Justice Hall

CHAPTER TWELVE

I girded myself for the dinner as grimly as any young knight girding for a tournament—and as painfully aware of my inferior equipage and relative inexperience.

To make matters worse, the only members of the party absent when I reached the drawing room were Marsh and Iris. I stood in the doorway, alone in my second-best dress, looking up at the furious murals of battle on the walls and feeling eleven sets of eyes come around to rest on me. My fervent impulse was to turn and sprint for the safety of the Greene Library; instead I stiffened my spine, put on a smile that Holmes would have admired, and went forward to greet my hosts and their guests.

Lady Phillida’s introductions were, for my purposes, woefully inadequate. Not that she was trying to exclude or patronise me—indeed, I believe it was the opposite, that her casual, first-name introductions were an attempt to make me feel welcome, as if I were already on the inside of her circle and she was merely reminding me of people I already knew. In fact, her method had the opposite effect, leaving me uncomfortable about addressing anyone by name, yet incapable of asking who they were and what they did. The structures of traditional formality have their uses.

By the time Iris and Marsh arrived, I had met Bobo, Peebles, Annabelle, Jessamyn, and the seven others, and knew nothing whatsoever about any of them beyond what I could glean by my own senses.

“Peebles,” for example, was a dissipated individual with artificially blackened hair and moustaches whose compulsive double-entendres and caressing lips against the back of my hand at introduction made clear his devotion to the sensuous life, even as the chemical odour his pores exuded told me that champagne was not the strongest stimulant in which he indulged. Aristocrat, I mentally added when one of the men addressed him as “Purbeck”; there was a Marquis of Purbeck, I remembered.

“Bobo” was clearly an actor, as theatrical here beneath the chandeliers as he would be under spotlights. There were also two watchful London businessmen (who winced slightly at being presented as “Johnny” and “Richard”) and a pair of German immigrants in expensive suits.

The three remaining guests were women, but not quite ladies. Their accents wandered up and down the social scale, and even before Marsh came in with Iris and fixed them with an icy glare, I had already decided that they were there to entertain the gentlemen. In one manner or another. (And, watching the actor circle around Peebles, I suspected that he had been brought for essentially the same purpose.)

When we went in to dinner, I was cut off from my two comrades, and found myself seated between Bobo and one of the Germans. As I tipped my head to permit an arm to snake forward and fill my glass, it occurred to me that, four years earlier, I would never have believed that I might one day positively crave the presence of Ali Hazr as a dinner companion.

Because the actor spent the entire meal talking across the table at the Marquis, and the German on my right was more interested in his countryman to his own right, I spent the meal in isolated splendour. Drinking rather more than I ought, true, but listening as well, and watching everything.

The seating arrangements were wildly unconventional and most provocative. Marsh and Iris were at one end, with Sidney and Phillida at the other: Which end, a person was left to speculate, was the superior? And Marsh played along with it: When the wine was brought to the table, he diverted its steward to the other end with a nod, leaving Sidney to taste and approve. Iris glanced at him, saw the hidden amusement behind his face, and relaxed.

The servants, however, were clear as to where authority lay, so that when a footman entered with a message, he went first to his duke for permission before circling the table to where Sidney Darling sat. Darling excused himself and followed the man from the room, returning with the faint bulge of a crumpled telegram distorting his elegant pocket and a thoughtful look distorting his elegant features. He went to the two Germans and bent to tell them something in a voice too low for me to hear, then straightened and was heading for his pair of London businessmen when Marsh’s voice stopped him.

“Have you news, Sidney?”

Darling hesitated, glanced at Johnny and Richard, then returned to his vacant chair to sit down beneath the concerted gaze of the table before answering his brother-in-law.

“There was a demonstration today in Munich, an attempt to proclaim a national dictatorship. Police fired on the crowd, a dozen or more people were killed. General Ludendorff gave himself up for arrest. Herr Hitler was injured and has escaped.”

“What will all this mean for your business interests?” Marsh asked, all friendly interest on the surface.

Darling’s answer had too much frustration in it to be anything but the truth. “I don’t honestly know. We have friends on both sides.”

“So you intend to wait and see who comes out on top, then make your arrangements with them, trying in the mean-time to avoid creating enemies inside either camp.”

Darling flushed, more at Marsh’s tone than the actual words, but he did not argue with the analysis, merely clenched his jaw, inclined his head, and picked up his fork. The German on my far right, however, was disturbed by this exchange, and he turned to my neighbour to whisper urgently in their native tongue, “But he told us the duke would support the project, that—”

I don’t know if the man to my right kicked him or gestured him into abrupt silence, but the question cut off in the middle, and the table talk was wrenched back into innocuous paths. But the quick protest had given me something to think about: As I had suspected, Darling’s plans in Germany rested on the financial support of Justice Hall. Marsh not only knew this, I saw, but had just declared that although Darling might perform as the master of Justice Hall, master was he not. The duke had publicly and knowingly cut Darling’s legs out from under him; Darling responded with a brief inner fury followed by a summoning of civility, and the party went on.

Marsh’s taste for mischief was awakened, however, so that when eventually the interminable meal had wound to its end and Phillida was rising to lead us ladies out, a pair of bright ducal eyes flicked between me and Iris, and he said, “I imagine my two feminist companions will choose to stay for the port?”

It was command, not question; we stayed. Phillida could do nothing but usher her three entertaining ladies from the room, leaving behind seven variously startled men, two highly amused women, and a trouble-making duke.

The port was waiting in the library, a pair of noble and cobwebby bottles with the equipment to decant them laid out like an array of surgical tools. As we came into the room, Marsh waved at the display and said, “Sidney? You care to do the honours?”

Another man, with another voice, might have been restoring his sister’s husband to authority, with a tacit apology. Or with a slightly different emphasis, might have been condemning Sidney to the humiliating position of mere wine steward. With Marsh, it could have been either, or both. It might only have been a simple admission that Sidney would do a better job of it—and even I could not tell which attitude he intended. Sidney certainly had no idea. I could see the moment when the man decided that there was no point in taking umbrage, that making the most of an uncertain situation would impart the most dignity. He nodded graciously and took up the tongs, to heat them in the glowing coals (although the emphasis with which he thrust the long-handled implement into the fire made me suspect that he was visualising applying their prongs to the neck of his brother-in-law, not the neck of the bottle).

Red-hot tongs, cold wet cloth, the clean snap of the bottle’s neck, and the painstaking decanting of the dark liquid through a silver sieve: Men have more rituals than women have hair-pins. Then the cigar ritual followed, and talk made awkward by the presence of two ladies and a duke who was not One of Us; it was no wonder the men drifted away to the billiards table and left us in possession of port and fire. Long before the women rejoined us, the limits of conversational topics among the men had been firmly established, enforced by sharp, eloquent silences during which stern looks and gestures were exchanged, and by the occasional clearing of throats. Germany’s politics were forbidden, its art and music allowed (although the Marquis’s knowing reference to some night-club elicited two simultaneous throat-clearings); business of any kind was out, which meant that horses and horse-racing were permitted, whereas stud fees and auction houses were not.

We three sat listening through the open doors to this verbal dance as it smoothed out from its stilted beginnings, and I could see that any opportunity for learning more about the Darling situation was probably gone for the night. I was just about to take my leave of the duke and his unlikely duchess when Marsh’s head came around and he fixed me with a look in which swirled meaning and mischief.

“What would you say to a game of darts, Mary?”

I puzzled for a moment at the overtones behind the question; when I caught his meaning, the surprise of it knocked a sharp laugh out of me.

Once upon a time, Marsh and I had teamed up to cheat an unsuspecting village of their hard-earned savings, linking his gift for smooth patter with the unexpected accuracy of my throwing arm. If I understood him aright, he was proposing to set up his brother-in-law’s friends for a similar fleecing. I was sorely tempted, not only for the pleasure of the thing in itself but for the joy of forging an alliance with Marsh Hughenfort; reluctantly, I had to decline.

“Marsh, I would absolutely adore playing such a game with you, but I think I had better put it off for the moment. Perhaps at the end of this week-end, when everyone is more . . . relaxed?”

His eyes were dancing when he agreed, and I went to bed, well pleased.

Saturday dawned clear—and I do mean dawned. The house broke its fast early, despite the late night, with a breakfast that would have done a Victorian household proud. The previous night’s quartet of entertainers were conspicuously absent, either allowed to sleep in or, I thought more likely, already bundled up and got out of the way. Nonetheless, their numbers over the groaning buffet table were more than made up for by friends and neighbours—and, I saw to my amusement, by the wives of the gentlemen in our party of the night before—gathered to spend the day trudging across frozen hillsides and firing expensive shotguns at our host’s carefully raised and artfully driven birds.

I have, I hasten to say, nothing against a shoot. As an enterprise, it is no more silly or time-consuming than many. The objective viewer may find it incongruous for a landowner to rear, coddle, and set free hundreds of birds just for the challenge of shooting them out of the sky and picking lead shot out of one’s food; however, one could argue that (other than the occasional cracked molar) it is little different from raising chickens for the family plate, with the additional benefit of fresh air and open skies for bird and shooter alike. There even exists the narrow—very well: minuscule—chance that some of the nurtured birds may escape the flying lead to assume their ordained state in nature. Even the man with the gun appreciates a crafty escape.

I say “man” advisedly, for generally speaking, women were permitted to spend the day of a shoot at their leisure, perhaps joining the shooting party for a picnic lunch alfresco and lingering to witness the next drive before being packed off home for tea, a long bath, and preparation for the travails of dinner. Certainly Phillida and the visiting wives planned such a calendar, along with a number of the morning’s newcomers who were hardly dressed for a day in the open.

I was waiting my turn at the buffet, smiling absently at strangers and anticipating a day of literary pleasures under the watchful eye of Obediah Greene. (What to wallow in first? A folio today: The byble in Englyshe, 1540 with the signature “O. Cromwell” inside? Or perhaps the 1624 Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and Severall Steps in my Sicknes? Or—) I looked up, startled, as my name pronounced by Marsh’s voice cut through both my distraction and the clatter of forks and knives.

“Mary,” he called. “Will you be joining us today?”

I looked across the room, saw the expression on his face, and decided that the intensity of his gaze indicated that the question had taken the form of the Latin “question expecting the answer yes.” I spooned another egg onto my plate, and kept the surprise (and, I hoped, disappointment) from my face.

“I shall be happy to, if the gentlemen don’t mind,” I answered.

“We’ll pair you with Iris then, shall we? Put the ladies together? She’s a formidable shot.”

“I’m sure that Iris is formidable at anything she sets her hand to,” I said easily, which answer seemed to please him. I took my plate to the table and bolted my hearty breakfast, then trotted upstairs to change from my decorous skirt into the tightly woven trousers I’d worn the day before. At least it looked to be dry again today. Freezing, but dry.

Downstairs, I found the shooting party beginning to drift out of the front door and down the steps to the drive. Neither Marsh nor Iris seemed to be among them, although another motor had just driven up and was off-loading yet more newcomers. The two males of the party retrieved guns from the boot and went to join the other warmly clad gentlemen; the females darted up the steps, clutching the sorts of bags used for knitting or needlework. The men were all involved in hearty greetings and introductions, followed by the inspection of weapons, so I went back inside. On the other side of the Great Hall I spotted the multitalented Emma, walking coquettishly at the side of an unfamiliar figure with a crooked nose and the dress of a manservant. Unwilling to shout across the echoing space to attract her attention, I speeded up to catch her before she vanished into the house. Before I could do so, Ogilby emerged from the same doorway towards which Emma and the stranger were heading. She went immediately demure under the butler’s glare, leaving me to reflect on the scant opportunities for romance among the staff of a country house.

“Mr Ogilby,” I said, when that good gentleman was in earshot. “Have you seen the duke or duchess?”

“Her Grace suggests that you join her in the gun room,” he replied, and led me there himself, to a room in the stables wing not far from the estate offices.

“Quite a lively gathering,” I commented to his shoulder.

“Indeed,” he agreed, sounding more gratified than harassed.

“Does Lady Phillida do a lot of entertaining?”

“This time of year, we are a busy house.”

“Makes for a lot of work.”

“It is satisfying to see the house full,” he explained, formal but I thought honest.

“Not as full as some of the week-ends before the War,” I said. “I saw the photographs.”

“The sixth Duke and his wife were great entertainers,” the butler agreed, sounding proud of the fact. “The gun room,” he announced, and opened the door.

“Ah, Mary,” said Iris, lowering a gun from her shoulder. “What kind of weapon do you fancy?”

“The one I use at home is an American make, my father’s old gun. What do you recommend?”

“How good a shot are you?”

“Passable.”

“Is that modesty or honest judgment?”

“Well, better than passable, I suppose.”

“Thought so.”

“Not quite in the formidable class, though.”

She grinned at me. “Men take pride in such odd things, don’t they?” She held out the gun she’d been examining, and suggested, “Let’s see how this one suits you.”

I automatically broke it and checked that it was unloaded, then set it to my shoulder while she watched critically.

“You’re left-handed, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but I shoot the usual way. I don’t seem to have a dominant eye.”

“That one’s too short for you. Try this.”

She took back the first one and exchanged it for one slightly longer in the stock, squinted at my technique with that one, and reached for a third.

At the fifth gun, I had to ask about the size of this arsenal, which was nowhere near depletion. “Who was the gun collector here?”

“Oh, there’s always been a big collection. Marsh’s father and brother were both fine shots.”

“But some of these are new.”

“Sidney,” she said succinctly. “Look, I don’t suppose you can shoot without the glasses?”

“Not unless we place everyone else behind me.”

“Right. Well, try this one; it tucks under a bit closer.”

I tried that one, and then another, a sweetly balanced Purdey that nestled into my shoulder like an infant’s head.

“Sidney seems very much at home here,” I commented as I dry-fired at the various stuffed heads poking out of the walls.

“Marsh’s brother turned a lot over to him, especially after the War.”

“Alistair showed me Sidney’s future stud farm.”

“He’s done some good work around here,” she said, meaning Sidney and sounding reluctantly approving. “He’s a hard man to like, but I’ll admit that without Phillida and Sidney, Justice Hall would be in sad condition. Is that one all right, then?”

“It’s a beauty. You’re sure you don’t want it?”

“I’ve got my gun. Marsh wanted to know if we want two loaders each, or one, or none.”

“What do you like?”

“Truthfully? I prefer to be on my own. It means I only get a handful of birds at each stand, but I’m not out to feed the district. I let the men do rapid-fire volleys and get the high count.”

“That sounds good to me.”

“Are you sure? We’ll end up fetching a fair number of our own birds.”

“All in a day’s exercise,” I told her cheerfully. Apart from which, servants at one’s shoulders did inhibit conversation so.

We joined the others in the terraced front drive. I was apprehensive that they might have been waiting for us, but it appeared that although Sidney Darling was there, Marsh and Alistair were not. We did receive a couple of disapproving glares from the older guests, either because of our clothing or our mere presence, but Iris blithely ignored them, and set about the introductions like one who had been participating in these events for years. As indeed, in a way, she had.

The oldest gun was a judge and former member of Parliament in his early sixties, Sir James Carmichael (grey hair, pale blue eyes, and a rigid posture that spoke of spinal problems rather than discipline). He was paired with Peebles, who indeed turned out to be the Marquis of Purbeck; both men had brought their own loaders and dogs. There was a cousin of Alistair’s named Ivo Hughenfort (thirty-five, intense, dismissive of introductions and interested only in getting the day started), and two young men, boys really, who turned out to be nonidentical twins out for their first day’s shoot. They were with their father, Sir Victor Gerard, another business acquaintance of Sidney Darling’s, who walked with a limp that would grow worse as the day went on.

Iris even included a few of the hired men in her greetings, men she had known when they had headsful of hair not yet grey. “Webster—I’d know you anywhere. How have the years treated you? That can’t be your son? He’s changed a bit since he was two. And you’re . . . no, no, don’t tell me, you caught us damming up the trout stream one time, I thought I’d die of terror: Doyle? No—Dayle, that’s right. You still raise ferrets?”

Childhood knowledge of the country and its people, intimate and too deeply implanted to be worn away by twenty years of living abroad. The men looked at her sideways—they could not help being aware that her marriage to the current duke was somehow irregular, even if they didn’t know the details—but they responded to her as to one of their own, going so far as to venture a joke or two. It was a thing they would not do with Sidney Darling.

Marsh finally appeared, carrying a gun, with an unarmed Alistair trailing behind and looking resolute. Shooting, I guessed, was not a favourite with Alistair. We were twelve guns in all, it would seem, with the twins and their father holding one gun between them, and Alistair just out for the air. Iris and I were the only women. Twelve guns, plus loaders and dogs and however many men had been hired to drive the birds to us.

The drivers were, of course, already deployed in the fields and woods. A day such as this was a carefully choreographed affair; a well-conducted shoot was a work of art, balancing the timing and presentation of the birds with the number and abilities of the guns. I knew within seconds of Marsh’s appearance on the steps that the day’s planning was not his, but that of Darling in conjunction with the head gamekeeper, a short, taciturn countryman by the name of Bloom. After a brief consultation, Bloom gathered together his loaders and their dogs, and in two groups, the well-dressed and the working man, we moved out into the parkland.

In addition to the men introduced by Iris, our party included Sidney’s four business partners from the night before. The two Germans were called Freiburg and Stein, and were looked upon with mistrust by the others: They might dress like Englishmen and speak the language fluently, but the War was too fresh for easy acceptance of the enemy, even when he had lived here long enough to smooth out everything but his Rs and Vs. The Londoners Johnny and Richard were more formally a banker named Matheson and an industrialist by the name of Radley, who had made a major fortune on armaments during the War. These two were as thick as the proverbial thieves they probably in fact were, and spent most of their time talking about the American stock market.

Iris talked with Dayle for a while about ferrets; when he was called away by the chief gamekeeper, I turned to her.

“I was led to understand that the Darlings moved inside the London social whirl. These guests of theirs seem fairly staid.”

“Apparently they alternate their social circles. After one week-end when a trio of experimental artists sabotaged the shoot, got roaring drunk, and offended a magistrate, Phillida decided the two sorts were best kept apart.”

“Pity,” I said. The party looked as if it could use a bit of livening up.

“I don’t know. The Marquis and the twins look as if they might have some fun in them.”

I gave a snort of laughter, then nearly leapt out of my boots as a figure appeared at my shoulder—but it was only Marsh, silent as always in his approach.

“You found a gun to your satisfaction?” he asked.

“Iris found one for me, yes. Will you tell me why you wanted me to come shooting today?”

His answer was oblique to an extreme. “You have not heard from your Holmes?”

In a house crawling with servants, one could hardly expect that a message from London would go unnoted. I took his answer to indicate that my presence was required in Holmes’ absence.

“If I do not hear from him by tomorrow, I shall make enquiries. What is it you want?”

“This is an interesting group of professional men my brother-in-law has brought together. I should be interested to know if you perceive a particular . . . link between any two or three.”

“You think this may be a business meeting, then?” I had thought the same myself, the night before.

“I do not know. You and Holmes, you are perceptive. I should like to hear your thoughts when the guests have left on Monday.”

“They won’t speak freely in front of me.”

“Neither would they before Holmes. I wish the wisdom of your eyes, from the distance that will be placed upon you.”

“Very well. I will watch.”

“Thank you. You are good with that gun?”

“I am an adequate shot.”

“Better if you would be allowed to bring the birds down with a knife, I think?” There was a smile deep in the back of his eyes, but he turned away before it could reach his mouth. I, however, laughed aloud.

“What did that last comment mean?” Iris asked curiously, when he had left us alone.

“He’s referring to this odd skill I have with a throwing knife,” I told her—clear indication of how I had come to trust her in the few hours I had known her: This was not an admission one would make to a casual acquaintance.

“When did he witness this skill?”

I met her eyes. “In Palestine.”

“Do you know,” she said, shifting her gaze to Marsh’s retreating back, “that’s the first time I’ve heard him refer to his time there, even obliquely, since I came. In France he would talk about it freely, the handful of times he came to visit me, but every time I say anything about it here, he just looks blank. He said that Phillida isn’t to know, but even when we’re out of hearing of the house, he won’t talk.”

And to think that I had speculated that he might actually have wanted to return home from Palestine, I thought wryly. “I believe,” I said slowly, “that the possibility of having to remain here permanently is so painful, the only way he can accept it is to cut himself off completely from that life.”

“He calls Ali ‘my cousin,’ ” she agreed ruefully.

“Yes, and he punched Holmes—my husband—for using the name Mahmoud.”

“Good heavens.”

“Yes. Of course, he’d been drinking at the time.”

“Who? Marsh? Marsh?”

“He seemed to be drinking more or less continuously until you arrived.”

She stared at me, disbelief struggling with the unlikelihood of my being mistaken, until acceptance asserted itself.

While we had been talking, we were following the others without paying much attention to them, other than making sure to keep a safe distance from other ears. Now we found that we had come to a halt on a rough patch of open ground between two long fingers of woodlands. The coppice to the right was alive with untoward sounds, the cries of alarmed birds punctuating the approaching racket of the beaters: their whistles and calls, the crackle of their boots, and the thwack of sticks against tree-trunks. Anticipation mounted; cartridges slid into place; dogs quivered on their haunches; shoulders grew ready for guns.

Twelve guns seemed to me an unwieldy number; at any rate, it was more than I’d ever shot with before. I had been on organised drives any number of times, although I preferred the informal method of flushing birds out one or two at a time; I braced myself for the noise, and glanced down the line at the others. Twelve in all: Freiburg and Stein had been placed nearest the wood, followed by Iris and myself, then Sidney Darling with Alistair’s cousin, Ivo, on his left. The banker Matheson and the industrialist Radley came next, then Sir James and the Marquis; on the far end, nearly a third of a mile from Freiburg, stood a cluster consisting of Marsh and Alistair with Sir Victor and his two boys. The twins were taking turns under their father’s tutelage, while Marsh looked as if he had little intention of pulling a trigger. Yes, twelve was a lot of guns; I couldn’t help wondering if the head-keeper Bloom had been given any say in the matter.

The first pheasant of the day broke from the woods, taking off high in an effort to escape the pressure of the strange noises closing in so inexorably. It took me by surprise, but Iris had her gun up and fired, and the bird dropped to the ground with a soft thud. She took the next one too, then I got one, and then the sky was full of fleeing birds and deadly lead shot. The roar of the pair at our left was nearly continuous, since Darling and Ivo Hughenfort had two loaders each and both were aggressive shots. Unnecessarily so, I thought, on the part of Darling, who was for all intents and purposes the host here. Iris and I plucked birds from their flight selectively; Darling and Hughenfort sent a killing cloud of pellets out before them; the rest did as best they could with the birds that got through. The doctrine of Ladies First was acceptable, particularly when the ladies loaded for themselves, but I could not see that the boys on the far end would get much practice today with this arrangement. Rabbits, perhaps: They’d got two already.

The pale smocks of the beaters began to be visible through the final trees; the last wily birds launched themselves into the air; the guns fell silent. The first drive of the day was over, with forty-seven limp bodies to hang on the game-cart. Three of them were mine, six Iris’s, a round dozen went to Darling, and ten to his partner. I reckoned six for a one-woman show counted as top score, and going by Darling’s dark looks, he was aware of her superiority as well. Iris seemed oblivious, merely collecting her bag with her own hands, but on the way back to the cart she gave me a wink, making it clear how conscious she was of offended male pride. I stifled a smile, and wondered if Darling would move us down the line a bit for the next drive.

Sure enough, at the next stand, which was a lightly wooded area through which a stream wandered, Darling suggested positions in a slightly different order. My inexperienced eye could see no difference between our deciduous copse and that of Freiburg and Stein fifty yards away, but either the drive or the location meant that our birds came high and fast. I pruned any number of high branches, but only brought down two birds, despite the overall superiority of numbers: fifty-three this time, two of them woodcock. Darling and Ivo Hughenfort were engaged in a mild rivalry, with fourteen each—until, that is, Iris came happily up and thanked Darling for suggesting that she stand where she had.

He looked confused, and blurted out, “But you only got five.”

“And all of them deliciously tricky,” she responded, all enthusiasm. “One of them straight overhead—I have bits of shot in my hair. No, five birds like those are worth twenty in the open. I shall thank Bloom for them.”

Darling watched her troop off to fetch another pair of birds, frowning in an attempt to decide if she was serious. I nearly laughed aloud, and when our paths coincided, I said to her, “You’re being wicked to that poor man.”

“That poor man is stacking the decks.”

“Shall I load for you on the next drive, get your numbers up a bit?”

“You don’t need to do that—if I wanted loaders, I’d have asked for them.”

“Just one drive?”

“Well, all right. It’s very naughty, though.”

“What, to stack our own deck?”

She shot me a grin of pure mischief. “I shall have a word with Bloom.”

Our third stand, near to midday, was in open ground again. We spread ourselves out across the rolling hillside, each of us backed by one or two loaders and their dogs. Except Iris and me. She took my gun and snapped it to her shoulder two or three times. She would have to compensate each time to the differences in make, length, and weight, hardly an ideal situation when the goal was a quick fire. At least hers took the same cartridge as the Purdey—I wouldn’t have to fumble too much in my loading.

The others, naturally, saw the change. Alistair abandoned Marsh and his family group to stroll back the line in our direction.

“Do you wish me to assist?” he asked.

“No,” said Iris briskly. “Thanks, old boy, but we’re fine.”

As a loader I was far from professional, but we quickly reached a rhythm, Iris thrusting the hot gun back to me without looking, me slapping the full one back into her hand, the stock leaving my grasp in an easy, continuous motion. The drive was a heavy one, and it seemed to me a larger percentage came our way this time than the last, but I had little time to look up or even note the birds falling. I dashed the hot barrel open, knocked the spent cartridges to the ground, shoved the fresh ones in, and snapped it shut in time to exchange it for the other gun. Around and around the guns went. I was vaguely aware of birds raining down, but it seemed a long time before the continual roar along the line slowed to a sporadic bang. One last bird broke, overhead and behind Iris; she spun around and took it.

Triumphant, panting with exertion, she was transformed, very near beautiful. I was sweating myself and felt it fair to join in the triumph.

“Twenty-five,” said Alistair. Even his eyes gleamed. Iris threw back her head and laughed aloud.

Darling, with two loaders and perfectly matched guns, had got twenty-three.