Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [72]
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.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
While we were busy decimating the avian population of the parkland, a luncheon had been transported for us over hill and dale, so that at the next rise we came upon a mirage of folding tables and snowy linen laid out on the upper lawns. The dog-carts and Daimler in the background helped account for the phenomenon, but the redoubtable Ogilby, standing beside a tray of crystal goblets with a bottle of wine already in his hand, appeared to have summoned our meal from the faeries of the wood.
The wine was white and slightly fizzy; the temperature of the food the only concession to the distance from the Justice kitchens. I was suddenly ravenous, and even the presence of half a dozen beautifully coiffed and clad women did not stay me from my plate. Phillida made introductions, and I dutifully nodded and murmured acknowledgments around my mouthfuls of food, but it was not until Ogilby had begun to produce coffee on an elaborate machine over a spirit flame that I began to put them together.
The two German women were as unmistakable, and as inseparable, as their husbands. The tall horsey sort of woman was attached to Sir Victor and the twins, and was dutifully bent over a blow-by-blow account of their bag, which had come to a brace of pheasants each, a hare, and three rabbits. Sir James was linked with a rather exotic-looking dark-haired beauty named Costanza, who spoke with an American accent; the Marquis seemed unattached; a conventionally pretty blonde woman losing the battle with her frown lines was the wife of Alistair’s cousin Ivo; and a flighty, flirty girl of about my own age, a friend of Phillida’s, was I thought there on her own but later decided had a male left back at the house.
Inevitably, the talk was of the shoot—the birds, the near-misses, the triumphs, and underneath it all, the numbers. It would not do to boast too openly, but everyone knew before the plates were before them how many Darling and Ivo Hughenfort had taken. It was Alistair, with Marsh playing the role of audience, who introduced the subtly superior bag of Marsh’s wife. By the time he finished telling Marsh about her shooting, no-one there, even the two German wives, retained the illusion that numbers were of any importance when it came to judging skill. Alistair was, in a manner both polite and devastating, very nearly contemptuous of the two men’s superior numbers—and, by implication, of the two men themselves. He was eating an apple, and his voice carried as he spoke to Marsh, until by the end, everyone including Ogilby was glued to him.
“—and I am quite certain it was twenty-five, because I was behind her watching the birds fall, so that when that dog of Spinach’s carried one of Iris’s in, I brought it to his attention. I don’t know if he counted it as his or not.” All innocence, he popped a slice of apple into his mouth and carved another one off.
Sidney Darling had gone pale with anger. “I hardly think I need to steal someone else’s birds to pad out my count,” he objected, truthfully enough.
Alistair