A Place Called Freedom (1995)

by Ken Follett

  “Will you?”

  “Aye, to be sure!”

  “Spit and swear.”

  “Spit and swear?” It was something they had done as children, to seal a promise.

  “I want you to!”

  He could see she meant it. He spat on his palm, reached across the plank table, and took her hard hand in his own. “I swear I’ll send for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  6

  A DEER HUNT HAD BEEN PLANNED FOR THE FOLLOWING morning, and Jay decided to go along. He felt like killing something.

  He ate no breakfast but filled his pocket with whiskey butties, little balls of oatmeal steeped in whiskey, then stepped outside to look at the weather. It was just becoming light. The sky was gray but the cloud level was high, and there was no rain: they would be able to see to shoot.

  He sat on the steps at the front of the castle and fitted a new wedge-shaped flint into the firing mechanism of his gun, fixing it firmly with a wad of soft leather. Perhaps slaughtering some stags would be an outlet for his rage, but he wished he could kill his brother Robert instead.

  He was proud of his gun. A muzzle-loading flintlock rifle, it was made by Griffin of Bond Street and had a Spanish barrel with silver inlay. It was far superior to the crude “Brown Bess” issued to his men. He cocked the flintlock and aimed at a tree across the lawn. Sighting along the barrel, he imagined he saw a big stag with spreading antlers. He drew a bead on the chest just behind the shoulder, where the beast’s big heart pumped. Then he changed the image and saw Robert in his sights: dour, dogged Robert, greedy and tireless, with his dark hair and well-fed face. Jay pulled the trigger. The flint struck steel and gave a satisfactory shower of sparks, but there was no gunpowder in the pan and no ball in the barrel.

  He loaded his gun with steady hands. Using the measuring device in the nozzle of his gunpowder flask he poured exactly two and a half drams of black powder into the barrel. He took a ball from his pocket, wrapped it in a scrap of linen cloth, and pushed it into the barrel. Then he undipped the ramrod from its housing under the barrel and used it to ram the ball into the gun as far as it would go. The ball was half an inch in diameter. It could kill a full-grown stag at a range of a hundred yards: it would smash Robert’s ribs, tear through his lung, and rip open the muscle of his heart, killing him in seconds.

  He heard his mother say: “Hello, Jay.”

  He stood up and kissed her good morning. He had not seen her since last night, when she had damned his father and stormed off. Now she looked weary and sad. “You slept badly, didn’t you,” he said sympathetically.

  She nodded. “I’ve had better nights.”

  “Poor Mother.”

  “I shouldn’t have cursed your father like that.”

  Hesitantly Jay said: “You must have loved him … once.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. He was handsome and rich and a baronet, and I wanted to be his wife.”

  “But now you hate him.”

  “Ever since he began to favor your brother over you.”

  Jay felt angry. “You’d think Robert would see the unfairness of it!”

  “I’m sure he does, in his heart. But I’m afraid Robert is a very greedy young man. He wants it all.”

  “He always did.” Jay was recalling Robert as a child, never happier than when he had grabbed Jay’s share of the toy soldiers or the plum pudding. “Remember Robert’s pony, Rob Roy?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “He was thirteen, and I was eight, when he got that pony. I longed for a pony—and I could ride better than he, even then. But he never once let me ride it. If he didn’t want to ride it himself, he would make a groom exercise Rob Roy while I watched, rather than let me have a go.”

  “But you rode the other horses.”

  “By the time I was ten I had ridden everything else in the stable, including Father’s hunters. But not Rob Roy.”

  “Let’s take a turn up and down the drive.” She was wearing a fur-lined coat with a hood, and Jay had his plaid cloak. They walked across the lawn, their feet crunching the frosted grass.

  “What made my father like this?” Jay said. “Why does he hate me?”

  She touched his cheek. “He doesn’t hate you,” she said, “although you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.”

  “Then why does he treat me so badly?”

  “Your father was a poor man when he married Olive Drome. He had nothing but a corner shop in a low-class district of Edinburgh. This place, that is now called Castle Jamisson, was owned by a distant cousin of Olive’s, William Drome. William was a bachelor who lived alone, and when he fell ill Olive came here to look after him. He was so grateful that he changed his will, leaving everything to Olive; and then, despite her nursing, he died.”

  Jay nodded. “I’ve heard that story more than once.”

  “The point is that your father feels this estate really belongs to Olive. And this estate is the foundation on which the whole of his business empire has been built. What’s more, mining is still the most profitable of his enterprises.”

  “It’s steady, he says,” Jay put in, remembering yesterday’s conversation. “Shipping is volatile and risky, but the coal just goes on and on.”

  “Anyway, your father feels he owes everything to Olive, and that it would be some kind of insult to her memory if he gave anything to you.”

  Jay shook his head. “There must be more to it than that. I feel we don’t have the whole story.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. I’ve told you all I know.”

  They reached the end of the drive and walked back in silence. Jay wondered whether his parents ever spent nights together. His guess was that they probably did. His father would feel that whether she loved him or not she was his wife, and therefore he was entitled to use her for relief. It was an unpleasant thought.

  When they reached the castle entrance she said: “I’ve spent all night trying to think of a way to make things right for you, and so far I haven’t succeeded. But don’t despair. Something will come up.”

  Jay had always relied on his mother’s strength. She could stand up to his father, make him do what she wanted. She had even persuaded Father to pay Jay’s gambling debts. But this time Jay feared she might fail. “Father has decided that I shall get nothing. He must have known how it would make me feel. Yet he made the decision anyway. There’s no point in pleading with him.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of pleading,” she said dryly.

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know, but I haven’t given up. Good morning, Miss Hallim.”

  Lizzie was coming down the steps at the front of the castle, dressed for hunting, looking like a pretty pixie in a black fur cap and little leather boots. She smiled and seemed happy to see him. “Good morning!”

  The sight of her cheered Jay up. “Are you coming out with us?” he inquired.

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  It was unusual, though perfectly acceptable, for women to go hunting, and Jay, knowing Lizzie as he did, was not surprised that she planned to go out with the men. “Splendid!” he said. “You’ll add a rare touch of refinement and style to what might otherwise be a coarsely masculine expedition.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” she said.

  Mother said: “I’m going in. Good hunting, both of you.”

  When she had gone Lizzie said: “I’m so sorry your birthday was spoiled.” She squeezed his arm sympathetically. “Perhaps you’ll forget your troubles for an hour or so this morning.”

  He could not help smiling back. “I’ll do my best.”

  She sniffed the air like a vixen. “A good strong southwest wind,” she said. “Just right.”

  It was five years since Jay had last hunted red deer, but he remembered the lore. Hunters disliked a still day, when a sudden capricious breeze could blow the scent of men across the mountainside and send the deer running.

  A gamekeeper walked around the corner of the
castle with two dogs on a leash, and Lizzie went to pet them. Jay followed her, feeling cheered up. Glancing back, he saw his mother at the castle door, looking hard at Lizzie with an odd, speculative expression.

  The dogs were the long-legged, gray-haired breed sometimes called Highland deerhounds and sometimes Irish wolfhounds. Lizzie crouched down and spoke to each of them in turn. “Is this Bran?” she asked the keeper.

  “The son of Bran, Miss Elizabeth,” he said. “Bran died a year ago. This one’s Busker.”

  The dogs would be kept well to the rear of the hunt and released only after shots had been fired. Their role was to chase and bring down any deer wounded but not felled by the hunter’s fire.

  The rest of the party emerged from the castle: Robert, Sir George, and Henry. Jay stared at his brother, but Robert avoided his eye. Father nodded curtly, almost as if he had forgotten the events of last night.

  On the east side of the castle the keepers had set up a target, a crude dummy deer made of wood and canvas. Each of the hunters would fire a few rounds at it to get his eye in. Jay wondered whether Lizzie could shoot. A lot of men said women could not shoot properly because their arms were too weak to hold the heavy gun, or because they lacked the killer instinct, or for some other reason. It would be interesting to see if it was true.

  First they all shot from fifty yards. Lizzie went first and made a perfect hit, her shot striking the target in the killing spot just behind the shoulder. Jay and Sir George did the same. Robert and Henry struck farther back along the body, wounding shots that might allow the beast to get away and die slowly and painfully.

  They shot again from seventy-five yards. Surprisingly, Lizzie hit perfectly again. So did Jay. Sir George hit the head and Henry the rump. Robert missed altogether, his ball striking sparks off the stone wall of the kitchen garden.

  Finally they tried from a hundred yards, the outside limit for their weapons. To everyone’s astonishment Lizzie scored another perfect hit. Robert, Sir George and Henry missed altogether. Jay, shooting last, was determined not to be beaten by a girl. He took his time, breathing evenly and sighting carefully, then he held his breath and squeezed the trigger gently—and broke the target’s back leg.

  So much for female inability to shoot: Lizzie had bested them all. Jay was full of admiration. “I don’t suppose you’d like to join my regiment?” he joked. “Not many of my men can shoot like that.”

  The ponies were brought around by stable hands. Highland ponies were more surefooted than horses on rough ground. They mounted up and rode out of the courtyard.

  As they jogged down the glen Henry Drome engaged Lizzie in conversation. With nothing to distract him, Jay found himself brooding over his father’s rejection again. It burned in his stomach like an ulcer. He told himself that he should have expected refusal, for his father had always favored Robert. But he had fueled his foolish optimism by reminding himself that he was not a bastard, his mother was Lady Jamisson; and he had persuaded himself that this time his father would be fair. His father was never fair, though.

  He wished he were the only son. He wished Robert were dead. If there were an accident today and Robert was killed, all Jay’s troubles would be over.

  He wished he had the nerve to kill him. He touched the barrel of the gun slung across his shoulder. He could make it look like an accident. With everyone shooting at the same time, it might be hard to tell who had fired the fatal ball. And even if they guessed the truth, the family would cover it up: nobody wanted scandal.

  He felt a thrill of horror that he was even daydreaming about killing Robert. But I would never have had such an idea if Father had treated me fairly, he thought.

  The Jamisson place was like most small Scottish estates. There was a little cultivable land in the valley bottoms, which the crofters farmed communally, using the medieval strip system and paying their rent to the laird in kind. Most of the land was forested mountains, good for nothing but hunting and fishing. A few landowners had cleared their forests and were experimenting with sheep. It was hard to get rich on a Scottish estate—unless you found coal, of course.

  When they had ridden about three miles the gamekeepers saw a herd of twenty or thirty hinds half a mile farther on, above the tree line on a south-facing slope. The party halted and Jay took out his spyglass. The hinds were downwind of the hunters and, as they always grazed into the wind, they were facing away, showing the white flash of their rumps to Jay’s glass.

  Hinds made perfectly good eating but it was more usual to shoot the big stags with their spectacular antlers. Jay examined the mountainside above the hinds. He saw what he had hoped for, and he pointed. “Look—two stags … no, three … uphill from the females.”

  “I see them, just over the first ridge,” Lizzie said. “And another, you can just see the antlers of the fourth.”

  Her face was flushed with excitement, making her even prettier. This was exactly the kind of thing she would like, of course: being out of doors, with horses and dogs and guns, doing something violently energetic and a little unsafe. He could not help smiling as he looked at her. He shifted uncomfortably in his saddle. The sight of her was enough to heat a man’s blood.

  He glanced at his brother. Robert looked ill at ease, out in the cold weather on a pony. He would rather be in a counting-house, Jay thought, calculating the quarterly interest on eighty-nine guineas at three and a half percent per annum. What a waste it would be for such a woman as Lizzie to marry Robert.

  He turned away from them and tried to concentrate on the deer. He studied the mountainside with his spyglass, searching for a route by which the stags could be approached. The stalkers had to be downwind so that the beasts could not pick up the scent of humans. For preference they would come at the deer from higher up the hillside. As their target practice had confirmed, it was nearly impossible to shoot a deer from farther away than about a hundred yards, and fifty yards was ideal; so the whole skill of deer stalking lay in creeping up on them and getting close enough for a good shot.

  Lizzie had already devised an approach. “There’s a corrie a quarter of a mile back up the glen,” she said animatedly. A corrie was the depression in the ground formed by a stream running down the mountainside, and it would hide the hunters as they climbed. “We can follow that to the high ridge then work our way along.”

  Sir George agreed. He did not often let anyone tell him what to do, but when he did it was usually a pretty girl.

  They returned to the corrie then left the ponies and went up the mountainside on foot. The slope was steep and the ground both rocky and boggy, so that their feet either sank into mud or stumbled over stones. Before long Henry and Robert were puffing and blowing, although the keepers and Lizzie, who were used to such terrain, showed no signs of strain. Sir George was red in the face and panting, but he was surprisingly resilient and did not slow his pace. Jay was quite fît, because of his daily life in the Guards, but all the same he found himself breathing hard.

  They crossed the ridge. In its lee, hidden from the deer, they worked their way across the mountainside. The wind was bitterly cold and there were flurries of sleet and swirls of freezing fog. Without the warmth of a horse beneath him Jay began to feel the cold. His fine kid gloves were soaked through, and the wet penetrated his riding boots and his costly Shetland wool stockings.

  The keepers took the lead, knowing the ground. When they thought they were coming close to the stags they edged downhill. Suddenly they dropped to their knees, and the others followed suit. Jay forgot how cold and wet he was and began to feel exhilaration: it was the thrill of the hunt and the prospect of a kill.

  He decided to risk a look. Still crawling, he veered uphill and peered over an outcrop of rock. As his eyes adjusted to the distance he saw the stags, four brown smears on the green slopes, ranged across the mountainside in a straggling line. It was unusual to see four together: they must have found a lush piece of grass. He looked through his glass. The farthest had the best head: he could not se
e the antlers clearly but it was big enough to have twelve points. He heard the caw of a raven and, glancing up, saw a pair of them circling over the hunters. They seemed to know that there might soon be offal for them to feed on.

  Up ahead someone yelped and cursed: it was Robert, slipping into a muddy puddle. “Damn fool,” Jay said under his breath. One of the dogs let out a low growl. A keeper held up a warning hand and they all froze, listening for the sound of fleeing hooves. But the deer did not run, and after a few moments the party crawled on.

  Soon they had to sink to their bellies and wriggle. One of the keepers made the dogs lie down and covered their eyes with handkerchiefs, to keep them quiet. Sir George and the head keeper slid downhill to a ridge, raised their heads cautiously and peered over. When they came back to the main party, Sir George gave orders.

  He spoke in a low voice. “There are four stags and five guns, so I shan’t shoot this time, unless one of you should miss,” he said. He could play the perfect host when he wanted to. “Henry, you take the beast on the right here. Robert, take the next one along—it’s the nearest, and the easiest shot. Jay, you take the next. Miss Hallim, yours is the farthest, but it has the best head—and you’re a pretty good shot. All set? Then let’s get in position. We’ll let Miss Hallim shoot first, shall we?”

  The hunters spread out, slithering across the sloping mountainside, each looking for a lie from which to take aim. Jay followed Lizzie. She wore a short riding jacket and a loose skirt with no hoop, and he grinned as he watched her pert bottom wriggling in front of him. Not many girls would crawl around like that in front of a man—but Lizzie was not like other girls.

  He worked his way uphill to a point where a stunted bush broke the skyline, giving him extra cover. Raising his head he looked down the mountain. He could see his stag, a youngish one with a small spread of antlers, about seventy yards away; and the other three ranged along the slope. He could also see the other hunters: Lizzie to his left, still crawling along; Henry to his far right; Sir George and the keepers with the dogs—and Robert, below and to Jay’s right, twenty-five yards away, an easy target.