The eyes dropped. ‘No. Today’s different. I—I was coming to get you. I thought we could go for a walk.’ Beautifully simple and knavish. He was a politician, this boy. He twisted you round his little finger. And she loved him dearly.
‘Looks like you’ve got me,’ she said crisply. ‘And something else as well coming to you from your father, you lucky boy. But now that you are here, I don’t suppose you’ve seen Brand?’
‘Buggy? Yes,’ Toby said promptly. ‘Up there.’ He jerked his head. ‘I saw him in the bushes near the deer part.’
‘Thank heaven for that,’ she breathed her relief, and responded willingly to his: ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’ All the same, the occasion could not be overlooked. ‘Toby, do something for me. Don’t cut school like this again. It’s not fair on Daddy. He’s got a lot tied up in you.’
‘Investments, do you mean?’ The brow tramlining with interest made him very like Rory.
‘Bang on!’ she approved. ‘There’s everything invested in you, Toby—money, time, thought, and a great deal of judgment. You’re the biggest thing he has and sometimes the biggest headache. But not always. When you discovered the hare netting that day he was so proud of you. We all were, of course, but Daddy most of all. Do you know why?’
The head shook, quickly and selfconsciously.
‘Because it proved he was right about you. Backed his judgment. Showed how alike you are. The spit of each other, actually.’
His glance was bashful and peony red. His smile was bashful too and short-lived. In the next second he was swaggering again, hitting at the bracken. And looking ridiculously like his father.
He was like him also in the way he knew the forest. They were making for the deer lawns as she had done five days ago under Rory’s guidance, but now in daylight it was possible to see that over the right-hand rim of ivy and bramble was a boulder-strewn precipice.
‘See down there!’ Toby pointed. ‘That little house. Willie Byrne lives there.’ They went sometimes to visit ‘Willie’.
‘Not that way, I hope?’ Haidee remarked. In places there seemed to have been a landslide. In others the drop was very nearly sheer.
‘ ’S’all right,’ Toby said, pleased at the impression he had made. ‘There are roots and things to hold on to. You could do it in ten minutes. The road takes nearly an hour.’
Haidee, who in fear and trembling had just checked that no mangled flame-gold body was lying at the bottom, said she would take the road.
‘You couldn’t if you were in a hurry,’ her companion countered. ‘I mean a real hurry. When we had the big fire here last year he did it to ring the Brigade.’
Toby habitually referred to his father as ‘he’. Haidee shuddered, picturing Rory’s body making that perilous descent. For herself, she was not brave. She could not imagine herself ever responding to a situation with such reckless physical courage.
They went back to the left-hand side of the wood strip and she recognized the deer entries Rory had previously shown her. It seemed a long way for Brand to have travelled, but Toby was confident of his whereabouts. He had seen him skulking in the bushes.
‘Oh, leave it,’ Haidee said at last. ‘He’s moved on. He’s probably home by now.’
Toby, however, loath to give up, had darted off the track. She saw him duck under a green overhang and noticed despairingly that he had a rip in the seat of his pants. Nothing she could do about it now. Rory would just have to woo back his former cleaning lady. And then she heard a gasp, rather a frightened gasp, and after it nothing.
When, heart in mouth, she dived in her turn into the tunnel of laurels, Toby was standing crimson-cheeked, his hands by his sides. A man was staring down at him. She knew the man was not a forestry employee and she did not like the look of him. On the other hand, just because a person was unkempt... She hesitated and to her shame the initiative came from Toby.
‘I suppose you know you’re trespassing,’ he said squeakily. ‘It’s private round here.’
‘D’ye tell me?’ the man returned. ‘I think you’re a bit out of date, you know. What about all them notices around welcoming the public?’
‘That’s only when there’s a nature trail open. There isn’t one up here and you’re not allowed. Sorry.’ Toby’s cheeks still carried tell-tale blotches of red. But he had made his mark. The intruder shifted irritably.
‘Okay, sonny, keep your hair on. How do I get out of here?’
‘I’ll take you, I think. That way we’ll know you’re not dropping cigarettes about.’ The near-perfect reproduction of Rory’s blunt tones was fascinating, if not to the addressee who in his turn, had coloured.
‘Show us, then,’ he mumbled sulkily.
Haidee, who would not for diamonds have left Toby alone with such a person, accompanied them to the boundary fence. On the other side of this stretched the heath and in the distance was the ruin where they had waited for the deer.
‘Cross there,’ Toby directed. ‘Keep bearing right and you’ll come to the road. It takes you down past the waterfall. Don’t fall in!’
The humour was not appreciated. Face like a thundercloud, the man edged under the wire and shambled off across the scrub.
‘Bleedin’ kids,’ he muttered under his breath, and Toby sent Haidee an elated grin. She was about to compliment him on his performance when out of the corner of her eye she saw a flash of golden red. Toby saw it too.
‘There he is! There’s Buggy! Over there.’
He dived under the fence and Haidee went hot-foot after him.
‘Brand!’ she called. ‘Here, Brand! Pish-wish!’
‘Why is he running away?’ Toby complained. ‘He knows us. Silly old Bug.’
After the way he had handled the trespasser, she hadn’t the heart to reprove him for the hated ‘Bug’, and anyway, what had got into Brand? He liked to tantalize, but he always let himself be seen.
‘There’s his tail. He’s in there,’ Toby hissed, and sure enough there it was, sticking out from under the wire—Brand’s golden brush with the tuft of white at the end.
They grabbed for it simultaneously. It swished from their reach and the same red-gold streak bounded through the undergrowth. A few yards away it stood and looked at them, its body tapering down to its slim black paws. It was laughing fit to break its heart. Or so it seemed. The jaws were open, a pink tongue lolled and the long pointed face was merry. But it wasn’t Brand.
‘Golly, it’s a fox!’ Toby shouted. ‘It was a fox all the time. Well, what do you know?’
Haidee knew that she was a little tired and a lot distracted. She had not found Brand, she would never make the noon bus, and yet she must leave Glenglass before Rory returned. But at that moment Toby spoke.
‘Johnny, do you see those men up there?’
Haidee could see three figures standing on a hillock. She did not recognize them.
‘The small one walking over,’ Toby said excitedly. ‘He’s one of the ones we caught with the hares. Do you remember we met him afterwards talking to that man Daddy doesn’t like?’
Yes, she remembered that. Paul had come over to the car and she’d been worried in case it would lead to trouble with Rory. But worried only for the sake of peace. Surely Toby was not suggesting anything more sinister?
She glanced back to find him biting his lip. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m trying to think,’ he muttered. ‘He doesn’t like people coming up here. It’s the most private part of the forest. It’s where the deer come.’
That she could endorse from experience, but in this instance there seemed no sign of the men coming close enough to scare. They were still on top of the hill. She strained her eyes to see if she could distinguish the features of the man Toby had recognized. Impossible. She was much too nearsighted, but as she looked she realized that the three figures had become four.
‘That’s our one!’ Toby gasped. ‘He was in here looking for them. That’s it, Johnny. That’s it. He was going to rouse them out.’
&n
bsp; Suddenly his wide-open eyes and the passionate feeling in his voice were portrait-plain. So often Suzanne, like the elusive doe, had come so far but had always receded again. Now, Haidee realized, she was here at last, in her son, blazing with fury, ready to leap into action. But this could be a dirty business and Toby could get hurt.
He had darted off and she followed, dropping on all fours when he motioned her to do so. Below them the ground shelved into a dell and in it a number of fallow deer were quietly feeding.
Haidee had her invariable first impression of unreality. The delicate gold-brown shapes embossing the green were straight out of a book of legends. She stared silently at the arch of a down-bent neck, a comical black button nose, a pair of ears rotating wildly as one of the group looked up. It was a doe group. The rut was over and the herd had reverted again to segregation of the sexes.
And that it was real, only too bitterly so, was evident. A man’s figure had appeared on the slope some distance to the right. He seemed about to climb down and he was carrying something—what she could not be sure until the sun caught it and the barrel glinted.
‘It is a gun!’ Toby’s voice cracked painfully. As in her own case, sight of the weapon had turned any excitement he might have been feeling to a cold sickness. It was in his face and in the murmur which she was sure she was not meant to hear: ‘Oh, golly, what am I going to do?’
The man went back to the hilltop and seemed to be talking to his companions.
‘Are they going away?’ Haidee suggested hopefully.
Toby was wiser. ‘They’re just deciding which way to come at them. The wind’s wrong from that end.’
‘Then they can’t shoot from the top?’
‘Too chancy.’ He shook his head.
Agonizing as the circumstances were, she had to marvel at his maturity. He was only ten years old, but she’d followed him as though he was Rory. And now he had scrambled to his feet. ‘I don’t care what they do to me, I’m going to put them out.’
Haidee gripped his arm. It taxed her very hard, but restrain him she must. He was only a child and with men of that type, especially armed men, anything could happen. What would a million deer be worth if Toby were injured?
‘No, Toby,’ she said firmly. ‘Not on your own. That’s sense.’ It was a testing moment. Suzanne’s child, she asked herself, or Rory’s. Disciplined or irresponsible? ‘He'd say that, actually,’ she added.
‘All right,’ Toby gave in. ‘I’ll get someone. You stay here, Johnny, and don’t let them see you. I’ll be as quick as ever I can.’
Rory could count himself lucky in his son. He had passed every test with flying colours. His last: ‘Don’t let them see you’ rang in her ears as she left the cover of the bushes. That he would be as quick as possible she did not doubt, but even with his speed it was a long way through the wood, so obviously she could not wait for him. This was something that she, miserable coward that she was, must handle on her own.
She made no bones about it. She was deplorably fainthearted and the prospect of facing four rough customers with guns was daunting in the extreme. She certainly couldn’t press a trespassing charge. What she must do, and quickly, while Toby was out of the way, was to scatter the deer. She could blunder straight down the slope where she stood, but Toby had been right about the wind. It was blowing dead into her face. The skilled and gender approach would be to get in front of it. That way the deer would scent her and be warned at the first possible moment.
So far so good. She must first work her way round to the head of the dell. That it would bring her well up to the area where the men had been standing was something she just had to face. Toby had faced his man in the wood while she had stood there lacking the gumption to speak. Toby, green at the gills, would have faced all four men and their guns. Toby was ten years old.
There were times when she couldn’t stand herself. This was one.
Look a lion in the mouth, or was that a gift horse? It didn’t matter because anyway it had something to do with teeth, and as she crept along, skirting the little hill, it seemed that her lions’ teeth had been drawn. The men had disappeared. There wasn’t sight nor sound of them as she broke cover and stood cautiously facing down the side of the dell. Luck or the miracle still held.
There it lay, a clear green oval, and there were the does feeding peacefully, their white tails going like rudders. In light of the anti-climax it seemed heartless to scare them, but by now they’d got wind of her and started to move. They moved with dignity and at their own pace, purposeful but unhurried.
Haidee walked down the dell behind them. As she lessened the distance the deer quickened their leisurely gait. She felt sorry for them, but thank heaven it was like that, thank heaven they were upright and not on their backs with their feet beating the air.
A premonition? The thought had just occurred when, astonishingly, one of the foremost does stumbled. She seemed to keel over, but she didn’t fall. The ones behind streaked past her and from the boulders ahead a rifle cracked. Another doe stumbled. Barks of alarm and one heartrending cat-like scream tore up the previous silence.
It happened so quickly that at first it was not real. For a few merciful seconds both the tottering and the screaming passed before Haidee’s eyes and ears in a meaningless ding-dong. Seconds only. Then she was chasing down the valley, sobs rising in her throat.
There had been no miracle, the poachers hadn’t gone. They had merely manoeuvred down-wind for the stalk. They were there in the boulders at the lower end of the dell and she had driven the does straight into range.
As her brain cleared she realized that the marksmanship was very poor, but this was no good thing. She had heard Rory on ‘shotgun merchants’ who left wounded animals behind them. And as yet these ‘merchants’ had not seen her, for their fire kept coming. Someone had spotted her, though—on the cliff above her, indistinguishable but gesticulating. His arms were saying: ‘Get back,’ but he didn’t understand. She dashed on, raking desperately into the centre of the dell. They would see her now, they would have to.
The frenzied deer were beginning to thin out. She found herself in the middle, surrounded. The draught of another bullet singed her cheek. She stopped—she had no breath for more—and stood exhausted, her arms flailing like branches in a gale.
And then she was grabbed, violently and with no tenderness. Force against which she could not struggle half pulled, half dragged her away.
Rory’s voice thundered in her ears. ‘What in damnation...’ His hand clouted her shoulder and it hurt. ‘You little fool! What do you think you’re doing? Not even Suzanne would ever have been so crazy!’
‘Not even Suzanne.’ The words, themselves like rifle fire, cracked in her ears cutting out the barking of the does and reducing the world to two people, herself and a man with bright watchful eyes.
‘How long have you known?’ she faltered.
‘All the time,’ he said carelessly.
‘All the time?’
‘Yes. Let me spell it out for you. I have no wife. Suzanne died years ago.’
‘Died? Then why doesn’t anyone know?’ She was too staggered to feel afraid.
‘Know? Of course they know,’ he said briskly. ‘Everyone in Glenglass knows I’m a widower. I’m quite sure Toby told you himself his mother was dead.’
Against such dexterity she was useless. ‘Yes, but it’s still a lie—sort of—and very cruel. All these years you knew and you let her hope.’
‘Precisely,’ he said without emotion. ‘All these years I knew and I let her hope.’
The world came slowly back, dripping in over the rim of the dell in faces and voices. ‘Yes, she’s all right,’ Rory shouted back. ‘We’re coming up.’
Haidee looked back shrinkingly at the deer. The holocaust was over. Those that could had scattered up the slopes, those that could not were staggering about, heads down, forelegs sagging.
‘Never mind looking,’ Rory’s voice was curt. ‘Let’s get out of her
e.
‘Up,’ he rasped as she hesitated. ‘Unless you want me to carry you.’ A hand, firm and compelling, went under her elbow.
The glimpse, however, had been shattering. She was near tears.
‘Come on. We haven’t got all day,’ he said roughly.
How had it come about that he was there at all? From Glenglass across Dublin to the airport was a long and traffic-fraught run. The question was smoothly disposed of. He had not wanted to be away too long, so he had taken Jennie merely to the city terminal and put her on the coach. On the way home, passing Willie Byrne’s cottage, the old man had flagged him down. He had got to thinking about ‘a fella t’other day who’d asked a power of questions about getting up to the deer’.
If the intention had been to galvanize it succeeded.
‘But that was for me,’ Haidee interrupted indignantly. ‘It’s true Paul did ask questions. I was with him.’ Apparently this was no surprise, for Rory’s head nodded. ‘It was because I wanted to see the deer, that’s all.’
To this he had nothing to say. His knees bent, he was digging for footholds in the slippery grass. ‘One of these days,’ Haidee remembered Paul saying of him, ‘he’ll get what he’s asking for. And more power to the man that gives it to him.’ Paul had been seen with one of the poachers. Paul had virtually dragooned her into visiting Willie.
‘You’re not suggesting...’ She hadn’t the stomach to finish.
‘Suggesting is all I can do. It’s probably all he did. He wouldn’t have the guts to do it himself. He’d be the contact man. We’ll never know,’ he concluded. ‘But that’s it, for my money.’
Continuing, he explained that while he had been with Willie, Toby had burst in seeking help. Toby, it seemed, had been as quick as his promise. He had not gone through the woods. He had dropped over the crags as he had seen his father do. It had taken no more than ten minutes and the rest was history.
‘And history I mean, girl,’ the recital ended discouragingly. ‘It will be a long time before you live that down. What in heaven’s name were you about?’
Could he not see? Could he not give her credit for trying? And actually the shot fired seconds before he’d dragged her to safety had been the last. Not soon enough, though. Her eyes, now brimming, were drawn back in spite of themselves to the scene below where men were now mingling with the foundering animals. For a second everything tilted and she grabbed at a tussock of grass.
Dear Deceiver Page 20
