She leaned over the crupper, ready for the jump. At the last minute her courage failed. The height, which had before seemed merely daunting, now looked terrifying. No horse could do it, not even this great-muscled giant. But they were both committed and had to go forward. For a moment she thought it shared her doubts; there was a hint of a fumble as it doubled its hind legs under for the leap.
"Haaaa!" she yelled. And she frightened it into the supreme effort that carried it up, soaring and stretching, reaching beyond any achievement it knew of, until, by a hairsbreadth, it gained the crest of the fallen trunk. It did not need the tug of her rein to stop; every ounce of its ability had gone into that leap. There was no momentum left to be checked. Their coming to rest seemed both magic and effortless.
"Heigh!" she gave a cry of relief and delight and turned to Sir George.
He was as pale as the bleached wood on which they were both now perched. "Magnificent!" He merely breathed the word, shaking his head in disbelief. "But mad!"
"Why?" She laughed. "You did it."
"Would you look behind us."
She obeyed. "Oh!" she said.
A ridge, perhaps the roots of an ancient wall, crossed the glade at an angle to the trunk, running under it. Sir George had made his impressive leap from the top of it; she had made hers from fully three feet lower. "That was stupid," she added, beginning to tremble at the thought of what she had done. "But what a hunter!" She patted Fontana's mane.
"No one's going to believe me," he said, looking around. "Did anyone see?"
Automatically she looked around too. And there, over the tops of the trees
that grew on falling ground to their north, there on the other side of the valley was one of the loveliest country houses she had ever seen.
As big as a cathedral it stood, in red Midland brick and warm Oxford limestone, with the noon sun full upon it. The woodland, marching up the hill, vanished before it but reached an arm around to the west, fringing the road, and then ran behind it to the north, forming a long backdrop to the palm house and the terraces. Only the clock tower on the stables showed from behind the trees. With the sun shimmering on the glass of the palm house, and the frost turning every shadow pale blue, the whole place looked like a gem, set perfectly upon the hillside.
"Pretty place, really," Sir George said.
For her it was a citadel.
"Hardly buzzing with activity," she said. Very few chimneys were smoking.
"Only Wyatt himself is here at the moment. He can't stand his wife and children. They're at the family's main estate over Maidenhead way. To them this is just a huntin' lodge. There's only a handful of servants here on board wages."
"Let's go closer then," she said.
They galloped down the rest of the long gentle ride to the river, across a wooden bridge, and then up the grassy slopes to the terraces below the house. It was even lovelier at close quarters. Winter sweet, viburnum, and witch hazel were all in flower; the air was so still that they could hear the distant gurgle of the river from down in the valley. The smoke rose straight from the chimneys.
"Home!" she said suddenly. The display of the Wyatts' wealth, so casually used ("just a huntin' lodge") was more than she could bear.
Beador seemed relieved to be going. They went around the house by the gravel drive to the east. The gravel was a mixture of hard flintstone and sand. The two-mile ridge on which both Panshanger and Maran Hill stood was composed entirely of the same mixture, locally known as "hoggin." It makes an iron-hard road. Today, bound by the frost, it was as good as tarmacadam.
They soon left the estate, crossed the highway, and entered the park around Maran Hill.
"Now there's a happy couple," Sir George said, pointing to the gate lodge. "The Bagots."
The Bagots were nowhere to be seen.
"Yes." Sir George sighed. "I don't think there's a more contented little family anywhere. They adore each other and the children. They never fight. You never hear the children quarrel. They're all the picture of health. The house and garden's like a new pin. Yet I doubt they have meat more than once a week—and I doubt he thinks about money from one year's end to the other."
Nora kept an amused silence. She remembered the laughter and the happy times they had enjoyed in her father's cottage, where "meat once a week" would have been luxury indeed. No doubt the Duke of Bridgewater's agent had thought them happy when he collected their rent each week. But she knew what a constant and life-deforming worry the money had been.
"Yes," Sir George said, "you could base a book of sermons on the Bagots."
"It would probably sell very well too," Nora said, unable to resist it.
"We'll have one last gallop down to Lambs Dell and then up to home, what?" he said, his pastoral vision of the Bagots already forgotten.
"I think I could ride to Wales today," she answered.
But they soon found galloping impossible. Fallen branches littered the rides and new growths of whippy little sapling twigs poked down at head-and-shoulder height to a horseman.
They left the woods and went around by the neighbouring fields—"blind" country where the ditches and drains were all concealed in coarse, overgrown grass. They dared not canter there.
"Refresh my memory now," Nora said. "Which are the farms that belong to Maran Hill?"
They had ridden to the far end of the long gravel ridge. The whole upper valley of the river Maran stretched away from them in a succession of rich pasture, coppice, and deer park. There were a dozen fine estates between them and the distant skyline.
"Since we now own it," Nora prompted, "we ought to know its extent."
Sir George kept silent. He pointed vaguely here and there, scowling, and then let his arm drop.
"I can't follow that," Nora said.
He pretended to be busy adjusting his horse's bridle.
"Show me again," she asked.
He spoke to the bridle. "There aren't any bloody farms."
Quickly, she thought back to the day that the deeds for Maran Hill had arrived. Quite a pile of them. They hadn't checked them all at the time, and then they had forgotten. They hadn't checked the farms!
"I suppose Lord Wyatt won them too!" she said, thinking it could not possibly be so.
But it was. Four farms, nearly eight hundred acres—Wyatt had taken them in
settlement of various wagers.
"I won things off him too," Sir George said defensively.
"For instance?"
"I won three of them back once."
She stifled her fury. There was no point in being angry with him—he was nothing, nothing but a fool. "Show them to me anyway," she said.
Sullenly he pointed them out. They were good farms with plenty of watermeadow along the river banks, all of it drowned in protection against the frosts. Their loss—again to Lord Wyatt—was, at this point, worse than all that had gone before.
"Wyatt is going to have to give them back," she said. "I don't know how, but I'm going to make him."
"You can't. He won them honourably."
"Honour!"
Her scorn stung him at last. "You could hardly be expected to understand. There's no honour in the gutters you came from. But a wager is a matter of honour among gentlemen."
She was so angry she dared not trust herself to speak above a whisper. "You say that to me! When we've honoured your debts? Honoured!" She found her voice. "And you sneer at me about honour, sir? You? Lecture me?"
He could not look at her.
"I swear to you that your honourable gambling partner is going to restore those farms to this estate. Our estate. And you will do nothing to hinder me."
Still he was silent.
"Do you hear?"
"I hear you."
"And you give me your word you will do nothing to hinder me?"
"I give you my word." He reined about and spurred his horse into a gallop.
"I hope I may trust your honour even that far!" she shouted after him.
B
ut she had no idea how to make her threat come about.
Chapter 25
Next day the frost had gone. A fitful northeast wind blew a dampness over the country, threatening rain that never quite fell.
"There'll be scent enough today," she said as they set off again for the meet. This time one of the grooms came too. Nora was once more on Fontana.
It was a huge field, more than eighty riders, all as certain as Nora that the scent would burn today. Their excited babble and their laughter carried far—the cacophony that ruined many a good hunt. Nora's spirits sank.
They drew a long covert upwind between Queen Hoo Hall and Bramfield. Nora, seeing its western end thinly attended, went there at first. But as they drew deeper into the coppice, moving farther east all the while, she began to fear they would leave her entirely behind. Slowly, for she could still hear them less than half a mile away, she walked forward into the thick of it.
If Beador's rides had been bad, these were deplorable. Elderberries, whitethorns, sycamores, and other volunteer saplings of every sort barred the way. Soon she was quite alone and wondering whether or not to go back and make her way around by the fields. Then she heard a commotion in a thicket some way in front and to her left. She urged Fontana carefully ahead. Three loose hounds were in there: one, she was sure when she got a good look, was a bitch, Wrathful, who had impressed her that memorable day last February.
A rider, still out of sight around a bend, came toward her, crashing heavily through the regrowth. As soon as he came to the turn, where the path was open to the sky, she saw it was the Master, Lord Watson Wyatt himself.
"The buggers have found something," he said.
Nora was too astonished to reply. He peered toward her. "Who in hell's name are you?" he asked amiably, still unable to make her out in the thick shade of an ivy-infested oak.
"Mrs. John Stevenson. I hunted with you in February." She was damned if she'd call him Master, speaking like that.
"One of Beador's." He was not the least embarrassed.
"Yes."
He looked away at the dense thicket where the three hounds were working.
"Rioting after a badger," he said, drawing in breath to bellow a discord.
"It's my belief there's an earth in there. Wrathful wouldn't riot."
"Eh?" He paused, uncertain now.
"Unstopped too."
"Devil!" he said and dismounted so as to approach the thicket more closely. "I was sure I knew every earth here. I'm me own huntsman today."
Wrathful had worked round the downhill side of the thicket until she lost the scent; now she had come back and was working around the uphill side. Nora guessed that if there was a fox in there and if it broke, it would seek first to go downhill. She pulled Fontana around and trotted quickly back the way she had come. When she arrived at the edge of the covert, she made her way cautiously along its downhill fringes. There was a rider standing ten yards out in the fallow.
"You'll head him if he breaks here," she warned.
He looked at her scornfully. "They won't find in that!" he said. Then he looked her up and down appraisingly.
But just at that moment came Wrathful's opening challenge, quickly taken up by the other two hounds. The rider spurred for the edge of the covert, immediately in front of Nora, arriving there only just before the fox broke. There was a great deal of crashing behind.
The scornful rider gave the fox no chance to get well away. As soon as it entered the fallow he began an excited scream of "view halloa, halloa!" and flapped his arms.
"No!" Nora shouted, unheard. She could have shot him.
The fox turned at once and went back into the covert, about ten yards from the point where he broke. All the activity around his earth, and the fact that there were a mere three hounds, had combined to make him think the open country might be safer today; now they'd given him proof that it wasn't. He'd go to earth and stay there till dark.
She almost went home then. But it was such perfect weather that if they could only get a fox away, even the most incompetent hunt in England couldn't fail to make something of it.
She went back to the overgrown ride where she had left Lord Wyatt. He was just remounting as she reined in. He had obviously decided to be pleasant to her.
"Gone back to earth," he said. "Sorry I swore, by the way. I was sure you were my cousin." He grinned. "I suppose that makes it worse."
"If true," she said. "There's a young fool down there in pink, shrieking like a banshee and windmilling away. That's what headed Charley back to earth."
He nodded sourly. "That's my cousin, Meredith Wyatt."
They trotted in file up the ride, still having to pull this way and that around saplings and brambles. In a little while they came upon the rest of the pack at the upwind end of the covert. Most of them, to judge by the paw marks, had gone straight up the ride, not working the covert on either side at all. Of course they had drawn blank.
"See that small bit of sticks there?" the Master asked Nora. "In the hollow, two fields away?"
"Yes."
"I'm going to draw that next. From the upwind side—I don't want to surprise the fox and have the hounds chop him. As I'm short of a huntsman, might I ask you, Mrs. Stevenson, very kindly to go downwind and watch him away?"
He had the difficult task of taking the field around and beyond the covert and getting them to stand well back before he could attend to his hounds. The gossiping and the cigar smoke carried strongly downwind to Nora, who had chosen a place to the south of the covert, where she could stand unseen in a gateway, her silhouette lost against a spreading oak at her back.
How often as a girl had she and her father and brothers deserted their looms and raced out to watch the hunt! Many a time she had seen the hounds draw such a covert and heard them open and challenge as the fox broke. And then the music as they followed in full cry! And afterward, the sadness as the pack and the field vanished over the hill, leaving their world silent and dreary once more.
That was the excitement of today: She could follow that music wherever it led.
Lord Wyatt gave one crack of his whip as a signal to his pack to begin drawing the covert. The fox needed nothing more to start him from his kennel. He slipped from the edge nearest Nora as soon as the hounds entered at the farther side. Only she could see him, a gash of red streaking over the pasture. She let him pass her, fifty yards to the east; the temptation to shout was strong but she waited until he was at the hedge. Then "View halloa! halloa!" she screamed, making sure that the pack had started to chase before she spurred Fontana toward the point in the hedge where Charley had threaded through.
But then the fox's behaviour went somehow wrong. He ran a great circle almost passing through the covert where they'd started him.
"A ringer!" people shouted.
Then he ran a short foil along part of his original track and broke abruptly northward, almost dead straight. Through Perrywood he led them, and Watkins Hall, between Datchworth and Broom Hall, over the Stevenage road, through the park at Frogmore Hall and on up the valley of the Beane. All the while a dark suspicion was growing in Nora's mind: a ringer that broke and ran dead straight for so many miles. It was not right. It was not Charley Fox, not in such country as this.
On top of that there was the slovenly, almost token, way they had drawn the first covert. And when they had accidentally found, the Master had sworn, and his cousin Meredith had deliberately headed the fox back to earth. Everything about this chase was wrong.
At Frogmore Hall she turned back. Beador was nowhere to be seen, but she did not care. She needed no squire for the kind of hunting she now had to do.
A furlong short of the small covert where the fox had started she slipped from Fontana's back. Quietly she went forward to the edge of the trees.
There was a scuffle, and then a woman's giggle, among the undergrowth toward the centre of the small coppice. Nora tied Fontana to a thorn and walked briskly toward the sound.
The man and
the girl were guiltily rearranging their clothing when she reached them. Their movement dislodged a stone beer jar that rolled into a small depression and began glug-glugging its contents into the soil. The man leaned quickly forward, on hands and knees, to right it.
Nora put her foot on the jar. "Your name?" she demanded.
He looked at the beer, gurgling away. He tried to tug it but had no leverage. She stood more firmly on the jar. The girl was hiding her face, pushing her hands up into her hair.
"Bryant," he said. "Charles Bryant."
"And you?" The girl turned completely away from her. The movement exposed the very thing she had come expecting to find: a large jute bag. The couple had been lying on it.
The Rich Are with You Always Page 26
