The Rich Are with You Always (35 page)

  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.

  But she had no idea how to make her threat come about.

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 girl's move revealed something else—a wedding ring upon her finger. It was that, not so much her face, she had been trying to conceal.

  "You!" Nora repeated.

  "Cory," the girl mumbled.

  Swiftly Nora took her foot off the jar and, while Bryant was busy retrieving what was left of his beer, she darted forward and whisked the bag from under

the girl.

  "Now," she said, "I want the truth of this matter. Or Lord Wyatt and Mr. Cory shall be told."

  The bag reeked of fox.

  Moments later she was cantering triumphantly back toward High Wood, near the head of the Beane Valley. For High Wood was the true home of their ringer fox—he had no more business in the small covert where they had found him than the man in the moon. That fox was a bagman! And she had the bag concealed beneath a fold of her riding habit.

  
Honour!
she thought exultantly.
Lord Wyatt—a man of honour!

  To introduce a bagman was one of the worst crimes in hunting's social calendar. Rather be caught cheating at cards or forging a friend's signature. Rather go into seven years' voluntary exile!

  She rejoined the field on the slope below High Wood. The bagman-fox, now on home ground, had delayed them by running up a long culvert. They had smoked him out and now he had run for home in High Wood. Once again Nora was among the leaders. Sir George was still nowhere to be seen. Cousin Meredith Wyatt was there though—and looking at her rather impertinently, she thought.

  Lord Wyatt did not want the fox to slip out unseen, so he first made sure every side of the wood was watched.