by Wilbur Smith
“At Heathrow. I am coming up to stay with you for a while. Is that all right?”
“Lumley’s B and B,” her mother chuckled. “I’ll go and make your bed. What train will you be coming up on?”
“I had a look at the timetable. There is one from King’s Cross that will get me into York at seven this evening.”
“I’ll meet you at the station. What happened? Did you and Duraid have a tiff? Old enough to be your father. I said it wouldn’t work.”
Royan was silent for a moment. This was hardly the time for explanations. “I’ll tell you all about it when I see you this evening.”
Georgina Lumley, her mother, was waiting on the platform in the gloom and cold of the November evening, bulky and solid in her old green Barbour coat with Magic, her cocker spaniel, sitting obediently at her feet. The two of them made an inseparable pair, even when they were not winning field trials cups. For Royan they painted a comforting and familiar picture of the English side of her lineage.
Georgina kissed Royan’s cheek in a perfunctory manner. “Never was one for all that sentimental fiddle-faddle,” she often said with satisfaction, and she took one of Royan’s bags and led the way to the old mud-splattered Land Rover in the car park.
Magic sniffed Royan’s hand and wagged his tail in recognition. Then in a dignified and condescending manner he allowed her to pat his head, but like his mistress he was no great sentimentalist either.
They drove in silence for a while and Georgina lit a cigarette. “So what happened to Duraid, then?”
For a minute Royan could not reply, and then the floodgates within her burst and she let it all come pouring out. It was a twenty-minute drive north of York to the little village of Brandsbury, and Royan talked all the way. Her mother made only small sounds of encouragement and comfort, and when Royan wept as she related the details of Duraid’s death and funeral, Georgina reached across and patted her daughter’s hand.
It was all over by the time they reached her mother’s cottage in the village. Royan had cried it out and was dry-eyed and rational again as they ate the dinner that her mother had prepared and left in the oven for them. Royan could not remember when last she had tasted steak and kidney pie.
“So what are you going to do now?” Georgina asked as she poured what remained in the black bottle of Guinness into her own glass.
“To tell the truth, I don’t know.” As she said it, Royan wondered ruefully why so many people used that particular phrase to introduce a lie. “I have six months’ leave from the museum, and Prof Dixon has arranged for me to give a lecture at the university. That is as far as it goes for the moment.”
“Well,” said Georgina as she stood up, “there is a hot-water bottle in your bed and your room is there for as long as you wish to stay.” From her that was as good as a passionate declaration of maternal love.
Over the next few days Royan arranged her slides and notes for the lectures, and each afternoon she accompanied Georgina and Magic on their long walks over the surrounding countryside.
“Do you know Quenton Park?” she asked her mother during one of these rambles.
“Rather,” Georgina replied enthusiastically. “Magic and I pick up there four or five times a season. First-class shoot. Some of the best pheasant and woodcock in Yorkshire. One drive there called the High Larches which is notorious. Birds so high they baffle the best shots in England.”
“Do you know the owner, Sir Nicholas Quenton-Harper?” Royan asked.
“Seen him at the shoots. Don’t know him. Good shot, though,” Georgina replied. “Knew his papa in the old days before I married your father.” She smiled in a suggestive way that startled Royan. “Good dancer. We danced a few jigs together, not only on the dance floor.”
“Mummy, you are outrageous!” Royan laughed.
“Used to be,” Georgina agreed readily. “Don’t get many opportunities these days.”
“When are you and Magic going to Quenton Park again?”
“Two weeks’ time.”
“May I come with you?”
“Of course—the keeper is always looking for beaters. Twenty quid and lunch with a bottle of beer for the day.” She stopped and looked at her daughter quizzically. “What is all this about, then?”
“I hear there is a private museum on the estate. They have a world-renowned Egyptian collection. I wanted to get a look at it.”
“Not open to the public any more. Invitation only. Sir Nicholas is an odd chap, secretive and all that.”
“Couldn’t you get an invitation for me?” Royan asked, but Georgina shook her head.
“Why don’t you ask Prof Dixon? He is often one of the guns at Quenton Park. Great chum of Quenton-Harper.”
* * *
It was ten days before Prof Dixon was ready for her. She borrowed her mother’s Land Rover and drove to Leeds. The Prof folded her in a bear hug and then took her through to his office for tea.
It was nostalgic of her days as a student to be back in the cluttered room filled with books and papers and ancient artefacts. Royan told him about Duraid’s murder, and Dixon was shocked and distressed, but she quickly changed the subject to the slides that she had prepared for the lecture. He was fascinated by everything she had to show him.
It was almost time for her to leave before she had an opportunity to broach the subject of the Quenton Park museum, but he responded immediately.
“I am amazed that you never visited it while you were a student here. It’s a very impressive collection. The family has been at it for over a hundred years. As a matter of fact, I am shooting on the estate next Thursday. I’ll have a word with Nicholas. However, the poor chap isn’t up to much at the moment. Last year he suffered a terrible personal tragedy. Lost his wife and two little girls in a motor accident on the Ml.” He shook his head. “Awful business. Nicholas was driving. I think he blames himself.” He walked her out to the Land Rover.
“So we will see you on the twenty-third,” he told Royan as they parted. “I expect that you will have an audience of at least a hundred, and I have even had a reporter from the Yorkshire Post on to me. They have heard about your lectures and they want to do an interview with you. Jolly good publicity for the department. You’ll do it, of course. Could you come a couple of hours early to speak to them?”
“Actually I will probably see you before the twenty-third,” she told him. “Mummy and her dog are picking up at Quenton Park on Thursday, and she has got me a job as a beater for the day.”
“I’ll keep an eye open for you,” he promised, and waved to her as she pulled away in a cloud of exhaust smoke.
* * *
The wind was searing cold out of the north. The clouds tumbled over each other, heavy and blue and grey, so close to earth that they brushed the crests of the hills as they hurried ahead of the gale.
Royan wore three layers of clothing under the old green Barbour jacket that Georgina had lent her, but still she shivered as they came up over the brow of the hills in the line of beaters. Her blood had thinned in the heat of the Nile valley. Two pairs of fisherman’s socks were not enough to save her toes from turning numb.
For this drive, the last of the day, the head keeper had moved Georgina from her usual position behind the line of guns, where she and Magic were expected to pick up the crippled birds that came through to them, into the line of beaters.
Keeping the best for last, they were beating the High Larches. The keeper needed every man and woman he could get into the line to bring in the pheasant from the huge piece of ground on top of the hills and to push them off the brow, out over the valley where the guns waited at their pegs far below.
It seemed to Royan a supreme piece of illogical behaviour to rear and nurture the pheasants from chicks, and then, when they were mature, go to such lengths to make them as difficult to shoot as the keeper could devise. However, Georgina had explained to her that the higher and harder to hit the birds passed over the guns, the more pleased the sportsmen were, an
d the more they were willing to pay for the privilege of firing at them.
“You cannot believe what they will pay for a day’s shooting,” Georgina had told her. “Today will bring in almost £14,000 to the estate. They will shoot twenty days this season. Work that out and you will see that the shoot is a major part of the estate’s income. Quite apart from the fun of working the dogs and beating, it gives a lot of us local people a very useful bit of extra money.”
At this stage of the day, Royan was not too certain just how much fun there was to be had from the job of beating. The walking was difficult in the thick brambles, and Royan had slipped more than once. There was mud on her knees and elbows. The ditch ahead of her was half-filled with water and there was a thin skin of ice across the surface. She approached it gingerly, using her walking-stick to balance herself. She was tired, for there had already been five drives, all as onerous as this one. She glanced across at her mother and marvelled at how she seemed to be enjoying this torture. Georgina strode along happily, controlling Magic with her whistle and hand signals.
She grinned at Royan now. “Last lap, love. Nearly over.”
Royan was humiliated that her distress had been so obvious, and she used her stick to help her vault the muddy ditch. However, she miscalculated the width and fell short of the far bank. She landed knee-deep in the frozen water and it poured in over the top of her wellington boots.
Georgina laughed at her and offered her the end of her own stick to pull her out of the glutinous mud. Royan could not hold up the line by stopping to empty her flooded boots, so she went on, squelching loudly with each pace.
“Steady on the left!” the order from the head keeper was relayed over the walkie-talkie radio, and the line halted obediently.
The art and skill of the keeper was to flush the birds from the tangled undergrowth, not in one massed covey, but in a steady trickle that would pass over the waiting guns in singles and pairs, giving them the chance, after they had fired two barrels, to take their second gun from the loader and be ready for the next bird to appear in the sky high above them. The size of the keeper’s tip and his reputation depended on the way he “showed” the birds to the waiting guns.
During this respite Royan was able to regain her breath, and to look around her. Through a break in the grove of larches that gave the drive its name, she could see down into the valley.
There was an open meadow at the foot of the hills, the expanse of smooth green grass broken up by patches of dirty grey snow from the previous week’s fall. Down this meadow the keeper had set a line of numbered pegs. At the beginning of the day’s sport the guns had drawn lots to decide the peg number from which each of them would shoot.
Now each man stood at his allotted peg, with his loader holding his second gun ready behind him, ready to pass it over when the first gun was empty. They were all looking up expectantly to the high ground from which the pheasant would appear.
“Which is Sir Nicholas?” Royan called to her mother, and Georgina pointed to the far end of the line of guns.
“The tall one,” she said, and at that moment the keeper’s voice on the radio ordered, “Gently on the left. Start tapping again.” Obediently the beaters tapped their sticks. There was no shouting or hallooing in this delicate and strictly controlled operation.
“Forward slowly. Halt to the flush of birds.”
A step at a time the line moved ahead, and in the brambles and bracken in front of her Royan could hear the stealthy scuffle of a number of pheasants moving forward, reluctant to take to the air until they were forced to do so.
There was another ditch in their path, this one choked with an almost impenetrable thicket of brambles. Some of the larger dogs, like the Labradors, balked at entering such a thorny barrier. Georgina whistled sharply and Magic’s ears went up. He was soaked and his coat was a matted mess of mud and burrs and thorns. His pink tongue lolled from the corner of his grinning mouth and the sodden stump of his tail was wagging merrily. At that moment he was the happiest dog in England. He was doing the work that he had been bred for.
“Come on, Magic,” Georgina ordered. “Get in there. Get them out.”
Magic dived into the thickest and thorniest patch, and disappeared completely from view. There was a minute of snuffling and rooting around in the depths of the ditch, and then a fierce cackle and flurry of wings.
A pair of birds exploded out of the bushes. The hen led the way. She was a drab, nondescript creature the size of a domestic fowl, but the cock bird that followed her closely was magnificent. His head was capped with iridescent green and his cheeks and wattles were scarlet. His tail, barred in cinnamon and black, was almost as long again as his body and the rest of his plumage was a riot of gorgeous colour.
As he climbed he sparkled against the lowering grey sky like a priceless jewel thrown from an emperor’s hand. Royan gasped with the beauty of the sight.
“Just look at them go!” Georgina’s voice was thick with excitement. “What a pair of crackerjacks. The best pair today. My bet is that not one of the guns will touch a feather on either of them.”
Up, and then on up, the two birds climbed, the hen drawing the cock after her, until suddenly the wind boiling over the hills like overheated milk caught them both and flung them away, out over the valley.
The line of beaters enjoyed the moment. They had worked hard for it. Their voices were tiny and faint on the wind as they urged the birds on. They loved to see a pheasant so high and fast that it could beat the guns.
“Forward!” they exulted. “Over!” and this time the line came involuntarily to a halt as they followed the flight of the pair that were twisting away on the wind.
In the valley bottom the faces of the guns were turned upwards, pale specks against the green background. Their trepidation was almost palpable as they watched the pheasant reach their maximum speed, so that they could no longer beat their wings, but locked them into a back-swept profile as they began to drop down into the valley.
This was the most difficult shot that any gun would face. A high pair of pheasant with a half gale quartering from behind, dropping into the shot at their terminal rate of flight, set to pass over the line at the extreme effective range of a twelve-bore shotgun. For the men below it was a calculation of speed and lead in all three dimensions of space. The best of shots might hope to take one of them, but who would dare to think of both?
“A pound on it!” Georgina called. “A pound that they both get through.” But none of the beaters who heard her accepted the wager.
The wind was pushing the birds gently sideways. They started off aimed at the centre of the line, but they were drifting towards the far end. As the angle changed, Royan could see the men at the pegs below her brace themselves in turn as the birds appeared to be heading straight for them, and then relax as the wind moved them on. Their relief was evident as, one after the other, each of them was absolved from the challenge of having to make such an impossible shot with all eyes fastened upon him.
In the end only the tall figure at the extreme end of the line stood in their flight path.
“Your bird, sir,” one of the other guns called mockingly, and Royan found that instinctively she was holding her breath with anticipation.
Nicholas Quenton-Harper seemed unaware of the approach of the pair of pheasant. He stood completely relaxed, his tall frame slouching slightly, his shotgun tucked under his right arm with the muzzles pointing at the ground.
At the moment that the leading hen bird reached a point in the sky sixty degrees out ahead of him he moved for the first time. With casual grace he swung the shotgun up in a sweeping arc. At the instant that the butt touched his cheek and shoulder he fired, but the gun never stopped moving and went on to describe the rest of the arc.
The distance delayed the sound of the shot reaching Royan. She saw the barrels kick with the recoil, and a pale spurt of blue smoke from the muzzle. Then Nicholas lowered the gun as the hen suddenly threw back her head and closed
her wings. There was no burst of feathers from her body, for she had been hit cleanly in the head and killed instantly. As she began the long plummet to earth Royan heard the thud of the shot.
By then the cock was high over Nicholas’s head. This time as he mounted the gun in that casual sweeping gesture he arched his back to point upwards, his long frame bending from the waist like a drawn bow. Once again at the apex of the swing the weapon kicked in his grasp.
“He has missed!” Royan thought with a mixture of satisfaction and disappointment, as the cock sailed on seemingly unscathed. Part of her wanted the beautiful bird to escape, while part of her wanted the man to succeed. Gradually the profile of the high cock altered as the wings folded back and it rolled over in flight. Royan had no way of knowing that his heart had been struck through, until seconds later he died in mid-air and the locked wings lost their rigid set.
As the cock tumbled to earth, a spontaneous chorus of cheers ran down the line of beaters, faint but enthusiastic on the icy north wind. Even the other guns added their voices with cries of, “Oh, good shot, sir!”
Royan did not join in the cheering, but for the moment her fatigue and cold were forgotten. She could only vaguely appreciate the skill that those two shots had called for, but she was impressed, even a little awed. Her very first glimpse of the man had fulfilled all the expectations that Duraid’s stories about him had raised in her.
By the time the last drive ended it was almost dark. An old army truck came rumbling down the track through the forest along which the tired beaters and their dogs waited. As it slowed they scrambled up into the back. Georgina gave Royan a boost from behind before she and Magic followed her up. They settled thankfully on one of the long hard benches, and Georgina lit a cigarette as she joined in the chat and banter of the under-keepers and beaters around her.
Royan sat silently at the end of the bench, enjoying the sense of achievement at having come through such a strenuous day. She felt tired and relaxed, and strangely contented. For one whole day she had not thought either of the theft of the scroll or of Duraid’s murder and the unknown and unseen enemy who threatened her with a violent death.