“Sloe gin. This year’s batch. The blackthorns are from the hedgerow along the west field.”
James took the flask, drank, and handed it back without comment. The ease of it struck Lex. Here, he was just a man taking a drink from another man’s flask on a walk. Except he was the King of the United Kingdom and the other was a duke.
Barnaby drank next. He took a more measured sip, the flask tipped precisely to his lips. Then Perry took it and poured in a mouthful that was clearly too much. He coughed, his eyes watering. The Duke watched this with undisguised satisfaction.
“Good batch, isn’t it?” he said. Perry wheezed something that sounded vaguely affirmative.
The flask arrived at Lex. He took a small sip and held it in his mouth before swallowing. The gin hit the back of his throat like sweet petrol. It was dense and fruity and then immediately, viciously alcoholic. It was the kind of homemade spirit that concealed its intent behind the taste of berries and then removed your ability to stand. His nan would have called it lethal. She would have also finished off the flask.
He handed it back with a murmured ;thank you’.
He was pacing himself. Not because he couldn’t hold his drink, but because he was walking through the grounds of acountry estate with Barnaby’s best friend on one side, and his father on the other.
He felt like someone deep into an audition for a role he wasn’t sure was on offer. It was entirely possible that he was only being tolerated because he happened to be very good at making the heir to all of this come. But until he had a clearer sense of this, he was keeping his wits sharp.
They crossed the second field in a loose formation, the Duke narrating the landscape as they went. That copse was planted by his grandfather. That barn housed the original Chatham herd of Shorthorns until the sixties, when his father switched to Herefords for the beef premium. The brook at the bottom of the valley had flooded in 2014 and taken out twenty yards of fencing, and the insurance company had quibbled about whether it constituted an act of God, which the Duke considered a metaphysical question that no claims adjuster was qualified to answer, so he’d offered to put them in touch with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Lex listened to the man’s stories. He liked the Duke. The man talked about his land the way Lex’s coach talked about the gym: with a bone-deep knowledge that came from decades of being responsible for every square foot of it. The Duke knew which fields drained poorly and which hedgerows held the best sloes. He knew the name of the farmer who rented the western acreage, the name of the farmer’s dog, and the year the dog had bitten a postman.
Florence had gone still at the far edge of the field, her ears pricked forward, her eyes locked onto something beyond the fence line. She’d found the cows. They were Herefords, reddish-brown and white-faced, standing in a loose cluster near a water trough at the edge of the adjacent field. Florence was at the fence line, her body rigid, her tail straight out behind her, one front paw lifted in a point.
“Florence.” Barnaby’s voice carried the lack of authority that Lex had come to recognise as his dog-handling register. “Florence, come back here.”
Florence didn’t come. She barked again, higher this time, and the nearest Hereford lifted its head from the trough and looked at her with the slow, liquid stare of an animal that weighed eight hundred kilograms and was not remotely concerned.
“Florence.Heel.”
The dog dropped to her belly and began crawling under the bottom rail of the fence.
“For God’s sake.” Barnaby started toward her, his stride quickening, and Lex caught the set of his jaw and the particular tension in his shoulders that telegraphed his deep, genuine unease.
“Are you scared of cows, Barns?”
“I am not scared of cows. I have a healthy and entirely rational wariness of large bovines in enclosed spaces, which is supported by agricultural accident statistics.”
“They’re behind a fence.”
“Florence is goingthroughthe fence, Lex. She’s going to antagonise them, and then they’re going to come towards the fence. Then I’m going to have to retrieve my dog from a field of agitated livestock.”
“They’re just standing there.”
“They’re standing therenow. Cows are deceptively fast, Lex. They look docile and then they charge. It’s a whole thing. It’s well documented.”
The Duke had stopped walking. He was watching Barnaby with an expression of fond amusement. “He’s been like this since he was seven,” he said to Lex. “A cow looked at him at the Chatham village fête and he didn’t go near the agricultural tent for three years.”
“It didn’t look at me. Itadvancedon me with intent.”
“It was a Jersey, my dear boy. They’re basically Labradors in cow form. They’re gentle, sweet things.”
Florence had made it through the fence and was circling the nearest Hereford. The cows paid her absolutely no attention. Barnaby whistled at her. Florence glanced back, wagged her tail once, and resumed her orbit, forcing Barnaby to give up on her as a lost cause.
The clay trap was set up in the long field beyond the ha-ha, a spring-loaded arm bolted to a concrete pad that the Duke said had been there since 1986 and showed no signs of needing replacement. A folding table had been arranged beside it, laid out with a Thermos of coffee, a bottle of sloe gin, a plate of shortbread, and a game pie cut into wedges on a china plate.
The shotguns came out of a leather case lined in green baize. Four side-by-sides, oiled and gleaming, with walnut stocks worn smooth by decades of use. The Duke handled them with care, breaking each one open and passing it across with a word about its history. This one was his father’s. That one came from a maker in Birmingham who’d since gone under. The pair at the end were Purdeys, and when Lex asked what a Purdey cost, the Duke said, “One doesn’t ask,” which was the most aristocratic non-answer Lex had ever received.
Two protection officers stood at the tree line, forty yards back. Lex had clocked them the moment they set off from the main house. He watched them watch James pick up a loaded shotgun three drinks into the afternoon without so much as a shifted weight between them, which told Lex this was a fairly regular occurrence. The King of England habitually got pissed and shot things on country estates.
The Duke loaded the trap, stepped back, and delivered the rules. One shooter at a time. Call “pull” when ready. Don’t point anything at anything you don’t intend to kill; an instruction thathe directed at Perry, who was at that moment aiming right down at his own foot.
