“James, you’re first.”
James stepped to the mark, settled the stock against his shoulder, and called it. The clay launched from the trap in a low, fast arc across the grey sky. James tracked it, led it, and fired. The clay burst into dust. He broke the gun, ejected the spent cartridge, and stepped back without comment.
Barnaby went next. Same result. Clean hit, clay shattered, gun broken and lowered.
Perry missed. The clay sailed intact over the hedgerow and disappeared. He lowered his gun, looked at it with suspicion, and said, “The wind moved it.”
“There’s no wind,” the Duke said.
“There was a gust.”
“It’s four degrees and perfectly still, Peregrine. You flinched. Like you always do.”
Lex stepped up. He’d never shot a side-by-side in his life. He’d fired a twelve-bore once at a stag do in Wales, at a clay shooting centre run by a man with a ponytail and a disconcerting number of opinions about immigration, and he’d hit nine out of ten because his hand-eye coordination was professional-grade and tracking a moving object was what his brain had been trained to do since he was fourteen.
He settled the stock against his shoulder. The walnut was warm from the case. He called “pull,” watched the clay launch, tracked it across the sky, and fired.
The clay exploded.
He broke the gun, turned, and found four faces looking at him with varying degrees of surprise.
“Lucky shot,” Perry said.
“Pull,” Lex said.
He hit the second. And the third. And the fourth. Each time, the clay arced across the field, and each time, Lex’s hands and eyes did what they’d always done: found the target, calculated the lead, and put the shot where it needed to be. He didn’t think about it. He just let his reflexes do the work.
“Good Lord,” the Duke said, after the fifth consecutive hit sent a puff of orange dust across the sky. “You’re a natural.”
“He’s not a natural,” Barnaby said. “He’s a professional athlete with elite visuomotor processing. He’d hit a clay pigeon blindfolded if you gave him the trajectory.”
“Thank you, Barns,” Lex said. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me.”
“Oh, I doubt that…” James smirked into the flask he had up against his face.
The afternoon settled into its rhythm. The sloe gin went around. The shortbread went around. The game pie was demolished by Perry, who ate three wedges. James shot well. The Duke shot better. Barnaby matched them both, while Perry continued to miss, and continued to blame the wind, the gun, the clay, the angle of the sun, and at one point the protection officers for distracting him by standing too quietly.
By the third round of the sloe gin, the formality had burned off entirely. James had undone his collar and rolled his sleeves. The Duke was sitting on an upturned crate, his gun broken across his knees, telling Perry about a shoot in the seventies where a beater had accidentally flushed a badger instead of a pheasant and the entire line had scattered. Perry wasn’t listening. He was filming something on his mobile, presumably for the content calendar that governed his waking hours.
James loaded his gun and turned to face the group with the barrel pointed upward. He planted his feet, brought the stock to his shoulder, and executed a quarter-turn that swept the gun in a tight arc, finishing with the barrel tipped skyward and his lefthand extended in a flourish that belonged in a Napoleonic oil painting.
“The Spanish parada,” he announced. “Vidal taught me. It’s a traditional military salute from the—”
“Put the gun down, James,” Barnaby said.
“It’s a perfectly safe manoeuvre. The barrel was pointed—”
“The barrel was pointed at Perry’s head for approximately one-fifth of a second, which is one-fifth of a second too long, and Vidal taught you that at a nightclub in Cardona after an entire bottle of grappa, so forgive me if I don’t trust the provenance of this ‘historic parade move’.”
“Fair point,” James said. “Fair point.”
“You’re all cut off,” Barnaby said, though no mechanism existed to enforce this, and the Duke was already unscrewing the Thermos to top up his coffee with another measure of gin.
Barnaby was drunk. His rider’s discipline kept his spine straight even as the rest of him softened. But his guard was down. The careful distance he maintained between his body and other people’s bodies had dissolved, and Lex was the nearest warm surface.
It started with Barnaby’s shoulder pressing against his arm while they watched Perry attempt his seventh consecutive miss. Then Barnaby’s hand was on Lex’s forearm while he talked about the time Meridian had refused a fence at Burghley and deposited him into a water jump. The hand stayed there after the story ended, his fingers light on Lex’s skin. When Lex loaded his gun for the next round, Barnaby leaned into his side and stayed there, his weight tipping against Lex’s ribs.
Lex held still. He let Barnaby lean. He let the contact happen without remarking on it. Drawing attention to it would make Barnaby aware of what his body was doing.
