Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Asixteen-year-old Reuben stood above the dog at the edge of the coppice of beech and buckthorn.
The hound lay prone at his feet as Joseph, panting slightly from exertion, caught up to them.
At first he thought red currants from the bush must have dropped along the dog’s head and body; winded from the run, and not ever having been witness to violence in the course of his quiet life, Joseph didn’t at first understand what he saw.
“You lazy beast! You cost me that hare!”
Reuben snarled at the animal and raised the butt of the shotgun. Joseph comprehended, his mind ticking along with irritating slowness, that Reuben had struck the animal down, and meant to strike again.
“Reuben! Desist,” Joseph said sharply.
“He let the jack get away!” Reuben looked as if he might turn the blow on Joseph. “He’s a cursed slow mongrel, and why m’father saddled me with him, I’ll never know.” The older boy sneered. “Much like yourself.”
Joseph shook off the barb. His grandfather the baronet had made it out to be an insult when his second son fell in love with and married the daughter of a tradesman, and his uncle, the current baronet, had inherited this sense of superiority. Joseph was more concerned about the hurt dog.
The Southern Hound lay on its side, panting after his run, its brown eyes wide and frightened.
Though blood seeped from the wound on its skull, the animal tried to rise, paws scrabbling through the layer of fallen nuts and yellow leaves cloaking the ground.
The hound had been bred to hunt and work, and even injured, instinct called it.
“The hare is fast, and the chase is the point.” Joseph looked around and spotted where the brown hare had gone to ground, finding a form to huddle in at the edge of the barley field.
The hare’s bright brown eyes watched Reuben with an alert sense of danger that Joseph was beginning to understand.
Something feral and wrong seemed to have taken possession of his cousin, who was prone to temper on his best days.
“You’re such a sally. We’re not here for the chase but for the kill.” Reuben’s lip curled back. He kicked the fallen hound. “Up, you cur! Let the jack escape, and I’ll never hear the end of it.”
The baronet’s booming shout startled both boys. “What is the meaning of this?”
Swiftly Reuben pointed at Joseph. “He attacked my dog! The hare escaped, and Joseph said Wolfe was too slow, and struck him.”
Joseph’s eyes strained wide with surprise. His uncle’s glare sent him a step backward, clutching his gun and stammering. “I-I never. I didn’t hurt your dog, sir.”
The baronet scowled, his spleen sharpened by Joseph’s whimper, but he wasn’t misled by his son’s false claim. The glare he swung back to Reuben suggested he was as familiar with his son’s lies as with his hot-headedness. Moreover, a betraying streak of crimson smeared the stock of Reuben’s gun.
“You’ve cost me my favorite hound, you arrogant jackanapes. Alive or dead, his hide is worth more than yours.”
Reuben flushed brick red, his look turning sullen. “He lost the scent! The hare sprang, and the doltish mutt brought us here rather than after it.”
“So you struck the dog? In anger?” Joseph’s father joined them. The quiet question in his voice lacked accusation; he was seasoned at resolving disputes. But his mild voice stirred both his brother and his nephew to greater ire.
“Stay out this, Jonas,” the baronet snapped. “I won’t have you rating my son when your own is a puling, lily-livered rabbit. Where’s my keeper?”
“Sir?” The gamekeeper came up, another hound at his heels, the as-yet-empty game bag slung over his shoulder. His eyes widened as he took in the scene, but Joseph noticed he did not seem surprised.
The baronet gestured toward the animal on the ground. “Take care of this.”
“Sir?” Joseph didn’t miss the look of contempt that the keeper sent Reuben, nor the look of tender sorrow on the man’s face as he regarded the injured animal. The man had tended this dog, raised and trained and fed it, and now would see it destroyed because of a temperamental and spiteful boy.
“I will do it,” Joseph’s father said.
Joseph held back a cry. He had never seen his father kill an animal.
His mother couldn’t even wring the neck of a chicken; she asked her housekeeper to do it.
His father, the gentle vicar of St. Cleer, patted the heads of lambs in the meadow and called Joseph and Amaranthe from the house when he discovered a den of fox kits.
The baronet had already walked on but turned to call back to Joseph. “Are you coming with, or will you stay here to puke up your guts?”
“Give him a moment, Josiah,” his father said, and his tone was harder than Joseph was accustomed to hearing from his mild-mannered sire. “This is his first hunt.”
“You’ve raised a mewling whelp,” the baronet sneered. “You need to toughen that boy, Jonas. You’ll turn him into a molly with your coddling.”
“I’d rather a boy with a soft heart than a bully,” Jonas answered swiftly.
Reuben watched with a greedy, nearly sickening expression as Jonas raised and sighted his flintlock.
“Look away, lad,” Jonas said sharply. “Go with your father.”
“Why does he get to watch?” Reuben groused, throwing a glare at Joseph.
“Because I am teaching him a lesson. Now go.”
Reluctantly Reuben left with the baronet, who had walked away from the scene, leaving others to clean up the destruction made by his son.
With a whistle Reuben set the second hound after the hare, which shot from its scrape and set off with its lolloping gait, hopping sideways now and again attempting to throw off the dog.
The shot echoed off the trees. Dirt flew as his father fired into the ground. Joseph nearly choked on his relief.
His father gave his spent gun to the keeper in return for another that was loaded and primed. “We will take the dog with us, Cobb,” Jonas said. “If you can keep him at your cottage until we leave.”
“Aye, I’ll tend’un an keep’un from sight.” Cobb rose soberly with the dog in his arms, the game sack wrapped around the animal. The hound stared mournfully at Joseph with its large, dark eyes, dull with incomprehension.
“That’un is a heller,” Cobb said, his face dark with anger. “And the baronet coaches it inee. Mark me, some day that lad will turn and bite the hand that feeds ’im.” He cradled Wolfe. “This’un hound is worth ten of that boy.”
“We’ll take care of him. I am sorry to benefit from your loss.” Jonas laid a hand on the other man’s shoulder, squeezing slightly. The baronet hadn’t addressed the keeper, his own trusted servant, but Joseph’s father knew the man’s name, and took the time to console him.
His father put an arm around Joseph’s shoulder as they both watched the keeper walk back toward the house. “Don’t ever become that, son,” Jonas said quietly. “Don’t you ever strike at a weaker creature.”
“No, Papa.”
“Use your strength to do good, Joseph. Not harm.”
“Yes, Papa. But why will no one punish Reuben?” If Joseph had done such a thing, struck at another, man or beast, he would have gotten a sound thrashing, and a moralizing lecture to boot.
“We must trust in the Lord to work his will in his own way, and turn our sorrow to his good,” his father said.
Joseph knew from that moment that whatever career he pursued, it would not be with the Church, because he would never be able to counsel people to accept the world as it was. He could not accept a world where the strong preyed on the weak, and some men were given power who did not deserve it.
Reuben had bagged a hare that day, but Joseph had killed nothing, not then nor any day after.
Wolfe became a steady companion in the years that followed, accompanying Joseph on his treks, but adoring his father above all.
Shortly after Jonas died, days after his wife, Wolfe laid down in the chicken pen with his heads on his paws and quietly finished the task Reuben had begun years before.
Perhaps this was the justice his father had meant, Joseph thought as he surfaced from that long-ago memory into his own parlor—well, Amaranthe’s parlor—the vellum stiff in his fingers.
Reuben had indeed become the baronet, but he had not managed to produce an heir of his own.
And so it all went to the lily-livered cousin—whatever was left that Reuben hadn’t managed to poison or destroy.
“Oh, it’s herself, then!” The cheerful voice of the little costermonger sounded from the hallway. “Gave him a turn, I think I did. He’s just been sitting there an age, staring into the air as if he seen a specter.”
“No doubt Mr. Joseph has as many fond recollections of our cousin as I do.” That was Amaranthe’s voice. “You might stop by the kitchens, Tamara, and have Mrs. Frost pack a basket for you. How are your sisters faring today?”
“Fair blooming, on all counts,” Tamara said proudly. “I’ll be by with your violets tomorrow morning, mum.”
“I shall look for them.” A rustle of fabric announced Amaranthe’s approach. Her dark hair was fashionably powdered and she wore a simple open robe, the stomacher laced lightly over her swelling middle.
“Well, Sir Joseph? I would have brought the letter myself, but I had to arrange to close the shop for the afternoon, and Tamara wanted an errand.”
Joseph set the letter on the table. It had no more to tell him. “Shall we go into mourning? I suppose there ought to be some notice of the niceties.”
“It seems a bit of a sham, since we won’t actually miss him nor lament his loss, but it is the proper thing to do.”
Joseph rose from his seat and prowled about the small chamber, which was tidy and sparsely furnished, and held almost nothing to indicate his possession of it. He tried to bend his imagination around the news that he would have a home to call his own.