Haidee considered him. ‘If you want to know what I think, no reason why you should, of course, but if you do, I think you were being deliberately kind and thoughtful. My mother should thank you. As she can’t, I do.’
For a second the blue eyes met her, candid as a child’s and pleased.
‘Thank me by minding where you walk,’ Rory commanded.
They were still in the woods, but ‘Big Oak Territory’ and Cats Spinney had long been left behind. These could be tagged ‘the Deep Woods’, and their sootiness had a brooding air. In it, she felt sure, every bank and bough and burrow held a pair of eyes and all were trained on her. The feeling was not new, but it had never been so strong and, of course, it was logical since this stretch of woodland was on the farthest boundary of the forest and had not been opened up.
There was a sudden crash as something broke cover. Unseen, but the branches were shaking. A squirrel, Haidee supposed.
‘Getting tired?’ Rory asked. ‘You’re sticking it well,’ he commented when she reassured him. ‘Not so young now after all. Thirty-two.’
‘Do you think I look it?’ The woman in her spoke. For the first few days it had seemed impossible that twenty-five should pass for the early thirties and she had dreaded his challenge. It had never come and now, perversely, she had descended to wanting it.
‘No-o. But I suppose it comes out of a bottle.’
She was so furious she could have choked. Fortunately the darkness hid her face. ‘No. No bottle, actually.’
‘Then it must be a clear conscience.’
Mute and hot-cheeked, she blessed the fact that his torch was beamed downwards on the path. Clear conscience. If he only knew!
‘I think you have got more honest, Sue,’ he observed. ‘And for once you’ve put your cards on the table, told me why you came and convinced me that it’s no good asking you to stay. Will you and Paul make it legal this time? After we get ourselves sorted, of course.’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.’
‘I think you should,’ he said gravely. ‘You’re not getting any younger and he’s fond of you. I saw that the other day. Made me think there’s truth in one man’s poison.’
‘I have no plans to marry.’ Thank heaven her voice had steadied. ‘Neither Paul nor anyone else.’
‘Well, there I’m not with you,’ Rory announced amiably. ‘I have.’
He lifted the torch slightly so that it picked out a small dark shape scurrying noiselessly across the path.
‘Mole,’ he said laconically. ‘I like moles. Best earth I ever got for the garden the moles dug up for me. It’s a fact. I used to watch where they were working and take the soil home with me. It was lovely stuff, pure loam, very rich. But what was I saying?’
‘You were about to get married,’ she reminded him tightly.
‘Not immediately, worse luck.’ He chuckled. ‘I’m having to bide my time, but between you and me and the deer I’ve got high hopes of her.’
The pause was so expectant and the voice so boyish and confiding that Haidee had to put self aside. The last thing she wanted—she couldn’t understand why it should be the last thing, but it was—the last thing she wanted was to hear about the girl he planned to marry, and the last lips she wanted to hear it from were his. But there it was. He was obviously bursting to talk about Jennie and he sounded about twenty-two years old.
‘Is she anything like me?’ she asked lightly. ‘Or have you learned from experience?’
‘She couldn’t be more unlike you, Suzanne, and that is exactly what I’ve done,’ Rory returned happily. ‘And what’s more I’ve got you to thank for it. These past five weeks you’ve opened my eyes. I’ve really seen you. And the past. And I know exactly where I’m going.’
‘And who you’re going with?’
‘That too, I hope.’ He stopped for a minute and shone the torch about them. ‘Entries,’ he said, pointing to places in the thickets where a passage seemed to have been worn. ‘They get in here. They think they fool me, but they don’t.’
Her blood ran cold. ‘You—don’t shoot them?’
His ‘no’ was short and discouraging. With it came a change of subject. ‘As I was saying, this girl I’m going to marry—if you’re interested?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, naturally, since I haven’t asked her yet I can’t tell you her name. Guess at it if you like.’ Did he have to be so heartrendingly young and naive? ‘She’s super, really super. You might think a puff of wind would blow her away, but she’s game as a lion. And true. True as steel. She sets a goal for herself and she’ll get there if it kills her. Not, please the pigs, that she’ll ever get far from Glenglass. She loves it just as I do.’ He stopped and she thought: ‘How different from the way he thinks of me.’
‘You’re quite a poet,’ she said frostily.
‘Am I?’ he chuckled elatedly. ‘Well, I’ve got inspiration.’
You love Jennie, Haidee reminded herself, you’ve worried about her, you’ve prayed for her future. Be glad for her—and a thousand times for Rory.
‘She sounds a paragon of virtue. Is she as nice to look at?’
‘She’s gorgeous,’ he said simply.
Ahead, a grey veil hung over the capsule of darkness. Beyond it, features swam mistily, a wire fence, scrubby bushes, a moon-pale stretch of heath. On both sides of the fencing the herbage had been pressed down.
‘Abatures,’ Rory said, grinning. ‘Deer beds to you.’ He seemed to be ignoring the fact that Suzanne knew about deer. Uncanny that, but Haidee did not complain. Her own ignorance was total and she welcomed the pointers he gave her, trees from which in places the bark had been stripped, one or two which had been used as fraying-stocks, and branches which had been racked by deer entering cover.
‘Then you allow them in the forest?’ she asked.
‘They get in. We don’t encourage them, but where it’s possible they have unofficial sanctuary. Well, took at it this way. In Ireland there are no Deer Laws, a lot of poaching and very little private preservation. We have to watch them, of course, like the squirrels, but there are only little herds here at the moment and no fear of being over-run. The fear is much more for them, that they’ll become extinct. So I know my deer and where to find them and the less number of other people that know it the better I’m pleased.’
A point of view absolutely her own though it was in contrast with the garrulousness of old Willie.
Rory held the wire and she scrambled under it.
‘Quiet now,’ he warned. ‘Don’t talk till I tell you. They’re not far off and they’re timid.’
Once more he was carried away, this time by his feeling for the creatures he protected. It was the more touching because like their whereabouts he kept it so secret. Why suddenly had he let out this hidden self, young, full of tumbling words and glowing with enthusiasm? Hers not to reason why, Haidee decided, following him across the heath. The future might be Jennie’s, but for herself there would always be this, down all the years until she was an old, old woman full of days, this night when he had admitted her to what he really was.
Another sweet wonder was that their communication no longer depended on words. Rory pointed to a ruin in the distance and she divined that this was their goal. Shortly afterwards he pointed again, this time to droppings, and once he stooped and picked up—quite thrilling this and just as the woodmen had told her—portions of cast antlers.
She was examining them eagerly when she felt his fingers on her arm and saw that he was staring across the tufty lawn. He had not moved a muscle, she didn’t either, except for her eyeballs.
Unmistakably, it was a deer. A very small one standing against a tree. It could have been doe or fawn and it was so motionless that it might have been painted on the trunk. She was gazing entranced at the slim goat-like shape which moonlight had blanched to the colour of a unicorn when the pressure of Rory’s fingers increased. Plainly, he was directing her eyes to the left. She looked
and at first saw nothing. The fawn was alone, or was it?
The movement just above the ground was barely perceptible, a flick was all, it seemed. But it was enough to show, silly perhaps, but Haidee’s heart missed a beat with excitement, that what at first sight had looked like twigs on the heath were antlers. They flicked again as she watched. At the same time Rory’s hand began guiding her back. For the first time he spoke, in a whisper: ‘We’ll have to get down wind.’
She had read that deer had wonderful vision, excellent hearing and an acute sense of smell, and when at last after a wide detour and an amount of taking cover, they reached the ruined cottage, she understood how true this was. Three bucks and five or six does were sitting where stunted trees formed a rough circle. Each set of antlers from the tops to the brow tines were statue still, as were the pale spoon-heads of the young bucks, but each and every ear in the group seemed to be rotating like pedals.
‘The finest mammal in these islands,’ Rory said quietly. ‘And the most persecuted.’
Within the cottage ‘hide’ it was safe to talk. These, Haidee learned, were fallow deer, more descendants of escapees from Powerscourt Park. Their bright red brown was presently spotted with yellowish white, but by nest month it seemed they would be in darker pelage with no spots.
‘You’re in luck,’ Rory whispered. ‘They’re not one bit bothered.’
So it seemed. An owl screeched, but the deer did not scatter. Their heads turned as one and languidly to give a vista of black button noses and antlers swaying like the corps de ballet.
The head of the largest buck was particularly well opened and had eleven jags as best Haidee could count them. Rory opined that he was in his sixth year. The other two bucks he put down as sorels, in venery the term for a third-year male fallow. All three were grunting huskily and this apparently was a characteristic of the rut. Great Buck would have gained his harem by the process of dispossession.
It seemed now, however, that the strife was o’er. Domesticity reigned. One of the sorels scratched himself enjoyably with a hind foot. The others fed peacefully on the stalky grass, their necks looking very slender for the weight of their heads. Fallow deer antlers are palmated, on top the croches grow like the palm of a hand. Rory explained this too while Great Buck chivvied his does nosing at their black-bordered rumps.
Haidee, accustoming herself to the landscape by moonlight, had now got her bearings. The heath was surely the green band she had looked up at from Willie Byrne’s cottage. Above it bare crags towered to the ridge of Glenglass; below, the north face dropped to the forest, the house and the village. The south face should bring one down eventually to the boundary of Powerscourt. It was exciting to find that her hunch that day about the deer had been correct.
‘Is there a road somewhere in that direction?’ she hazarded, pointing.
‘There is,’ Rory said shortly. ‘Only fit for a land rover or a tractor, but I wish it wasn’t there. Some joker came up here last spring with a crossbow thinking he was Robin Hood and got one of them on the flank. By the mercy of Providence, I found it soon enough to prevent a lingering death.’ He saw the white wordless horror in her face. ‘All right as it happened, the deer recovered, but you see why I don’t want this place publicized.’
She saw only too well. There were still no words for her revulsion or blazing anger.
Great Buck chose that moment to lead off and his train fell in behind him, the does skirmishing like nervous kittens.
‘I think we’ll hang on for a bit,’ Rory decreed. ‘Beginner’s luck. You might have other visitors.’
Whatever about beginner’s luck—fallow deer were not numerous in Glenglass—Haidee’s was only beginning. Rory directed her eyes to a soggy churned-up place where water glinted, and hardly had he done so than a dark thick-bodied shape came startlingly across the moonlight on the heath. The stag, a heavy-maned eight-pointer, threw itself on its back in the bog hole and wallowed ecstatically. It rose again and galloped off with tufts of peat snagged to its antlers. At once a smaller shape jumped into the pool for its turn.
‘That’s his fag,’ Rory explained. ‘You’ll often see young ones using a wallow after the master stag.’
For Haidee the hours raced by. The night was cold and the air frost-thin, but excitement kept her glowing. For some time after the master and his esquire had wallowed the cottage-eye view of the heath stayed like an empty stage. Empty but waiting, with, for overture, the voice wafting in roars and bellows from the ridge.
Rory’s deer lore was inexhaustible—and fascinating. ‘Hart,’ for instance, was commonly a male red deer of six years or more, probably a ten-pointer, and on Brendon forest in Somerset the local name for a wild deer was ‘forester’.
He laughed as he told her. ‘So one of these fine days I’ll grow my antlers. Horns, of course, I’ve had for a number of years!’
The jest reminded her of a piece of information previously imparted, to wit, that some stags, known as hummels, never grew antlers at all. Was there a human parallel? Rory, so imperious, and Paul, so peaceable, had both loved Suzanne, and on that stamping ground the unattired stag had won.
‘What’s the matter? You look very serious all of a sudden,’ Rory remarked. It was one way he certainly did not look. The first time they had ever walked through the forest, the moon, she remembered, had bleached all colour from his face. Tonight between dark sideboards that suggested fancifully the forward ‘tines’ of antlers his temples and cheeks showed their warm tan and his mouth quitted with amusement.
‘I was wondering are there any hummels round here?’
‘Oh yes. I saw one last week. Enjoying himself very much.’ He grinned. ‘Humble by name, but not by nature. If this were a deer forest the stalkers would have roused him out before the rut broke so that he couldn’t sire calves like himself.’
It was said strangely. She wondered for the moment if he could possibly have read her thoughts about himself and Paul.
‘It’s impossible then for a hummel’s calf to have antlers?’
‘Not impossible. Unlikely. Unlikely they’d be any good.’ Again she had the feeling that they were really discussing something else. The happy look had left his face. It looked stem again and set.
The night of beginner’s luck kept its top-of-the-bill offering till last.
‘Listen,’ Rory commanded. His quicker ears had caught the click of antlers.
The brown stag coming into view was even to inexpert eyes a beauty. He was a twelve-pointer, well affected, between four and five feet at the shoulder. His coat was thick and glossy and he was snorting vapour. Behind him strung out in single file came his harem of six.
‘By George,’ Rory said softly, ‘he’s a royal.’
In former times this had denoted a hart hunted by the king or queen. Now, less romantically, it referred to a twelve-pointer with a three-point crown-shaped top to each antler.
The one before them now had started to roar and from the near distance his challenge was taken. To Haidee’s astonishment—this really had seemed too much to expect—the dark shape just visible forty or so yards away was quite as large and in fact heavier than the hart royal, but his big head was unfurnished.
‘There’s your man for you. What do you think of him?’ Rory whispered.
Haidee was trying not to desert the maxim which had always seemed so personal to glasses, uninteresting brown hair and silly startled eyes. ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ But the truth was she didn’t like the hummel. And she didn’t like his tactics. Here was a parcel of hinds in tow and liking it, and like the serpent in Eden—
She stopped thinking about the stags, both of whom were now posturing and roaring defiance, and remembered that other group which had had a serpent, Rory, Suzanne and Toby.
‘I don’t go a bundle on him,’ she said replying belatedly to the question. ‘I’m sure they don’t either.’ She pointed to the hinds.
‘They don’t have much say in it,’ she was told.
&n
bsp; She was sorry for them. ‘The eyes of the herd,’ Rory had already described them, the ones even in a mixed group most likely to spot you first, and, for all that, to stand meekly by and not to be allowed even to lift a foot in the fight for your own person...
‘I’m glad I’m not a hind.’
‘I’m glad too,’ Rory said in a practical tone.
Suddenly it was no longer a light conversation. No word, no touch was necessary. His hands in fact were by his side and hers in the pockets of her jacket. And it was quiet, as quiet as snow. At first only their lips met and that was quiet too, and tender. And then it changed. Her arms were spanning his rough tweed back, his arms had wrapped her like a cloak. She felt his chin on her hair and she hid her face and climbed in like a stag going to harbour.
Oh, how I love him, how much, how terribly much...
Above her head Rory said lightly: ‘Suzanne, let’s do something incredible. Let’s try honesty.’
Suzanne ... it was a dash of ice water. But with it sanity returned. So long as he thought there was the slightest chance of a reconciliation with Suzanne he would continue to hope. As he had put it that afternoon at Glendalough she was his canker, the thing he kept burning his wings at. It was like looking at two paths, one in sunshine with Jennie, one under stormclouds perpetually harking back.
Dear Deceiver Page 18
