CHAPTER THIRTEEN
We ride for hours. The hounds lead us over fruitless acres and on all sides the fog hems us in until it seems that we are looping back and forth through one long mist-filled tunnel. Sometimes we break out of the trees into stretches of flatland and the fog runs low against the ground, a shallow smoke river above the wet bramble. The hounds are lost to view burrowing beneath it.
For the most part we're quiet but for Jocelyn, who's shouting out a torrent of banter from the front of the line. He mostly hunts, I think, because of his pride in entertaining, but I've always liked the man and can forgive the way his voice interrupts the peace of the morning. That, and I'm at the back and can only make out about every seventh word. What I do hear is the usual village gossip which, by lacking perspective, magnifies prosaic country wives and postmen to near-Olympian proportion. I try not to imagine how it would sound were I the subject.
The sun is high now in the haze overhead but just as we are all flagging and my back is starting to ache and even Easy is starting to toss and complain, a yap rings out ahead of us. A trail. I can smell her too now, a vulpine tang much sharper than the hounds' muddy domestic stench.
We don't even need Jocelyn's hounds, although I would never allow these men to know that. I can find the fox myself. She's there now in the map of scents along with everything else- the newborn fawn that we passed, hidden and trembling, in a pocket of brush, the rats in the trees overhead, the underground spring beneath the rocks, the spoor and cocoons and stinks and sprays- in the complex mazes of scent that are the forest. (It goes both ways, of course. The reason our hunts are poor, the reason the horses are nervy and the foxes hide, is that even through soap and sulphur and pipe-smoke they can smell the wolf.)
If we are to flush her we must be quick. I don't wait for the hounds to snuffle around and agree. I press a knee into Easy and he jolts to life beneath me and we are running, running.
We crash through the bramble with the other riders on our heels. Branches whip my helmet. I tuck my chin. Easy's body surges through the air, throwing me along with him. Creeks, ditches flash under us. Keadle's shrill whoop behind me. A stile, a fence, and Easy lifts over it in one brutal swing, the jolt as I fall back into the saddle pushing my breath out. Gleeson's horse landing hard with a stumble behind us, Gleeson cursing, Dungey laughing his mad cackle. The hounds bugling in the underbrush just before us. The forest a shattered blur. Branches smashing, clawing me from the saddle. Then suddenly a knot of squirming bodies piles just before me and I pull Easy up sharp, just in time, and he stumbles, knocks a yelping hound, dances back into balance. We've crashed to a stop at a scratched-out burrow under a pile of boulders, too narrow for the hounds to enter. The hunt piles up behind me. Out from the burrow come a slew of sour, ammoniac scents: cubs. We've been after their mother, now home free, and the man in me is relieved.
This hunt, the last one of the season, is over. We mill around offering each other commiseration. The hounds do the same, whining and babbling, digging at the mouth of the burrow and licking each other's faces.
"Must be the last one left in the whole county, I suppose. Ah, well. What a morning," Jocelyn's brick of a mug, red and fierce with shaggy blond eyebrows knit together, is shining with disappointment, a comic frown in the fog.
"At least we found, this time," Keadle chimes in, nodding to me. "Snapped right to him, my lord. Always do. Certainly got one on the dogs, you do."
There is a pure silence.
Everyone looks anywhere else. Some of them eye the dogs, who, as always, are crowded far away from me as they can manage. In the vacuum, I dig for a reply. For it to be convincing it must be both casual and rude. I shake my head at Keadle, pull a face, murmur, "It's time you old men wore eyeglasses."
Keadle is two years younger than I. But you couldn't tell it by the wine bloom that has already made a ruin of his swollen face, and that's why my weak joke is cruel enough to be funny to the rest of them.
A mollified tone to their laughter. I can almost see the thoughts spelling themselves out above their heads as they stand around me, reassuring themselves: the rumors are just the superstitions of peasants. Our fathers, grandfathers might've been peasants, but not us; we're civilized men, men with wealth, not children who believe any fairytale.
Just superstition.
Keadle claps my shoulder. "Luck to next year, anyhow." His voice is cheery but I feel, very subtly, the hesitation in his touch.
We form an ambling, thoughtful line back through the woods, and this time Jocelyn struggles to fill the silence. They lose the trail twice. I have to come up front to bring us back.
.
Easy, clean and brushed down, rugged, given mash and thanks, wants to be let in peace, and I sit on the fence watching him make his slow amble to the cover at the end of the pasture, a tall shadow pulling itself through the field, a deep grey shape against the lavender-grey sky. Evening birds call to each other in the orchard. A nighthawk swoops over me, catching moths. I'm running late to my own engagement, a tab open at the Bell in my name.
The last thing I could want in the world, tonight, is to sit at the Bell. It's not so bad in itself- the private room is dark, the firehose of congeniality that is Jocelyn after his fourth whisky-soda obscures my own shyness, and in honesty I enjoy the novelty of it all. Still I find myself walking slowly up the path. I do, usually, enjoy the unreality of being in that back room, a little drunk, listening to the breezy simplicity of these men, and in that short hour pretending that I am a man too. But tonight I don't want to go.
Harthome is a black cathedral but for Agnes' curtained window and the bright kitchen. It's not until I'm climbing the back steps that I realize how stiff I am, and how tired; how late and how covered in dried mud and sweat. The hall is black but the there are voices coming from the kitchen, a delicious smell, laughter and warmth. I go to the door. Standing just to the side, dark in shadow, I put my eye to the crack and squint into the hot glow.
The stove's door is standing open and they've pulled the little table up alongside it. They've just started- there's a pile of hot sandwiches on a platter between them, leftovers of the roast. Seamus is in his shirtsleeves, his collar opened to his undershirt, and he's laughing. A flush has spread out from the bridge of Rosalind's nose. Her ears are red. Through the crack the heat bathing the kitchen runs up my cold body, patting me with its little velvet paws. I see the cause of my discontent: inside my home, inside this room, another life is happening without me. One that I want. The door creaks just the slightest bit and I realize I'm leaning my forehead on it.
I pull back. I could ask. It is, after all, my house. May I please have one, I could ask. Rather stay in after all, I could say. Can't face all that shouting, I could say. It would sound reasonable; it would be an eminently reasonable request.
But now Rosalind's laughing back at him, with her hand over her mouth. "I do not! I never would!" She says something else, low, that I can't hear. He shrugs, chewing, and the eye I can see is narrowed and teasing. I know that look of his, I have received it, and to see it given away to someone else is starting an agitation in my chest.
My hand is flat on the door, but I can't go in. It occurs to me that I might be trespassing into the last asylum in this house. It's probable that even in my own kitchen I am still a monstrosity and that they are afraid of me. And even if my monstrosity isn't discomfiting, my intrusion would be; it's unthinkable that I should presume upon them. My title, impoverished and rural as it is, never mind the secret it hides, is an irony to me, but not to Rosalind or to her family in the village. There are places one is meant to be, whether I like it or not, and as intensely as I wish it were not so, the kitchen and its warm yellow contentment are closed to me. If I stay, I take my dinner alone in the hollow silence of the dining room.
Behind me the stair to my room is waiting, dark in shadow.
A scraping sound. Seamus is standing up. Rosalind and I both gawk from our opposing vantage points as he picks up a wooden chair from the corner of the kitchen, carries it over to the table, sets it down at the empty place beside his own. Pulls a dish from the rack. Unceremoniously drops a sandwich on the dish, sets the dish before the empty chair. Sits back down and picks up his own sandwich again, his expression blank. Rosalind frowns at him, her brow high. I pull away from the door, and, holding my breath, reach the stair in three panicked strides. Up them, up to the landing as fast and as quietly as I can.
He never one glanced at the door. It's possible that he heard my footstep in the hall, or felt the draught from the front door. But not that he saw me. Still, there is no mistaking what has occurred. I am a coward pacing in my room, and my face is burning, and downstairs Seamus is eating his dinner beside an empty chair, his uncalled bluff.
I stop at my window and look out into the dark of the evening I've just come from. The trees are lost in the haze and so is the path out to the village; there's only a chunk of moon in the sky. A shard of yellow light. Like the light in the crack of the kitchen door. I shake my head. It would be rude not to go on to the Bell; I can't afford rudeness on top of everything else; I run the bath.