Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [73]
There were many hares. Four miles she might run at her best, the lovers’ creature, the God-given Hermaphrodite; and thirty grey hounds might she still outpace. Fast, keen-nosed, cunning, jack or puss, they leaped from form or feeding ground as the lymhounds came. Big-jointed, white-tailed, they ran, jumped, doubled as the three motes rang out mellow behind them and the first relay of hare-hounds left the liams.
They hunted not in an enclosed park, but in a chase; in woods and scattered covert of nut tree and beech, poplar and ash, and in scrub and heath with elder and alder on the ground, gorse and blackthorn and the stubble of reaped corn. There the great hares started, with three years of cunning behind them, ears and scut couched, leaving the form cantering, not yet at full stretch. Then the running dogs would pass the slow lymers, the leader opening a single note as the hare ran and the ‘Laisser courrer’ sounded. Other hounds doubled and trebled their tongue as the hunt swept uphill, horns stuttering du grêle, the yeomen berners addressing the dogs.
The O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, golden hair streaming on streaming wool frieze, with his queer, inbred instinct had chosen his dog well. In the third relay, the best, the parfitières, ran Luadhas with her great bones and long back swaying, swimming; the flat brow and Roman nose high and delicately held. O’LiamRoe watched her, his soul in his eyes, and did not even know that Oonagh O’Dwyer was watching him in her turn.
Nothing in the situation escaped Robin Stewart. Pounding along, never quite abreast of the hunt, he caught Thady Boy’s eye at last and heavily winked. Thady Boy, who had pressing concerns of his own, took the first chance to spur his pied jennet and draw off.
The next hare was a fast one—eight pounds of her, grey in her winter coat, but with the wisdom to spare herself, squat when she could, and exhaust the dogs seeking her, questing, yearning in circles. They headed her at last to the stable where the last relay stood, and O’LiamRoe was not the only one who, elated with the sun, the cold wind, the warm saddle, the music of hunt horn and voice, strained to see the noble, waiting head of his lovely dog Luadhas.
She was there, but tight in hardel as were all the braches in that place, the rough hair lifted stark at her spine. Next to her stood a royal groom, a great thong round his wrist. And among the grey-yellow dusty filaments of last year’s flowering weeds was a low spread of dappled fur, staunch elbows, and great pads laid flat, and, above them, motionless in the quiet grass, a shallow, masked head. In a moment you could see the wide-spaced, tufted ears, the bottle nose, and the cheetah’s lyre mark sealing ancient secrets round the white muzzle. One of the hunting cats had been brought.
It was not hard to tell who had engineered it. Through Robin Stewart, mischievous in his jealousy, O’LiamRoe had already been forced to present his lady prematurely with his self-conscious gift of the hound. So much Thady Boy had already ascertained. Now the display of Luadhas was destroyed at a stroke, and Robin Stewart, who had laid his plans well, admitted as much buoyantly, with his knowing smile seeking Thady Boy’s eye yet again as they stood arrested, the tired dogs hard-leashed, the horses still. In the bare field before them, nothing moved but the hare.
The Duke de Guise raised a hand. The groom, bending,