Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [75]
It was bad hunting and improper coursing, but the day was ending and etiquette relaxed. The rival hunts swept after their respective hares, neither knowing nor greatly troubling about which pack was following the original prey, and which was hunting change. Then, with the width of the meadow between them, the de Guise party killed.
The ironic whoops, the waves, the horn blowing from the ridge, reached the less fortunate party down below; the second hare, now patently a fresh one, was far ahead, and both horses and riders were tired. But St. André, riled by the shouting, followed grimly, with O’LiamRoe at his elbow. And behind, among the running berners and the leashed dogs, the cheetah rode stiff-legged on its cushion, the mask dark above the silent muzzle.
They had no break for horn blowing now. Stream and ridge far on their left, they raced along the wooded edge of the meadow until the turf turned to a weedy tilth and began to show the bones of the underlying lime. Small quarries, holes and underworkings patched the distant ground; and it was apparent that they were now very close indeed to the banks of the Loire. Stewart, loose-seated in the middle, could hear O’LiamRoe swearing. Once into the broken ground, their hare was as good as lost.
Then their luck turned. Out of the ground far ahead materialized a man, a middle-aged man dressed in working clothes who waved his woollen cap and shouted and jumped so that his breeches clapped in mid-air. It had perhaps been worth a crown to him once before, and it certainly earned him as much again. The hare veered, hesitated, and then altering course grimly, began to forge back over the meadow.
It lay before them, a long field of close grass rolling uphill, dipping to the stream, rising to the ridge where the others waited, black and derisive against the frosty blue of the sky. If they chased her, they would simply drive her into the Duke’s hands.
St. André’s arm came up. They halted, sweating, jolting, behind him, the latecomers padding through the crumbling lime; and at an order the groom thrust past with the silent cat. The Marshal spoke. Fast and smoothly, the thong was slipped, the mask peeled off; and the cheetah’s peat-brown eyes, glassy full, were directed to their prey. Then with gloved hands the man lifted the cat by its flanks and flung it to the ground. For a moment the cat crouched, pale-spotted, furry, the tufted ears pricked; then the spine rose thin and raw like a lash, the thick joints folded, and the cheetah launched itself, clinging, inescapable as a dream and, undulating, began to cross the wide field after the hare.
Softly as she went, the sound reached the hare. Her thews responded, flinging her forward in great jumps, eight feet and nine feet between her pricking, her dark-tipped ears surging above the high grass. She jumped; and from the short fur on her neck a blaze of green flared into life and died again in the shade.
St. André suddenly froze in the saddle. On the pied jennet, Thady’s blue eyes narrowed. But Robin Stewart, closer to the household than any, knew at once what it was. As the hunting cat, smooth as lava, unfurled to the rhythm of its most perfect pace, Stewart flung his horse forward, shouting, the words floating thinly through the ice-clear, sunny air. ‘Damn you. It’s the leveret! It’s the Queen’s hare you’re hunting!’
They heard on the ridge. On both sides of the field, for a single second, no one moved. An outsider looking at the flushed faces would have seen fright and irritation and anger. The death of a royal pet was not the best way to win favour. Of all the faces beside St. André, only O’LiamRoe’s showed pity. Thady Boy was as still as the cheetah on his leashed pillion had been. For clearly the little hare was doomed. Already, it had swum, big-headed, bobbing, over the stream and was halfway up the long meadow; and already, far behind, the long spine and the padded, working shoulders of the cat, yellow like smoke, smoothly loping, had begun to narrow the gap. And hopelessly