Dear Deceiver(36)

'The finest mammal in these islands,' Rory said quietly. 'And the most persecuted.'                       
       
           



       

Within the cottage 'hide' it was safe to talk. These, Haidee learned,  were fallow deer, more descendants of escapees from Powerscourt Park.  Their bright red brown was presently spotted with yellowish white, but  by nest month it seemed they would be in darker pelage with no spots.

'You're in luck,' Rory whispered. 'They're not one bit bothered.'

So it seemed. An owl screeched, but the deer did not scatter. Their  heads turned as one and languidly to give a vista of black button noses  and antlers swaying like the corps de ballet.

The head of the largest buck was particularly well opened and had eleven  jags as best Haidee could count them. Rory opined that he was in his  sixth year. The other two bucks he put down as sorels, in venery the  term for a third-year male fallow. All three were grunting huskily and  this apparently was a characteristic of the rut. Great Buck would have  gained his harem by the process of dispossession.

It seemed now, however, that the strife was o'er. Domesticity reigned.  One of the sorels scratched himself enjoyably with a hind foot. The  others fed peacefully on the stalky grass, their necks looking very  slender for the weight of their heads. Fallow deer antlers are palmated,  on top the croches grow like the palm of a hand. Rory explained this  too while Great Buck chivvied his does nosing at their black-bordered  rumps.

Haidee, accustoming herself to the landscape by moonlight, had now got  her bearings. The heath was surely the green band she had looked up at  from Willie Byrne's cottage. Above it bare crags towered to the ridge of  Glenglass; below, the north face dropped to the forest, the house and  the village. The south face should bring one down eventually to the  boundary of Powerscourt. It was exciting to find that her hunch that day  about the deer had been correct.

'Is there a road somewhere in that direction?' she hazarded, pointing.

'There is,' Rory said shortly. 'Only fit for a land rover or a tractor,  but I wish it wasn't there. Some joker came up here last spring with a  crossbow thinking he was Robin Hood and got one of them on the flank. By  the mercy of Providence, I found it soon enough to prevent a lingering  death.' He saw the white wordless horror in her face. 'All right as it  happened, the deer recovered, but you see why I don't want this place  publicized.'

She saw only too well. There were still no words for her revulsion or blazing anger.

Great Buck chose that moment to lead off and his train fell in behind him, the does skirmishing like nervous kittens.

'I think we'll hang on for a bit,' Rory decreed. 'Beginner's luck. You might have other visitors.'

Whatever about beginner's luck-fallow deer were not numerous in  Glenglass-Haidee's was only beginning. Rory directed her eyes to a soggy  churned-up place where water glinted, and hardly had he done so than a  dark thick-bodied shape came startlingly across the moonlight on the  heath. The stag, a heavy-maned eight-pointer, threw itself on its back  in the bog hole and wallowed ecstatically. It rose again and galloped  off with tufts of peat snagged to its antlers. At once a smaller shape  jumped into the pool for its turn.

'That's his fag,' Rory explained. 'You'll often see young ones using a wallow after the master stag.'

For Haidee the hours raced by. The night was cold and the air  frost-thin, but excitement kept her glowing. For some time after the  master and his esquire had wallowed the cottage-eye view of the heath  stayed like an empty stage. Empty but waiting, with, for overture, the  voice wafting in roars and bellows from the ridge.

Rory's deer lore was inexhaustible-and fascinating. 'Hart,' for  instance, was commonly a male red deer of six years or more, probably a  ten-pointer, and on Brendon forest in Somerset the local name for a wild  deer was 'forester'.

He laughed as he told her. 'So one of these fine days I'll grow my antlers. Horns, of course, I've had for a number of years!'

The jest reminded her of a piece of information previously imparted, to  wit, that some stags, known as hummels, never grew antlers at all. Was  there a human parallel? Rory, so imperious, and Paul, so peaceable, had  both loved Suzanne, and on that stamping ground the unattired stag had  won.                       
       
           



       

'What's the matter? You look very serious all of a sudden,' Rory  remarked. It was one way he certainly did not look. The first time they  had ever walked through the forest, the moon, she remembered, had  bleached all colour from his face. Tonight between dark sideboards that  suggested fancifully the forward 'tines' of antlers his temples and  cheeks showed their warm tan and his mouth quitted with amusement.

'I was wondering are there any hummels round here?'

'Oh yes. I saw one last week. Enjoying himself very much.' He grinned.  'Humble by name, but not by nature. If this were a deer forest the  stalkers would have roused him out before the rut broke so that he  couldn't sire calves like himself.'

It was said strangely. She wondered for the moment if he could possibly have read her thoughts about himself and Paul.

'It's impossible then for a hummel's calf to have antlers?'

'Not impossible. Unlikely. Unlikely they'd be any good.' Again she had  the feeling that they were really discussing something else. The happy  look had left his face. It looked stem again and set.

The night of beginner's luck kept its top-of-the-bill offering till last.

'Listen,' Rory commanded. His quicker ears had caught the click of antlers.

The brown stag coming into view was even to inexpert eyes a beauty. He  was a twelve-pointer, well affected, between four and five feet at the  shoulder. His coat was thick and glossy and he was snorting vapour.  Behind him strung out in single file came his harem of six.

'By George,' Rory said softly, 'he's a royal.'

In former times this had denoted a hart hunted by the king or queen.  Now, less romantically, it referred to a twelve-pointer with a  three-point crown-shaped top to each antler.

The one before them now had started to roar and from the near distance  his challenge was taken. To Haidee's astonishment-this really had seemed  too much to expect-the dark shape just visible forty or so yards away  was quite as large and in fact heavier than the hart royal, but his big  head was unfurnished.

'There's your man for you. What do you think of him?' Rory whispered.

Haidee was trying not to desert the maxim which had always seemed so  personal to glasses, uninteresting brown hair and silly startled eyes.  'Handsome is as handsome does.' But the truth was she didn't like the  hummel. And she didn't like his tactics. Here was a parcel of hinds in  tow and liking it, and like the serpent in Eden-

She stopped thinking about the stags, both of whom were now posturing  and roaring defiance, and remembered that other group which had had a  serpent, Rory, Suzanne and Toby.

'I don't go a bundle on him,' she said replying belatedly to the  question. 'I'm sure they don't either.' She pointed to the hinds.



'They don't have much say in it,' she was told.

She was sorry for them. 'The eyes of the herd,' Rory had already  described them, the ones even in a mixed group most likely to spot you  first, and, for all that, to stand meekly by and not to be allowed even  to lift a foot in the fight for your own person...

'I'm glad I'm not a hind.'

'I'm glad too,' Rory said in a practical tone.

Suddenly it was no longer a light conversation. No word, no touch was  necessary. His hands in fact were by his side and hers in the pockets of  her jacket. And it was quiet, as quiet as snow. At first only their  lips met and that was quiet too, and tender. And then it changed. Her  arms were spanning his rough tweed back, his arms had wrapped her like a  cloak. She felt his chin on her hair and she hid her face and climbed  in like a stag going to harbour.

Oh, how I love him, how much, how terribly much...

Above her head Rory said lightly: 'Suzanne, let's do something incredible. Let's try honesty.'

Suzanne ... it was a dash of ice water. But with it sanity returned. So  long as he thought there was the slightest chance of a reconciliation  with Suzanne he would continue to hope. As he had put it that afternoon  at Glendalough she was his canker, the thing he kept burning his wings  at. It was like looking at two paths, one in sunshine with Jennie, one  under stormclouds perpetually harking back.                       
       
           



       

She thought agonizedly-I'm ruining his life.

'Suzanne, you fraud,' Rory's voice was still light and joyful. 'You love me.'