without looking, me slapping the full one back into her hand, the stock leaving my grasp in an easy, continuous motion. The drive was a heavy one, and it seemed to me a larger percentage came our way this time than the last, but I had little time to look up or even note the birds falling. I dashed the hot barrel open, knocked the spent cartridges to the ground, shoved the fresh ones in, and snapped it shut in time to exchange it for the other gun. Around and around the guns went. I was vaguely aware of birds raining down, but it seemed a long time before the continual roar along the line slowed to a sporadic bang. One last bird broke, overhead and behind Iris; she spun around and took it.

Triumphant, panting with exertion, she was transformed, very near beautiful. I was sweating myself and felt it fair to join in the triumph.

“Twenty-five,” said Alistair. Even his eyes gleamed. Iris threw back her head and laughed aloud.

Darling, with two loaders and perfectly matched guns, had got twenty-three.

   While we were busy decimating the avian population of the parkland, a luncheon had been transported for us over hill and dale, so that at the next rise we came upon a mirage of folding tables and snowy linen laid out on the upper lawns. The dog-carts and Daimler in the background helped account for the phenomenon, but the redoubtable Ogilby, standing beside a tray of crystal goblets with a bottle of wine already in his hand, appeared to have summoned our meal from the faeries of the wood.

The wine was white and slightly fizzy; the temperature of the food the only concession to the distance from the Justice kitchens. I was suddenly ravenous, and even the presence of half a dozen beautifully coiffed and clad women did not stay me from my plate. Phillida made introductions, and I dutifully nodded and murmured acknowledgments around my mouthfuls of food, but it was not until Ogilby had begun to produce coffee on an elaborate machine over a spirit flame that I began to put them together.

The two German women were as unmistakable, and as inseparable, as their husbands. The tall horsey sort of woman was attached to Sir Victor and the twins, and was dutifully bent over a blow-by-blow account of their bag, which had come to a brace of pheasants each, a hare, and three rabbits. Sir James was linked with a rather exotic-looking dark-haired beauty named Costanza, who spoke with an American accent; the Marquis seemed unattached; a conventionally pretty blonde woman losing the battle with her frown lines was the wife of Alistair’s cousin Ivo; and a flighty, flirty girl of about my own age, a friend of Phillida’s, was I thought there on her own but later decided had a male left back at the house.

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.