In his younger days he had been huntsman to the Gilroy pack and was still seen on the fringe of the hunting field, though he never actually attended a meet in case someone should demand his subscription. He was a mean, gruff, picturesque old rascal, and did not go far out of his way to welcome me when I called on him. He was still on nodding terms with Uncle Luke but he and Uncle Reuben detested one another. Uncle Reuben regarded him as a reincarnation of Grandfather during the days of his decline, whereas Uncle Mark dismissed his elder brother as “a bliddy ole humbug, wi’ no more go in ’im nor a zick cow!” On the few occasions they met in Whinmouth Bay their greeting was limited to a mutual growl.
It was on the afternoon when I had met and been repelled by Uncle Mark that I first saw the buzzards.
I had hoped to spend the entire afternoon at the stables, but Uncle Mark was in a foul temper over something or other and after looking me up and down with obvious disfavor he simply said:
“Huh! So you’m Miriam’s boy, be’ee? Can you zit a horse?”
When I told him that I had never bestridden a horse in my life he was so disgusted that he swore aloud. I backed away and dodged behind the stables, awaiting a chance to slip back to the woods. He waddled off mumbling to himself and I remember thinking how neatly he fitted my conception of Billy Bones, in Treasure Island, and wondering if he too was drinking himself to death on Jamaica rum, like Bones and Grandfather Leigh.
I misjudged Uncle Mark at that time. He was good company once you had learned to take his gruffness for granted, and he never touched rum or any other spirit, confining himself to rough cider which, he declared, “stayed in the legs, didn’t maze the ade, an’ left a man all his faculties to take full use of such hoppertoonities as come his way!”
By “hoppertunities” Uncle Mark simply meant a chance encounter with any obliging women who crossed his path, and his expectations were frequently gratified. At fifty he was a very lusty man and certain types of women were attracted by his heavy masculinity.
I escaped to the tangle of Teasel Wood and across the goyle into the larch and chestnut woods, behind Heronslea House. It was here, on a rail that marked the limit of the park, that I first saw the two buzzards and instantly mistook them for eagles.
They were magnificent birds, the female noticeably larger than the male, with plumage of deep, rich brown and conspicuously lighter patches on the underparts. Their tails were beautifully barred and they sat hunched on the crossbar, their bright yellow feet gripping the decaying bark, their arrogant eyes regarding me with mild disapproval, as though daring me to cross the fence and enter the grounds of the enclosure.
I had a good long look at them before they rose on blunt, mothlike wings and wheeled over the sparsely timbered paddock, uttering a duet of long, mewing cries, a note unlike that of any bird I had ever heard.
Fascinated I watched them soar and drift at about a hundred feet and then, entirely discounting me, they dropped again with wonderful deliberation and perched on the second fence that enclosed the inner plantation.
I don’t think I saw the notice board but if I had, the warning would not have deterred me. I climbed the rail and crossed the paddock but the buzzards rose again before I could dodge behind the tree close to them. I ran and leaped over the second paling and through the trees into the wood, but it was impossible to see them here although I could still hear their Mee-oo! Mee-oo! from above the feathery heads of the larches.
The wood was new ground for me and I went on down the gentle slope until I broke through to a narrow ride, a glorious, green aisle, as cool and still as a cathedral. It was the kind of wood one reads about and sometimes sees on a calendar cover but rarely discovers, not even in unspoiled country. Rides intersected it and every now and again two rides merged and huge bracken fronds crowded into the slender triangle formed by the junction.
Nearly all the flowers had gone but there were still tall fox-glove stems and one or two late campion and lady’s slipper. The trees were so closely set that a kind of green mist hung over the wood. There had seemed to be no breeze outside, but in here the faintest breath of wind set the larches tissing and they seemed to me to be whispering the same word over and over again: “Assyria—Assyria—Assyria.”
I was standing on a curve of the main ride when I heard a sudden crackle in the undergrowth behind me. Swinging around I came face to face with a keeper, carrying a double-barreled shotgun in the crook of his arm.
I took an instant dislike to the man. He was dressed in rough, patched tweeds, corduroy breeches, gleaming leggings and a drooping weather-stained trilby, but somehow he did not look like a countryman. His face was too pale and too narrow and his eyes were red and angry, like a ferret’s. It was clear too that he was going to be as truculent as most of his kind, for he neighed at me in a strong Cockney accent, as alien as my own.
“Wotcher think you’re up to, eh?”
Uncle Luke had given me casual advice about trespassing.
“If anyone challenges you offer ’em a farthing damage and walk off without arguing the toss!” he had told me. I had also read about this somewhere and the dignified compromise intrigued me. I happened to have a farthing in my pocket, change from a loaf I had bought for Aunt Thirza earlier in the day, so I plunged my hand into my trouser pocket and produced it as the keeper strode clear of the bracken and faced me in the ride.
“This is for any damage I’ve done,” I said, trying to keep a steady voice, for despite the grand gesture a townsman’s fears caused my heart to hammer wildly and I hated the man’s red eyes.
With a downsweep of his hand he struck the coin from my hand and thrust his narrow face to within an inch of mine.
“Saucy young bastard! Been after rabbits, you ’ave! Seen the notice, ’aven’t you? Read, doncher?”
I mumbled that I had not seen a notice and that if I had I would not have entered the wood, but he cut my excuses short and pushed me so vigorously that I staggered back and struck my elbow a sharp blow on a tree. Either the pain, the man’s manner, or both enraged me and the spurt of anger gave me a little courage.
“You can’t do that to me!” I shouted at him. “I wasn’t doing any harm!”
“Shut yer mouth an’ open yer jacket!” he roared, shifting his grip on the gun and advancing so close to me that I recoiled from the stench of his bad breath.
“I won’t and you can go to hell!” I screamed, my back to the tree and my fists clenched.
Townsman or countryman, he knew his business. In a trice he had dropped his gun and grabbed me above the elbows, whirling me around and throwing me violently against his extended leg so that I fell flat on my back in the bracken. In another second he was on top of me, had lifted me sideways and seized my arm in a half nelson. I cried out with pain and fright but he only jerked the wrist higher and higher, until I almost fainted and began to thresh out with both legs.
“Assaultin’ a keeper! We’ll see abaht this, cock!” he said, and was in the act of dragging me to my feet when I saw, through a film of tears, a horse and rider walk into view around the broad curve of the ride and heard a girl’s voice say:
“Let him go, Croker! Don’t be such a damned fool! Let him go I tell you!”
He released me at once, jumping back so quickly that I fell forward on my hands and knees. When I regained my feet I saw pony and rider advancing into the main ride and Croker, now harassed and confused, retreating to the spot where his gun lay in the long grass.
The girl came on slowly, her feet free of the stirrups, her body loose in the saddle that creaked as though very new. Apart from this rhythmic creak, and the almost noiseless impact of the pony’s hoofs on the beaten earth of the ride, it was curiously silent in the glade.
There was something stately about her advance, as though she was a young queen riding to acknowledge the obeisance of a respectful multitude, and she sat her pony as though she had never used any other means of progression. This regality, and the utter confusion of the keeper, suddenl
y communicated itself to me, so that I dropped my glance and pretended to look about for my cap, lost in the struggle.
“You know perfectly well that you’re not supposed to do that, Croker!” she said, and her voice, pitched pleasantly low, had a ring of authority. Her presence was so commanding that I began to feel almost sorry for the wretched keeper, now so ill at ease that he had forgotten to retrieve his gun.
He flushed and blurted out:
“He showed fight, Miss Em’rood, proper young d—”
He was going to say “devil” but the girl cut him short, lifting her gloved hand from the pommel of the saddle.
“Bring me your gun—quickly! Bring the gun here!”
The man bent, picked up the gun and almost ran across the ride. She took it from him and glanced at the hammers.
“It’s cocked, you fool!”
The man began to squirm under her merciless contempt.
“I know it is, Miss Em’rood, but I didn’t ’ave it in mind to shoot! Cor Jesus, I wouldn’t do that, miss, I was just—”
“You’re a liar, Croker! You cocked it to scare him and it might easily have gone off while you were rolling about near it! Then you’d have been charged with murder and strung up and I should have been a witness against you! I would have been, I can tell you! I’d have even turned up to read the notice on the prison gate!”
I suppose this was meant as a joke but Croker did not take it as such. He began stammering more excuses: He was trespassing … there’s the notice up on top … he must have seen it … he started the fight …
“That’s not true,” I said, speaking for the first time. “I offered him a farthing damages and said I’d go. Look, there’s the farthing on the ground.”
While we were talking the pale sun had passed the open part of the ride and I could see the new coin gleaming in one of Croker’s heel clips.
The girl glanced at the coin and then at Croker. Severity and the touch of haughtiness left her expression and she smiled. It was a swift, boyish kind of smile and when she spoke again the rasp had vanished from her voice.
“You certainly will hang one of these days, Croker! Imagine leaving a clue like that farthing!”
Croker recognized the change in her voice and was pitifully grateful for it. He began to weave more excuses, repeating over and over again that he had strict instructions to eject all trespassers and referring once more to the notice board on the edge of the wood, but again she cut him short with the regal lift of the hand.
“Oh, stop it, Croker! Don’t whine so! I hate people who whine and snivel. And I hate people who hide behind other people’s orders. Do you know what you are? You’re the sort of person who encourages the Bolshies. People like you would have us all guillotined in no time!”
I am sure that Croker failed to follow her odd line of reasoning and equally sure that it was employed for my benefit rather than his. She returned his gun but he seemed reluctant to go without some assurance on her part that the incident would not be reported.
“After all, I did ’ave me instructions,” he mumbled, “and if yer Pa gets to hear, about it—”
“You had no instructions to commit assault and battery on my friends!” she told him, and saw his jaw drop with renewed dismay.
“Gawd, Miss Em’rood, ’ow was I ter know he was a friend o’ yours? ’Ow was I to know …? He never said nothing!” He turned to me for corroboration. “You didn’t, did you?”
“I don’t imagine you gave him much of a chance,” replied the girl crisply, and then, as though conversation with Croker bored her, she pulled off her riding hat and dismounted.
I had never seen anyone dismount from a horse the way Diana dismounted. She threw her right leg over the pommel and pointed both feet before floating rather than leaping from the horse and then landing with half her weight against the mount’s shoulder. It was such an effortless, graceful movement that you wanted to see it performed over and over again. It set you wondering whether it had been acquired after months of practice, or was merely one of a whole repertoire of lithe, graceful movements, like the casual lift of her hand, or the way she moved with the horse when it had walked toward us across the glade. Everything about her had this smooth practiced fluency, even her voice and the movements of her wrist as she gently danced the hat on its elastic chin strap.
To watch her, to be with her, was like listening to a famous actor declaiming well-remembered lines, or hearing a brilliant concert pianist play a familiar passage from one of the classics. There was something exciting and accomplished about everything she did, yet it was the kind of accomplishment that contained no element of surprise or shock, so smoothly and effortlessly was it achieved.
“Hold the pony,” she ordered me, “I won’t be a moment,” and she handed me the reins and crossed to where Croker stood, taking him firmly by the arm and leading him away from me and down the ride in the direction of the house. They walked together as far as the curve and then stopped for a moment out of earshot. I saw her talking to him earnestly, and Croker listening with every mark of attention. Then, with a vigorous nod, he shouldered his gun and marched off between the trees and she came slowly up the ride toward me. It was then that I really saw her for the first time and the second of the October miracles occurred.
She was about my own age and not nearly so tall or mature as I had imagined her to be when she was mounted. Up to that moment, with her hair bundled under the hard little hat, I had judged her to be at least sixteen, but with her lovely hair loose on her shoulders she did not look as old as I and I wondered again at the deference shown to her by such a truculent man as Croker.
From a distance it was the quality of her hair that impressed me, that and the strange transparency of her skin, the paleness of which was so vividly emphasized by her dark chestnut hair. She had a short, straight nose and a small, slightly jutting chin with a single dimple, the largest dimple I had ever seen, a finger’s breadth below her mouth. This much I saw as she advanced up the glade, but it was not until she took the reins from me that I noticed her eyes. They were huge and the shadows around them made them seem even larger and more expressive. When she had first approached us, and put a period to the agony of my twisted arm, I had noticed that her eyes were blue, but not until this moment had I realized just how blue they were. They were like the patch of sky between cotton-wool clouds on the calmest April day, or the strip of Channel beyond the first line of sandbanks in Nun’s Bay, where the sea floor shelves away from the lip of sandstone and the sudden depth of the water is apparent from the clifftop. They were the blue of Teasel Wood periwinkles, the blue of the irises growing alongside Shepherdshey reservoir; they were Sennacharib blue, a christening gift from the fairy godmother of the woods, moors and cliffs of the lands I claimed.
I looked into their depth for perhaps three seconds while she took the reins from me and swung herself into the saddle with the same effortless hoist as she had left it. I think she must have known that, at this moment, I passed from boyhood to manhood and was hers for life, that everything awaiting me in the future, every ambition that stirred in me, every emotion I was to experience, would be prompted by her dimple, her dark tumbling hair and her eyes. She knew too, as I did, that from then on everything that happened to me that had no bearing on her would be smaller change than the farthing at our feet.
The conquest pleased her, that much was evident by her manner during that first afternoon, but it made no lasting impression on her, so that our relationship was destined to be lopsided from the very beginning.
At the time, however, I did not quarrel with this. Her ascendancy had been established from the moment she lifted her gloved hand to terminate the pain of Croker’s half nelson. It was more than that, for she was who she was, the daughter of Eric Gayelorde-Sutton, Squire of Sennacharib and stockbroking overlord of everything in it, a girl in beautifully cut riding clothes, mounted on a sleek, well-mannered pony, a girl who, at the lift of a hand, could make a bully like Croker w
riggle with fear and embarrassment.
Against this I had nothing but my secret claim, and that seemed ridiculous in the presence of Diana Gayelorde-Sutton.
2.
The strange thing about that first hour in Diana’s company was that I felt no shyness in her presence. We exchanged information about one another as readily as two people who find themselves embarking on a long railway journey in one another’s company.
The first thing I wanted explained to me was her name. The keeper had addressed her as “Miss Em’rood” and it seemed an unlikely name, even though I had imagined it to be a surname and not, as it turned out, his interpretation of her Christian name.
“It’s Emerald,” she told me, laughing, “not ‘Em’rood’—‘Em‘rood’ is just his way of saying it. He comes from Kent and you ought to understand, for you talk rather like him. Do you come from Kent?”
I said I did but I did not tell her it was unlikely to be the part of Kent from which a gamekeeper had been recruited. Somehow it was terribly important to me to impress her with the fact that Devon was my real home and that my childhood among the terrace houses and tramway clang of the Brixton Road had been incidental. I told her my name and she savored it.
“John Leigh … that’s a country name … John, yes, you do look a John but it’s still not quite right somehow …”
Suddenly her eyes sparkled and she dropped the reins, leaning back and putting both hands on her narrow hips.
“I know who you remind me of! It’s not John, it’s Jan Jan Ridd!”
The fancy excited her so much that she rocked in the saddle. “Jan Ridd, the big solemn boy in Lorna Doone! You’re tall and lanky and … and serious-looking. Haven’t you read Lorna Doone?”
Diana Page 2