The Hunter’s Tale Read online

  ‘It truly was murder?“ Sister Johane asked. ”Someone did kill him?“

  ‘They did. Very much killed him.“ Dame Juliana was as eager to tell as her listeners were to hear. ”Someone bashed his head in with a stone. They’d been hunting and he went into the woods after a dog, I think, and when he didn’t come back, they went looking for him and found him dead.“

  ‘They don’t know who did it?“ Dame Emma asked.

  ‘Well, they think it must have been a poacher and Sir Ralph surprised him and the man killed him. Whoever it was, he escaped clean away and that’s why they think a poacher, because a poacher would know the woods well enough to get away and how to lose the hounds when they tried to trail him.“

  Frevisse’s own thought was that it must have been a singularly stupid poacher if he chose to be there in the woods when a hunt was going on, but Dame Claire asked as they moved away, neither of them interested in spending their hour in fervent talk over a murder that had nothing to do with them, “How was it with Ursula when her brother told her, poor child?”

  Cautious with her own uncertainty, Frevisse said, “I was there only at first, before she’d had time to fully feel it, I think.”

  Dame Claire bent to run her fingers through a tall clump of lavender. “We’ll have a goodly harvest of this, it seems.”

  Frevisse agreed, and leaving the dead man forgotten, they strolled on.

  Chapter 3

  The trouble with summer days was how long they lasted, Hugh thought wearily, watching almost the last of the funeral guests ride out of sight around the far curve of the road along the woodshore beyond the church. Today had stretched out forever from sunrise until finally now when dusk had set the last guests homeward. Master and Mistress Drayton had a four-mile ride to go but twilight this near past Midsummer went on forever; they would be home before full dark. Hugh lowered his hand from a last wave after them and turned back through the gateway into the manor’s foreyard, trying to hold his shoulders straight against his weariness. Long summer days and their drawn-out twilight had always been pleasure for him, but today he had found himself wanting a brief winter’s day that would be done with and over, with a long night to follow when he could go to bed and not be anything except—with luck—asleep for hours upon hours and no need to say or do any of all the things he had had to do and say these past five days.

  As it was, having no need for haste to be home before dark, the guests had lingered over the funeral feast. Not that there had been that many guests. “And most of them are here simply for the pleasure of seeing him dead,” Miles had said low-voiced to Hugh as they came out of the uncrowded church after the funeral Mass. Nor was anyone there who had to take much trouble over coming except Master Wyck from Banbury and that was more because he had been Sir Ralph’s attorney than for respect. Certainly there had been no great grieving from anyone, unless Elyn and Lucy’s tears meant much, which Hugh doubted. That his sisters’ weeping seemed more from duty—they owed it to themselves to weep—than from feeling was among the thoughts weighing on Hugh all day. Another heavy thought was that despite Sir Ralph had lived a goodly number of years, been married, had children, known a fair number of people along the way, at the end of it all he was buried with no one much caring and only duty-tears over his grave.

  If anyone is going to miss him, Hugh thought as he crossed the foreyard, back toward the hall, his shadow stretching out black ahead of him, it will be me and the hounds. And I don’t think we do. Except maybe Bevis. The brindled wolfhound had been Sir Ralph’s present favorite, taken with him almost everywhere, even into church, where Father Leonel had frowned but not dared say anything. These days since Sir Ralph’s death, Bevis had limped restlessly through the hall and foreyard or else lain beside the hall hearth, long muzzle on paws, eyes fixed on the outer door as if awaiting Sir Ralph’s return. Yet when Tom had brought him to lie beside the bier, he would not, and today was tied in the kitchen yard, out of the way. Hugh had wondered before now how things would have gone that last day if Bevis had been with Sir Ralph. Assuredly not the way they had.

  But Bevis had cut a forepaw on a stone the day before and the morning of the hunt Sir Ralph had rumpled his ears and said, “Best you lie up today, old fellow. It’s only hare-hunting anyway.” But a very good hare-hunting, as it happened; the best there had been that summer. Only fallow and roedeer bucks and hare were allowable to the hunt through the summer months and early autumn, between St. John’s Day and Holy Rood, and since Sir Ralph had hunted roedeer a few days earlier, he had been in the humour for hare-hunting, and so Hugh had been out in the green-gold dawn that day, a-foot and without dogs, to quarter the rough pastureland beyond the village fields, looking for the best place to bring the hunt. He had been glad the signs for likely best hunting looked to be in the farthest of the pastures, well away from the fields where the grain was ripening toward harvest. Sir Ralph had no care if his hounds coursed through the standing grain, but it set the villagers to fury to see their work and hope of winter bread trampled by hounds and hunters for the sake of sport. Sir Ralph’s answer to their protests when they came into the manor court about it was always, “I have to live with your poaching my game out of my forest whenever you’ve a mind to it and stealing my wood whenever my back is turned. You can live with my trampling a little of your fields in return. Now get out.”

  A year ago Hary Gefori, the hay ward’s grown son and shaping well to take his father’s place when the time came, had dared say angrily back, “Aye, we poach, and when we’re caught at it, we’re beaten and fined for it. So, in like, when you and your hounds and horses have robbed us of our grain, why shouldn’t you pay?”

  Sir Ralph had half-risen from his chair, his hands gripping its arms so his knuckles stood out white, his face purpled with fury and his words almost throttled by his anger. “Pay for what’s mine? I own all this manor and everything on it, including you and every stalk of wheat and rye and barley and plain pasture grass. If anyone’s going to pay, it’ll be you—with half the teeth in your head and the skin off your back. Tom and you there, Duff, take him. Hugh, fetch my dog whip. I’ll show…”

  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?”