The Horseman

by Tim Pears

  ‘The last poacher what laid a hand on me,’ Budgell said. ‘Docker Furze. The autumn of nineteen o seven. Whacked me with his cudgel, and it was made of oak. When people see this, you know what it makes em think of, boy?’ Leo shook his head. ‘It reminds em of the state Docker was in when I was done with the old boy, that’s what. He’s still only able to eat liquids to this day, I’m told.’

  After breakfast Sid took Leo to the keeper’s barn. On the table was a bolt of red cloth from which he cut a square some two feet by two with a pair of scissors. ‘Use that for size to cut another one, and carry on for me,’ he told Leo. The scissors were sharp and cut the red cloth with ease. Sid punched holes in two adjacent corners of each square and tied them with string to ash sticks cut to size and with two nicks cut ready for the string to bite into. ‘We’ve twenty beaters, and I’ll make up five spare,’ Sid said.

  The boy’s brother Sid was sixteen and sole under keeper for the head gamekeeper Aaron Budgell. Sid was fascinated by all animals, not horses in particular; it was the other way round for Leo.

  ‘There’s six Guns tomorrow,’ he said. ‘One a they’s a woman, if you can believe that. Lord Grenvil’s daughter. Mister Budgell reckons t’will give us bad luck. Her’s here like as a chaperone, so the master’s daughter can shoot this year and not look out a place, for she did insist upon it and as we all know the master cannot refuse Miss Charlotte nothin.’

  Leo asked whether he would be carrying the cartridge bag for Lord Grenvil’s daughter.

  ‘I don’t reckon so,’ Sid said. ‘Us should give her a woman for loadin, and a cartridge girl, and some other trapper for pickin up an all, see how she gets on. Mister Budgell reckons her’s too pretty to be able to shoot straight. Maybe Lady Grenvil’s tryin to marry her off. Thinks her’ll meet a good man on the shootin field.’

  Leo cut the red cloth. As his father’s tack room was filled with the accoutrements of the carter’s profession so this keeper’s barn possessed an assortment of strange tools and devices. Traps of different kinds, some surely antiquated, half gone to rust. Spades with hooks at the end of their long handles. Nets. Bird scarers.

  ‘The master and Miss Charlotte. Lord Grenvil. The Miss Grenvil. Colonel Giffard from over the Quantocks. And a Mister Carew – he’s some London toff not been here before. Arrived last night. I don’t know nothin about him. Tis his bag you’ll carry.’

  Leo finished cutting the flags. He offered to help tie them to the ash sticks but Sid said that he should do them himself. It was not that he did not trust his younger brother but rather that if one came loose he had no one to blame but himself, that was it. Leo studied the keeper’s implements while Sid talked. A shelf of canisters. Renardine, creosote, paraffin. Strychnine, arsenic. A knuckle-duster with two spikes.

  ‘I do believe the master has shoot days out a social obligation. He could do without em, I reckon. What he loves is goin out with me or Mister Budgell, walkin up the hedgerows and havin a pot-shot at a pheasant or two. A hare. They old Labs a his potterin alongside.’

  Leo asked his brother if he knew how much he stank. Sid said he believed it for he’d been skinning stoats. They had some new steel gins that worked a treat. ‘I’ll make a few bob,’ he said. ‘Stoats, weasels, to go with the rabbits. We’ve had a few cats come into our coverts and all. Mister Budgell sends the skins off up to London. He gets a shillin or two for a stoat, four shillin for a good cat, and he shares it all with me.’

  When the flags were finished Sid rolled each one around its thin pole and stacked them in a corner. Then he had Leo carry another pile of wooden posts to the cart outside. Each post had a number painted in yellow upon it, one to six. While he waited Leo counted the posts. There were eighteen numbered in all, plus two blanks. Sid returned leading the keeper’s donkey, which he attached to the cart. Then he pulled the donkey’s halter, and cursed her until she had made plain her reluctance to work, and then she plodded forward. ‘Once she knows we’re comin back home, she’ll move quick then all right.’

  Sid led the donkey through the wood, Leo beside him. Leo asked if they had caught moles. ‘Moles?’ Sid said. ‘Moles don’t hurt no one, you idiot. So long’s they keep off the master’s lawns. And then the mole catcher comes in, and he gets their skins. We had good sport with rats, though, you should a been here last week. All round the stables. We found their holes and put barley meal down. Next day, Wednesday, come back and did the same. They loved us, the little bastards. Thursday we give em nothin. Then Friday Mister Budgell mixed barley flour with caster sugar and arsenic. Had me put it down their holes with a spoon tied to a long stick.’

  Sid spoke as they walked. The donkey plodded along. Sid Sercombe was loquacious as Leo was shy and taciturn. Their mother Ruth used to tell Sid he was taking the words out of his younger brother’s mouth and leaving none for him, to kindly shut his trap for just one minute, but he would not.

  ‘I had a dead jackdaw, Leo. Tied it to a line. We waited till these blasted crows was comin in to roost and I dragged it across the field. The crows come down to mob the bloody thing, dead as it was, and Mister Budgell scattershot em by the score. Magpies, you can’t take em so easy. You have to find their roost for one thing. They like a patch a brambles to hide in, in a big wood. I waited for a good wind and then I went and shot a few. I got eight of em one afternoon.’

  Sid unloaded a number of the posts, then carried on across the estate. He pointed out a gibbet of vermin of which he was mighty proud. There sparrowhawks hung with their wings outspread. There was a dog fox, a vixen, cubs. Ravens. Sid admitted he did not know whether the main purpose of the gibbet was to deter other vermin or to let the master know that his keepers were doing their job. He told Leo how owls would take the head off a young bird. They’d trapped tawny owls in a ginn, but used pole traps for brown owls. Mister Budgell would never kill a white owl, he said. No, he never would, Sid could swear on the Bible to that, and neither would Sid himself. He said that sparrowhawks were easy to shoot for they always came back to where they’d last killed, but kestrels were unpredictable. You just had to keep an eye out, and if you saw one when you had your gun, you nabbed it if you could.

  Most vermin control took place in the summer and autumn, of course, but Mister Budgell kept it up all year round. During his two years on the job, Sid said, they’d put harriers, merlins and the hobby on the gibbet, and once a peregrine falcon he reckoned he’d mentioned before to Leo, and there weren’t many keepers who could say as much.

  They laid a bunch of posts at the second drive, and continued. As long as his brother spoke, the boy was happy to listen. Like Leo, Sid had meeched off school and would cross the estate to help out Mister Budgell. As soon as Sid was old enough the head keeper had requested that his under keeper be let go and Sid Sercombe taken on. The master had obliged.

  On the day following, the second Saturday in January, the boy walked back to the keeper’s cottage before first light. There was a frost on the ground, the world was silent and new, he perceived it being born out of the darkness around him. The air was cold and clear. There were skeins of mist in the low fields that were like the breath of the land made visible, like his own. The last stars of the night sky disappeared above him into the pale blue. He might have been the first human upon the earth, striding through the garden. He doubted whether there were any places so beautiful in all the planets known or unknown to man, or to God.

  Outside the gamekeeper’s cottage, boys and men gathered. Some girls, ever hopeful. Most off the estate, Fred and Herbert among them, a few from the village. Aaron Budgell allotted them their roles. Sid gave a red flag to each beater. Boys and old men would be stops. Six cartridge boys, six pickers-up. The Guns would have their own loaders. One man had brought his dog along. Mister Budgell sent him home.

  Most shoot owners and keepers believed that partridge shooting should finish by Christmas, for the birds began to pair in early January. The master instead shot none before. He believed that partridges drove bet
ter off land that lay quiet, and anyhow, partridges were incidental in this crooked landscape. Pheasant was the main quarry.

  They walked en masse to the first beat. The boy’s brother Sid wore corduroy breeches, pigskin leggings, ankle-length tea-drinker boots of horsehide, a thorn-proof tweed jacket. Aaron Budgell was accoutred likewise and he rode a cob at the head of the crowd. They reached the covert from which the first battue would proceed. Aaron Budgell explained that they would beat the birds out of this wood that was their home, and in the afternoon would drive them back. He told the stops that if they wished they could light small fires to keep warm, not because he gave a tinker’s cuss for their comfort but because in moving about in search of twigs and branches they would do more to keep the pheasants from sneaking out of the sides of the wood than in standing about doing nothing but shiver. The smoke too would help.

  Mister Budgell left Sid to place the stops and the beaters. But first he said that some had been doing this job three Saturdays in January for many years, and might not take kindly to orders given them by such a youth. Mister Budgell said that if anyone had a problem with his under keeper then they had one with him, and should step forward now. None did. The remainder followed him on his pony down into the combe from which the Guns would shoot.

  The boy’s brother Fred was to be a picker-up, and walked beside him. He spoke quietly. ‘See some a they beatin lads have big pockets in their coats?’ Leo nodded. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if Herb put a bird or two by to collect later on.’

  They waited at the pegs, the numbered stakes, which must have been hammered into place after the master and the gamekeeper had held their conference. Aaron Budgell told the cartridge boys and the pickers-up who their Guns were. He told them how the master deplored the drawing of pegs, a hit-and-miss method. The master and he had set the pegs with care, and Lord Prideaux had allotted the Guns to them as he best judged it. Leo would carry the cartridges for the stranger, Mister Carew. His brother would pick up for Lord Grenvil’s daughter. One of the others said Fred Sercombe would have a restful day, it was money for old rope for some. As the laughter died down Aaron Budgell said, ‘Now, now,’ but he himself was still grinning. He rode the cob away and tied it to a tree some way distant and returned.

  They heard a waggon trundling along and then they saw it, conveying the Guns towards them, the boy’s uncle Enoch driving. One horse between the poles, Enoch’s oldest Shire. The loaders walked behind. Enoch brought the waggon to a halt. The Guns were seated upon benches put in place for the purpose. They rose and alighted from the waggon. Loaders stepped gallantly forward to assist their ladies. Miss Charlotte reached the ground before hers could do so. The master introduced his guests to the head gamekeeper, Budgell, who for those who did not know him had been with the family for many years. He had taught the master to shoot, and was teaching Lottie with the same gun, a small, single-barrelled muzzle loader she would use today.

  Lord Grenvil told Budgell that he hoped he was doing a better job with the daughter than he’d managed with the father. If it were so, he should like to offer him the post on his own estate with a view to a similar improvement. He nodded to his daughter Alice, who smiled and shook her head. Colonel Giffard pronounced it nonsense, though what precisely no one knew.

  Aaron Budgell explained to the Guns where the birds would come from. He asked the gentlemen to leave the low-flying pheasants for the ladies. He said they would have four drives this morning and two this afternoon. After lunch they would shoot only cock pheasants, but this morning they may shoot hens as well.

  The master invited his guests to warm their blood with a sloe gin before they began. The cartridge boys and pickers-up joined the loaders at the back of the cart. Fred knew something of guns and admired them. The master used a pair of Charles Lancaster 28-inch 12-bores, their stocks rubbed to a smooth and shining patina. Lord Grenvil used a pair of Purdeys, his daughter very light Churchill 12s with 2-inch chambers. Colonel Giffard had a pair of Holland & Holland guns. Fred asked the man handling the remaining guns, which he lifted carefully from two wooden cases, whose and what they were. The man said they were Mister Carew’s and had been made for him on his eighteenth birthday, in nineteen o seven, by Cogswell & Harrison. He said they were hammerless, of course, and had 30-inch barrels. Leo stared at them. They were inlaid with gold, and had intricate scroll engraving on the barrel. The monogram on the stock was also embossed on the leather bag he was to carry, containing two hundred cartridges.

  The Guns took their places at the pegs. Behind each stood their loader, holding the second gun, then the cartridge boy, and finally the picker-up, who would have nothing to do but watch until the shooting was over. The master’s black Labradors were the only dogs present, to Mister Carew’s left. Leo looked at the master’s daughter at the next peg to the right. She only had the one gun, and it only had one barrel. She would have to wait to have it reloaded after every shot. She was not much taller than he was. He did not know her age. Her gun, though small, looked too big for her, yet she held it confidently, her left hand gripping the forestock, the fingers of her right hand around the trigger guard. She stood with her left leg forward, her long dark skirt brushing the grass.

  Aaron Budgell stepped forward from the Guns and blew a battered old hunting horn up the slope in front of them, then he stepped back and walked to the rear of the pegs.

  They stood in the cold quiet morning, in the shadowed combe, waiting for the beaters to drive the birds from their covert. After some while they heard a whistle, which Leo knew must be blown by his brother Sid. The shots raised their guns in readiness and stared at the empty sky. There was silence, broken only by the panting of one of the master’s dogs who stood a few feet away. Suddenly the dog went quiet and held its breath, and then the first birds came over the bank above them.

  The Guns had their lunch in the head keeper’s cottage. The loaders and beaters and stops crowded into the barn. The stops were given a big lump of cheese and a pork pie each. Boys had small loaves or buns of bread with a chunk cut out of the middle and a lump of butter stuffed inside. The loaders and beaters ate salt beef sandwiches and pickled onions. There was a barrel of pale ale and another of mild, and bottles of pop. They spoke of the morning. Mister Carew had said not a word to anyone, whether those assisting him or his host or fellow guests. His loader was his valet and had accompanied him from London. The man assured the company that the reason was shyness rather than arrogance. Be that as it may, all the pickers-up agreed he was the best shot they had ever seen. One of the old stops said the previous Lord Prideaux, the master’s father, was a finer shot, but all laughed at him for as a stop in the wood he could not have witnessed a single shot of young Carew’s. All that the beaters and stops saw of the entertainment was the occasional bird falling in front of them, and the loaders and cartridge boys were too involved in their work to watch.

  Mister Carew’s picker-up, who’d stood behind Leo all morning, asked if anyone else had seen the two birds he’d brought down on the second drive, one barrel after the other up in front of the sun. He said that Mister Budgell had asked the Guns to leave low-flying birds but it seemed this young marksman left everything below thirty yards. He said some were so high, seventy yards he reckoned, that he could hear the pellets rattling the pheasants’ wings as they flew on, unscathed. Someone asked Mister Budgell whether there might be a bonus paid if more than a hundred pheasants were shot today. Mister Budgell said no, the stops would receive a shilling and the cartridge boys the same, and the beaters one and six, as he had already made clear.

  It was agreed that the master’s young daughter had bagged more pheasants with that child’s gun than was feasible. Three, if not four. Fred said that the only birds shot on his, Miss Grenvil’s, peg were those swiped by Colonel Giffard next door, and many laughed and nodded in agreement, for it was a well-known, ill-mannered habit of the old Quantocks codger. Sid went outside and when he came back he said he fancied a breeze was coming up, which c
ould make for a brisk afternoon. Mister Budgell said that speaking of the afternoon it was upon them, and time to go.

  The final beat took place back in the combe where they’d started, as the light began to fail. The pheasants were beaten homeward, out of the hanging woods. They were driven gradually, steadily, to avoid flushes and give the Guns as many single birds as possible. When Leo heard Aaron Budgell, standing between Mister Carew’s peg and the master’s, say, ‘He’s doin it right,’ he understood that the keeper was referring to Sid. Some birds flew straight across the little valley, no more than twenty or twenty-five yards above them, but the wind was indeed blowing, many birds were lifted and flew higher and faster. Mister Carew’s loader worked so fast that the boy could hardly manage to keep him supplied with cartridges. He was too busy to witness Mister Carew’s skill but he had certainly not seen such quick loading as from this valet.

  He did not know how long they shot for but it was constant. When at last Mister Carew lowered his gun the boy saw flames pouring out of the ends of the barrels. Both guns were so hot that Mister Carew and his loader laid them down upon the ground, where they scorched the grass. The pickers-up did their work and the Labradors too padded around collecting the downed birds. Leo asked the loader how many Mister Carew had shot. The loader grinned and pointed to his ears. He shrugged and shook his head. Then the boy smiled too for he realised that he was deaf as well and had not heard a word of what he himself had said.

  February

  The bell sounded like a warning to the population that children had escaped. They came out of the schoolhouse to a world still fogged and frozen. They took one direction or the other in two keen unruly crowds. Some attempted to skate on the frozen ruts. Others broke off icicles and sucked them, winter sweets, or used them as weapons. Many ran to keep warm or simply for the sake of it. The boy did not. He walked, sucked in the sharp cold air, and breathed it out in plumes of steam.