The Hunter’s Tale (4 page)

Hary had not waited to be taken or whipped but had spun on his heel and shoved his way among the men gathered to the court, with no one—including Tom—trying to stop him before he was out the door. That had earned Tom a yelling-at and every man there the fine of a penny each, including Tom, though Hugh doubted Tom ever paid it, since Tom and Father Leonel between them kept the manor accounts and Sir Ralph “never cares what the accounts say,” Tom had raged once to their mother. “So long as the hounds are healthy and the roof isn’t falling in, he doesn’t care. I could be stealing him blind and he’d never know.”

‘Are you stealing him blind?“ Lady Anneys had asked.

‘No. The more fool me,“ Tom had said bitterly.

Now everything was Tom’s, and if the villagers had warily held back from outright celebration of Sir Ralph’s death, Hugh did not doubt there was nonetheless hidden joy among them because Tom, for all that his anger could flare like Sir Ralph’s, was far more even-handed in his dealings. He had been even more pleased than Hugh the morning of that last hunt to hear the chase would likely keep well away from the grain fields.

‘It will be closer to the gathering place, too,“ he had said.

‘Farther for the servants but closer for us, and Mother and the girls won’t mind the walk.“ Which they would have to make, whether they minded or not, because last night Sir Ralph had pointed at Lady Anneys across the parlor and ordered, ”See to it there’s food laid out at the spring after the hunt. We might as well make a day of it, since Sir William is bringing both Elyn and his girl.“ Sir William being their near neighbor and as passionate to the hunt as Sir Ralph.

That night Miles said, while he and Hugh and Tom had been readying to bed in the chamber they shared over the kitchen at the hall’s other end from Sir Ralph and Lady Anneys’ own room, “So we’re to hunt in the morning, guzzle through midday, and return to the slaughter in the afternoon. I wonder if I feel a sickness coming on and must keep to my bed for the day?”

Tom had thrown a wadded shirt at him. “If I have to be there, so do you.”

‘I hate hare-hunting.“

‘You hate all hunting.“

Miles threw the shirt back at him. “Hare-hunting is worse. You can hunt the fool things twice in a day. Everything else you hunt and then go home. Red deer, roedeer, fallow deer, otter, badger, fox, boar, bear, wolf…”

‘Boar? Bear? Wolf?“ Tom had repeated cuttingly. ”When have any of us ever hunted boar or bear or wolf?“

‘Never, thank St. Eustace. It’s been bad enough listening to Sir Ralph moaning on about lacking them. Years and years of him moaning there’s no wild boar or bear or wolf left for him to slaughter. Moaning on and on…“

‘Nephew,“ Tom warned, ”if you don’t shut yourself up…“

‘… and on and on and…“

Tom and Hugh together had shoved him backward onto the bed and made to smother him with a pillow until laughter broke up their wrestling and they had all settled to sleep in the cheerfulness they so often had together when away from Sir Ralph.

In the morning Hugh had been first up and dressed and away, leaving them pulling on their heavy hunting hosen and debating whether hare was better baked in gravy in a crusted pie or roasted crisp on a spit. He had returned, more than ready for his breakfast, to find Sir William had arrived. His pair of scent hounds were in the foreyard, held on leash by Sir William’s steward, Master Selenger.

Master Selenger was a man as lean and ready to the hunt as the hounds he held, and Hugh traded a few words with him before going in to tell what he had found and snatch some bread and cheese while his father and Sir William discussed which hounds they meant to use today. Sir William was not quite Sir Ralph’s age nor given
to
anything like Sir Ralph’s rages but their shared passion for hunting had made them “as near to friends as Sir Ralph is ever likely to come,” Miles once said. Friends enough that Sir Ralph had married Elyn, his eldest daughter, to him and lately begun to talk with him of marrying Tom to Sir William’s daughter, Philippa.

For a wonder, given how readily Tom quarreled with Sir Ralph over anything and everything else, he had made no protest against that. Not that there was much to protest. Besides being Sir William’s only child and therefore his heir, Philippa was a pleasant-featured, pleasant-mannered girl, friends with Elyn and Lucy and so often at Woodrim that Lady Anneys, fond of her, said she was already more than halfway to belonging there. The only present complication was Sir William’s marriage to Elyn two years ago. Besides that it made him Tom and Hugh’s brother-in-law, it raised the likelihood he would father more children, lessening Philippa’s inheritance or, if there were a son, replacing Philippa altogether. Any marriage agreement made now would have to be most carefully made to ensure she stayed worth Tom’s marrying and as yet Sir Ralph and Sir William had not settled down to the task and Tom knew better than to push the matter. And since Elyn wasn’t bearing yet, everything was mayhap and maybe anyway and more important that morning was the hare-hunt.

They had gone on foot to the far pasture, the hounds knowing what was coming and as eager to the business as the men. At the pasture’s edge Sir Ralph had blown three glad notes on his hunting horn, and Hugh, Degory, and Master Selenger had uncoupled the six lymers—the scent hounds—who had the first work. Set forward with Hugh’s cry of “Avaunt, sire, avaunt!,” they had surged away into the pasture with Hugh’s following call of, “So howe, so howe, so howe!” to urge them onward. Not that urging was needed. Hares were cunning. As if ever-aware they might be hunted, one hare never, for choice, traveled straightforwardly but rather went one way, then back on its trail for a ways before going another way, over and over again, ten times or more and crisscrossing its own trails while it did, with sometimes a sideways leap to start a different way all over again. The lymers’ challenge was to sort out the trails and thereby track a hare to its form—its resting place—and rout it out, and Somer, Sudden, Sendal, and young Skyre, along with Sir William’s lymers, set to it joyfully, questing rapidly back and forth through the long grass, heads down and tails madly wagging. As always for Hugh, their intensity became his as he watched them searching, spreading apart, sweeping this way and that across the pasture to untangle the scents, while beside him and Tom, Sir Ralph, Sir William, and Master Selenger, the coursing hounds waited their chance with quivering eagerness. Miles, as always, stood a little apart, there because he had to be, but even so he was watching, smiling, the hounds’ joy at their work impossible not to share.

Hugh saw Sendal start to swing too far apart from the others and called out, “Howse, Sendal, howse!” to bring him back to the others, now closing in on a hare it seemed, to judge by how they were rushing forward, crowding together, then spreading apart and crowding forward again, all a-quiver and their tails wild. As Sendal rejoined them, the hare burst up from the grass and into a run hardly three hounds’ length ahead of Sudden in the lead.

‘She goes!“ Sir William cried. ”Ears up! She’s a good one!“ Because a hare that waited until the hounds saw it and ran with its ears up was confident of its strength and chance of escape. This one was as cunning in its running as it had been in laying its trail, swift in its turns and twice cutting sideways and away under the very muzzles of the hounds before Sir Ralph said, ”That’s enough. Now,“ and set Bertrand loose with the cry, ”Venes!“ The rest of them loosed the other hounds with him and—white, and brown-spotted, and brindled gray—Makarie, Melador, Bane, Brigand, and Sir William’s Chandos streaked away to join the others.

The end came quickly then, and hunters trotted out to the kill-site where Melador was standing over the dead hare while the other hounds seethed around with high-waving tails, panting and pleased with themselves. Sir Ralph held the corpse high and blared the death on his horn, they went through the various ceremonies demanded at a kill, and then the hare was dismembered, bits of it mixed with blood-soaked bread and cheese and given to the hounds, but the better parts handed to a servant to carry back to the manor. Then they began again.

Two more hares were started, both of them escaping after good runs, before another one was taken. By then the morning was far enough along that Sir Ralph declared the hunting done for the while and they headed across the pastureland and along the woodshore to the greenway, men and hounds all glad of the shade under the tall-arched trees and gladder when they turned aside from the way into the wide, smooth-grassed clearing of the gathering place. At its upper end a spring bubbled out of the slope, its cold water filling a stone-built basin before flowing over and away in a shallow, broadening stream the length of the clearing and out of sight among the trees. Along the near side of the clearing wooden tabletops on trestle legs had been put up and cold chicken, new cheese, bread, and ale set out by servants waiting now to serve, while beyond the little stream Lady Anneys, Elyn, Philippa, and Lucy were seated on cushions on the grass, Philippa with her small lute on her lap, the others with their embroidery.

As usual, Hugh, Master Selenger, and Degory saw to watering the hounds, then Hugh and Master Selenger left them to Degory to tie in the shade and feed while they joined the others at the tables to eat and drink and talk over the morning’s hunt. Afterward the women returned to their cushions, and the men, fed and tired and ready to rest, dropped down around them on what Lady Anneys called the hunt-cushions—large, old, not very clean cushions kept for this use. Only Miles went to sit on the wide rim of the spring’s basin, dabbling his fingers in the water. The midday warmth and well-fed bellies slowed the talk and even the women sat idle, their sewing in their laps, except Philippa took up her lute again and began to stroke small, silver-sounding notes from its strings, simple as the sound of the water flowing and hardly more noticeable. Sir Ralph tried to pick a quarrel with Tom over a pasture that had been grazed last month instead of left rough for the summer’s hunting but they were both too full and tired for it, and giving it up, Sir Ralph joined Sir William in dozing, stretched out with their heads laid on cushions and hands clasped on stomachs. Tom shifted to sit beside Philippa, watching her play. The family jest was that he had no more ear than a post for music, and when Elyn asked Philippa to sing, it was to Master Selenger that Philippa turned, asking, “Join me?”

Lying on his side, propped up on one elbow on one of the cushions, he smilingly said, “Gladly,” and sat up. He was Philippa’s uncle, brother to Sir William’s first wife, dead these dozen years, and their singing together was always everyone’s pleasure. Their voices—his dark, hers light— blended around each other, wending through “At sometime merry, at sometime sad, At sometimes well, at sometimes woe” as gracefully as dancers winding a maypole until at the end they sang exactly together, “He is not wise, he is but mad, That after worldly wealth does go,” and then laughed at their own delight in their shared pleasure while Lady Anneys, Elyn, Tom, Hugh, and Miles lightly applauded them.

Looking back from afterward, Hugh could only think how usual it all had been. A midday gathering like uncounted others, with no warning of what would come. But what warning could there have been, Hugh wondered now, crossing the foreyard back to the hall. Almost a week was past, with time enough to remember, and he did not see what…

‘Hugh,“ his mother said quietly from the hall doorway.

He had been looking down, making no haste back to the hall, but at her call he looked up and lengthened his pace. He was tired and knew she was and he had not expected her to wait for him there after seeing the guests away. She had taken these past days quietly, the way she took everything. Not even in the first horrible surprise of Sir Ralph’s death had she cried. Elyn and Lucy had shed more than enough tears and Hugh’s thought was that Lady Anneys’ own were dried up with comforting them, but his fear might have been that with the funeral done and the guests gone, her grieving would come over her in a storm. Except, in a carefully buried part of his mind, he doubted that she grieved at all.

But then, did any of them?

He smiled at her as he joined her at the doorway and asked, “Will you rest now, Mother? Can I send Elyn and Lucy off to a far corner of a far field and let you be at peace for a while?”

She smiled back at him. “Not just yet.” Against the black of her mourning gown and veil, her always fair-skinned face was even paler, the gray shadows under her eyes almost its only color. “Master Wyck wants to speak with us all.”

‘Now? Does it have to be now?“

‘To have it done with,“ Lady Anneys said. ”He’s to spend the night with Sir William, to be that much further on his road to home come the morning with no need to come back here.“

‘You’re tired.“ So was he, come to that. Since Sir Ralph’s death there had been no pause in things to be done, beginning with the useless hunt through the woods for his murderer, looking for track of someone and not finding it, casting the hounds wide and wide again, trying to flush someone out but failing. Then there had been sending for the crowner—the king’s officer charged with seeing into unexpected deaths—and when he came, his questions and demands to be answered. And then fetching Ursula from the nunnery and all the preparations for the funeral and finally today the funeral itself and the funeral feast and all that went with that, and now the lawyer wanted them.

Hugh knew he himself was faltering, doubted how much more his mother could endure, and protested more strongly, “You’re too tired for this.”

She laid her hand on his arm, briefly smiled at him, said, “It’s no matter,” and turned away, back into the hall.