She could hear the hounds in the copse. The Huntsman was in there with them; his voice rose, calling individual hounds by name, urging them on. “Bounder, get out of there. Dapple, up, up girl….”
Then there was a shout and they were away again, the horn, and the hounds giving voice….
Sylvan.
Someone was supposed to be riding with them today. A guest? Someone not a member of this Hunt.
Sylvan. Here he was. Beside her, turning in the saddle to look adoringly at her. She felt her face flame and drew herself up proudly.
Some of the riders had fallen back. They had been at it all the morning, and it was noon now, with the sun overhead and hot on her hat. The fox had taken refuge in Brent’s Wood, and the Huntsman and whippers-in were among the trees. The Master, too, which was strange. Standing on his horse like some circus acrobat, standing and throwing things.
And then … a surge of feeling. A jolt of pure pleasure that streaked up from her groin. An orgasm of sheer delight which seemed to go on and on and on.
Sylvan felt it, too. They all felt it. Every face showed it. Every body lashed with it, heads jerking, jaws lax.
Then at last the Huntsman was sounding the kill. There was the Huntsman with the fox’s mask, and the horses turning for home. Now the sun was behind her. A long ride home. Even if they went the short way, along Magna Spinney and onto the gravel road past the Old Farm, it was still a long way home
She was desperately tired when they returned. Her father came over to her and took her arm, roughly, too roughly, and they walked through the gate with the others.
“What in God’s name were you doing here?” he demanded, his mouth almost at her ear. “Stella, you little fool!”
She gaped at him. “Riding,” she said, wondering why he asked. “Why, Daddy, I was riding.”
She followed her father’s gaze, up to the terrace. Mother stood there, a glass in her hand, very pale, very beautiful. Sylvan was beside her. He had his arm around Marjorie, pointing down at them. How could he be there, not even in Hunt dress, when he had been riding just moments ago?
Stella felt her face growing red. Sylvan hadn’t really been on the Hunt. He couldn’t have been. Her father walked away from her, up the flight of shallow stairs. Mother was clutching the balustrade with both hands, tightly, her knuckles white. Sylvan was holding her up, snapping his fingers at a nearby servant. Then Father was there, shouldering him aside.
“Marjorie!”
His wife looked blindly at him, as though she did not know who he was. “Stella,” she said, pointing. “Her face …”
Rigo turned to look back at his daughter where she stood at the foot of the stairs, turned just too late to see what Marjorie had seen, the same chill, senseless gaze that the Goosegirl had worn when she had appeared among them at Opal Hill.
As for Stella, she tottered upon her feet, trembling between fury and shock with the realization that Sylvan hadn’t really been there to see her riding and that she could remember almost nothing about the day at all. She remembered horses and hounds and a fox, but they were real horses, real dogs from some other time, years ago. She remembered that jet of feeling which had filled her and the memory made her flush, but she did not know why she had felt it. Staring up at Sylvan’s concerned face, at her father’s furious one, at her mother’s anxious one, she had the fleeting realization that there were things happening all around her, hideous, important things, and that she had not paid attention to what was going on.
12
Shoethai, assistant in the Office of Acceptable Doctrine, sat in the dining room of the port facility waiting for a ship to unload. Elder Brother Noazee Fuasoi had explained that the ship carried a very important cargo, and he had sent Shoethai to receive it.
Shoethai’s automatic response had been unvoiced. “Why me?” Even now he studiously avoided looking at himself in the window, where his reflected image was superimposed over the ship in question like a hovering and misshapen ghost. The face was sufficiently grotesque to have made several staff people at the port pretend they hadn’t seen him, including two of the waiters in this dining room.