They walked along a passage to the back of the house, coming out in the stable-yard, where Harding was waiting with a dog. ‘Should you like me to come along, sir?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Jack, ‘you wait here for Master George and take him along for the paper. But Bess can come.’
The rough, more-or-less spaniel bitch heard the words and bounded across, quivering with zeal and gazing into Jack’s face to see which way they were to go.
They went in fact through those back regions where Jack had been so happy as a boy –
stables, tack-room, double coach-house, the fine red-brick wall against which he had played single-handed fives for so many hours, the grapehouse, the kitchen garden –
where they sat in the grotto for a while and Stephen examined his gun. ‘Sure, this is the elegant fowling-piece of the world,’ he said, ‘and beautifully balanced.’
‘Joe Manton was thoroughly pleased with it. He said the stock had the prettiest grain he had ever seen. And Stephen,
take notice of the touch-hole, will you? It is platina, which never corrodes or chokes – no others shoot so sharply.’
‘Upon my soul, Jack, you do yourself proud. I have never had a Manton gun at all, let alone one with a platina touchhole, rich as Beelzebub though I was.’
‘Ain’t you rich now, Stephen?’ he asked with never a hint of vulgar curiosity; only with a very deep concern.
‘I am not. I carried my fortune to Spain, as you know; and there it has been seized. They had wind of my doings in Peru. But I am in no way desperate, Jack. I have my pay
* much in arrears, I may observe – as a naval surgeon; and we mean to get rid of that ill-omened place at Barham and take a little small cottage somewhere in these parts. No. I am not desperate at all: it is just that I am in no way to indulge in a platina touch-hole to my gun.’
‘Then we are in the same boat, brother. I had scarcely been home a month before writs started coming in – actions for wrongful seizure, forcible detainer and the like, based on my taking slavers who by one damned quibble or another could claim protection. Most were dismissed out of hand, but two or three were argued before the court and although that dear good man Lawrence did all he could, I was cast in damages. Stephen, you would never believe the amount of damages when it comes to shipping and cargo. I have been refused leave to appeal on the most recent, and there are at least two more pending.
Lawrence spoke to the Admiralty counsel, a member of the same inn, who told him that my instructions had been perfectly clear: they forbade me to interfere with any protected vessel, and if in spite of that I did so, I must bear the consequences. For my own part, I spoke to the First Sea Lord – I had always regarded him as a friend – but he was pretty cold and distant, as high as Pontius Pilate, and he gave exactly the same answer, except that he said I must pay the consequences. Well, I can not pay them, if any of the other cases goes against me. Even as things are, we can only just scrape by if Sophie sells Ashgrove: this place and the whole Woolcombe estate are entailed.’ Stephen shook his head, looking so wretchedly Low that Jack went
on, ‘But like you, I am not at all desperate. I too have my service pay, and so long as I am a member they can’t arrest me. Lord, Stephen, we have been very much worse off. Shall we see if we can find any rabbits?’
The moment that he stirred from his damp seat the spaniel sprang up and whimpered with eagerness, cast to and fro among the seedling asters, and vanished behind a row of myrtle: here she could be heard marking, at a stand, but she was a silent bitch and uttered nothing but an urgent whine.
‘That will be the gate leading to the common,’ said Jack. ‘I wanted you to see it in any event, a lovely piece of country.’ They walked quickly through, and there on the path some thirty yards beyond there was a white scut bobbing along. Jack whipped up his gun; the rabbit made a somersault; the spaniel raced out and brought it back, breathing deep with satisfaction.
‘So this is the common,’ said Stephen, looking over a broad expanse of rough pasture, fern-brake, scattered trees, with here and there a pool; the whole agreeably undulating, autumn-coloured, with a fine great sky over it, adorned with the whitest sailing clouds. ‘An elegant common too, so it is; but my ideas are all confused. I had supposed your father
and his friends had enclosed it, to your great distress, when we were on the far side of the world.’
‘Certainly they inclosed Woolhampton common and it did grieve me. But this is another piece of common land called Simmon’s Lea – it was always my favourite – and now they want to inclose it too. Over my dead body! Such fun I had here when I was a boy: mostly alone but sometimes with young fellows from the farms or the village – netting, ferreting, drawing the mere, poaching on Mr Baldwin’s land, leading his keepers a rare old dance, wild-fowling in a hard winter – Heneage Dundas used to come down sometimes. And when the Blackstone came over in this part of the country we would always find a fox in the furze. Did you notice that old chap in the stable-yard?’
‘Certainly.’
‘That was Harding, a real country-man, born and bred in
the parish – there are a score of Hardings here. He began as a kennel-boy with the Blackstone, where his father was huntsman; then he whipped-in for another pack, but having a nasty fall he took to being an under-keeper beyond Wimborne, and then after a spell as a water-bailiff he came to us as keeper, oh, well before I was born. I can’t remember a time without him. I am no expert on birds, as you are very well aware, but what little I do know I learnt from him. This very path leads to a place where he showed me a nightjar’s egg, lying there on the ground. Have you ever seen a nightjar’s egg, Stephen?’
‘I have; but it was brought to me. I have never found one.’
‘Then I do not have to tell you how beautiful they are. Then as for fishing and setting snares and finding a hare, and shooting for that matter, he – oh, well shot, Stephen.’
The spaniel brought the rabbit back. Stephen praised the gun, as pretty a gun as he had ever seen. ‘Do you preserve, at all, Jack?’ he asked as they went on.
‘Oh no. I just take a gun out from time to time, more for the walk than anything else: I love this common. If a shot offers, well and good, but I have no notion of breeding birds up in order to knock them down again. And a shot does offer most days, because many of my neighbours do preserve, and do breed up pheasants by wholesale, so when they have one of these big shoots, with driven birds, a good many come on to our land. Some of these people resent it, and one mean-spirited sodomite says that my reason for opposing the enclosure is that I like getting high-reared game for nothing. There is a lot of ill-feeling
… and that fellow,’ said Jack, cocking his head to bring his good eye to bear in what was now a habitual gesture, ‘that fellow on the pony, coming into sight behind those willows, is a perfect example. A sailor, I am sorry to say, and a scrub.’
‘That sounds a contradiction in terms.’
‘You are truly good to say so, Stephen; but when you consider . . . However, this fellow Griffiths is not so much as a sailor, neither. You will remember him in Valletta and Gib as a commander – he had the Espiègle and then the Argus – a big black-haired red-faced domineering cove, younger than me but with much mQre influence – a member for Carton and Stranraer’s heir, his nephew – and he was made post in the same month. But after a cruise or two in the Terpsichore, when he had an ugly mutiny on his hands, he refused commands that would have taken him to the West Indies. He prefers farming, high farming; he has a deal of land over towards Paston. He was the prime mover in enclosing Woolhampton Common – by the way, we say either Woolcombe or Woolhampton here: it’s all one – and now he wants to do the same to Simmon’s Lea. He and his friends want