Vango (41 page)

The smell of coffee wafted through the room. In one corner sat a chimney sweep, who was still perfectly clean at this time of day, chatting with a laundress. It looked like any other early morning in Paris.

Had she dreamed everything? Had she fallen asleep?

All of a sudden, the Vulture appeared at the top of the stairs, grimacing. He was clutching his belly as if he’d been wounded. He didn’t even glance in the Cat’s direction but rushed out into the street.

Some customers starting screaming.

A dead man had been found in the basement.

Panic spread through the bar.

Outside, the Cat was already running over the snow, guided by the thin trail of blood the Vulture had left behind.

The Highlands, Scotland, Christmas Eve 1935

Bare highlands gave way to forests, but the rain, mud, and fog made everything blurry. The hounds were braying for death. Horns were being sounded on one side and then the other, giving contradictory orders.

The hunt had started seven hours earlier. And for seven hours, the pack had been after one beast. A diabolical animal, fiendishly difficult to catch, and on the verge of making thirty riders and fifty hounds lose their minds.

Ethel, who was looking for a stray ewe that had abandoned its lamb for the past three days, found herself caught up in all of this.

Mary had turned up in Ethel’s bedroom that morning with the three-month-old lamb in her arms and bleated at her mistress to find its mother again.

Ethel was guiding her horse through the fog toward the boundaries of the Everland estate. Not a single hunter paid her any attention.

Occasionally, she would spot a horsewoman riding sidesaddle between the trees, a few birds flying scared, or hounds splashing through the water. Nobody seemed to hear her or see her.

At one point she was galloping alongside a man who could barely sit anymore. He let out a howl of pain every time he came into contact with the saddle.

“You haven’t found a sheep, by any chance?” Ethel asked him.

The man stared at her as if she were a lunatic before deigning to answer.

“I can assure you there are no sheep here, young lady! Unless flying, tree-climbing sheep that play havoc with our nerves and wreak mayhem on . . .
ouch
. . . my bottom!”

Ethel thanked him and left him to his pain, letting her horse pick up pace before riding through a small copse. The barking of the hounds to the right was getting closer. Two hunters emerged on the left without seeing her. Her horse jumped nervously over a series of dead trees. It wasn’t used to the thunder of hounds and horns.

The horse and its rider felt their hearts beating together as one, as if they were the game in this hunt. But Ethel didn’t want to abandon her search.

She galloped over bog land toward the braying pack. Where was this beast? Ethel was intrigued by the wild creature that had outwitted the entire hunt since dawn.

A yapping noise prompted her to slow down. They had arrived at a mound of rocks, in the middle of the trees, known as Chaos. Ethel had heard tales of strange things happening there at night.

She could see a lone hound with a piece of black cloth in its mouth. It was sniffing the ground frenetically, then howling up at the sky. She dismounted from her horse.

“Come here. Give that to me,” she ordered, walking toward the hound.

Ethel led her horse by the reins and took the piece of cloth from the dog’s mouth.

On taking a closer look at the wet, panting, slathering hound, she sent up a prayer that Lily the doe hadn’t wandered off from the tame copses surrounding the castle.

The hound raised its muzzle. A faraway whistle summoned it back to join the rest of the pack. It disappeared. Ethel slipped the scrap of torn cloth into her pocket. A bird flew overhead. She mounted her horse again and headed away from the chaos.

The hunt was going around in circles now. Trails led nowhere. The pack was scattered. At one point, Ethel found herself elbow to elbow with a huntsman on a black mare. They were flanking a thorny hedge.

“I simply can’t understand it,” the huntsman confided in Ethel. “Never seen anything like it. I’ve been hunting for forty-five years, and I’ve never known a hunt this hard.”

“I suppose the stag has to win from time to time,” muttered Ethel.

The rider, who had his horn slung across his shoulders, was riding jockey-style.

“This isn’t a stag,” he said.

“Then what is it?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

Using the crop on his mare, he straddled the thorny hedge and parted company with Ethel.

She decided to go around one last time before heading home. Her curiosity was still keen, but her horse was flagging. It was not fit enough to gallop for this long. Since Andrew had left, on Saint Nicholas’s day, there was nobody to ride out the horses at Everland on a regular basis.

Andrew had announced he would be back in April, and Paul had absurdly accepted his departure, even though Ethel had pointed out that a groom was useful only during the winter months. As soon as spring arrived, the horses lived outdoors. Ethel didn’t trust the Russian vagrant: he was too gentle, too handsome; he went away for five months of the year, and he played the violin in the garage like a child prodigy.

Suddenly, jumping over a ditch, she landed on the sand and sawdust of a felling area. The horn of a vehicle tooted as her horse reared up high. A car had nearly mown them down. It braked shortly afterward and the driver could be heard letting out a torrent of swearwords. It was pouring rain. And the car was open topped.

Ethel calmed her horse by stroking its neck. This track was completely unsuitable for motor vehicles. There was no reason for a car to be driving around here.

A woman started insulting them from the passenger seat.

Ethel and her horse trotted over to the car.

The driver was holding an open umbrella and examining a scratch on the metal bodywork through a magnifying glass.

“Damn and blast . . .” the driver muttered.

Then the woman in the passenger seat cried, “Vandal! Vandal!”

“Your horse scratched my car!” said the driver.

“Heavens above!” exclaimed the woman. “Look, Ronald, it’s Ethel.”

Ethel had just recognized the entire Cameron family. They resembled a bunch of sopping-wet floorcloths. Lady Cameron’s hairdo had collapsed under a makeshift paper rain hat, and her husband’s ankle boots made dubious
glug-glug
noises with every step he took.

In the back, Tom had turned as pale as the beige car upholstery. This was his favorite form of camouflage.

“Hello,” said Ethel. “Out for a spin?”

“No, my dear,” Ronald Cameron corrected her. “We’re hunting.”

“You’re hunting?” Ethel smiled in amazement, staring at the two picnic hampers swimming on the backseat.

“Yes, we’re the guests of the Earl of Galich. He’s a friend of ours. I’m lending him a field for his horses this evening.”

“He’s a close personal friend,” Beth Cameron was quick to point out.

“We’re hunting by car. It’s more sporty,” boasted her husband.

“I’m very happy to see you, Ethel,” declared Beth Cameron, taking up the baton. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about your plans. This whole story has been rather trying for us.”

“Now is hardly the time or the place,” her husband protested.

“Be quiet, coward!” snapped Beth Cameron.

Tom, who hadn’t said a word up until this point, stood up.

“And you can pipe down too,” shouted his mother before he could even get a word out.

“Th-there! Look!” Tom managed to stammer, pointing at the horizon.

Ethel turned around to see a mud cloud rising up at the end of the path. Thirty riders and fifty hounds were galloping at top speed in their direction.

“Heavens above!” gasped Lady Cameron.

“I . . . I’d better pull over to the side, perhaps,” said Lord Cameron.

“Perhaps you had, yes,” his wife agreed.

The thunder of hooves on the wet path was already audible.

Ronald Cameron started up the engine and clung to the steering wheel. He pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The wheels were spinning on the spot, sending up huge amounts of sawdust and sand.

“Heavens above!” repeated Lady Cameron.

The stampede of dogs and horses was getting ever closer.

Cameron pressed down on the pedal one more time. His wife was bouncing about in the passenger seat.

“You can’t do this to me, Ronald! You simply can’t do this to me!”

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” ventured Ethel, “but I suggest you leave your car and make your way over to the edge. I’ll help you.”

“Never!” boomed Sir Ronald. “I won’t give in!”

“Never!” echoed his wife, who was soaked to the skin and trembling like jellied beef.

“Please, Tom!” cajoled Ethel. “Come with me over to the side.”

Tom glanced at his parents.

“Tom, if you desert us, I shall never speak to you again,” declared his mother.

“Lady Cameron,” shouted Ethel, “they’re almost here!”

“We Camerons don’t behave like that.”

“In any case we’ll be out of here in a flash. This is a brandnew car!”

Tom didn’t budge.

At the last moment, Ethel ordered her horse to ride on.

Fifty hounds and thirty hunters rode straight over the Cameron family and their new automobile. It didn’t take long. At the end of it, there weren’t many spare parts in the car worth saving.

The Cameron family itself, on the other hand, emerged from this experience sufficiently unscathed to continue hunting on foot.

An hour later, just as the hunt was about to disband for the day, a rumor went around that they had found the animal at last.

Hunters and hounds gathered around a small oxbow lake with a bulky gray shape moving in it. Tom and his mother were standing on the shore in a pitiful state.

“He’s got it! He’s caught it!” crowed Beth Cameron, approaching a man who was dismounting from his horse.

In the middle of the braying pack, Ethel recognized the man she had spoken with by the thorny hedge, the rider on the black mare.

“Earl, my dear Earl!” simpered Beth Cameron.

“And who are you?”

“I am Lady Cameron.”

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” said the Earl of Galich, without much regret. He was sure he’d never encountered this muddy specimen before.

“We’ve lent our field for your horses.”

“The field . . . ah, of course. Yes, they did tell me about that. Thank you very much.”

“Look! Sound the horn. It’s my husband. He’s caught the stag with his bare hands.”

A second later, a bulky shape rose up triumphantly out of the lake, and under the beating rain, Ethel could just make out that Ronald Cameron was indeed holding a live animal in his arms.

“A sheep,” murmured the earl, scrunching his eyes.

“Heavens above!” said Lady Cameron. “It’s a sheep.”

My ewe!
thought Ethel.

The ewe had a broken leg. She had gotten stuck in the bog two days earlier. So it hadn’t been the sheep that had kept the hunters on the run.

“A strange day,” the earl concluded.

Galich had politely turned away to spare the Camerons. Even the hounds thought it was a sorry scene. They stopped barking.

They tied the legs of the quavering animal together, and Ethel wedged it in front of the saddle on her horse and rode off.

The hunt vanished into the fog.

Tom Cameron had never felt so embarrassed.

It was the first time that Paul wouldn’t be there for Christmas. His squadron had been posted to India until the rainy season.

So Ethel went down to the village church with Mary, who dragged her along for the celebrations. She also went to please the minister, for whom she had developed a soft spot. This dated back to the time she had caught him picking mushrooms in the Camerons’ woods and hiding them in haversacks beneath his cassock.

The church was full. And hot. The Christmas carols rang out to the far end of the village. The minister noticed Ethel sitting in the pew at the back and even put in a word for stray ewes in his sermon.

Ethel sometimes took the minister out for a spin in her Railton. She would set him a metaphysical question or two while driving at ninety miles an hour downhill:

“Didn’t you ever want to wear trousers?”

The minister would burst out laughing, and Ethel would smile. Nothing she said could shock him.

“Don’t you wonder what you’ll say, if none of it really exists after all?” she had asked him on one occasion.

“None of what?” asked the young minister, cupping his hands close to his ear.

“None of it, none of your stories, none of what you believe in. Heaven and all the rest . . . If it doesn’t really exist?”

The minister started laughing again and shrugged.

“Don’t tell anyone, but it wouldn’t much matter to me!”

“Why?” Ethel had grilled him, narrowly avoiding going off the road.

“I’d ask myself, would I have preferred not to believe?”

She gave him a quizzical look.

“What matters,” he declared midjolt, “is that I can answer this question: Would I have been happier for not believing?”