26. Cass
CASS
In the morning, it’s pheasant time.
It’s a Snyder I’ve seen him try to assemble an Ikea nightstand, and that led to almost as much bloodshed as today’s hunt will—and then snap it shut with a satisfying clack .
“That’ll do the trick, eh?” he booms to the crowd. All his sycophants laugh on cue, just like they’re paid to do.
More of us shuffle through. Down the line, Matvei is handed his.
He takes it as if the gun was made for his hand and his hand alone.
No fuss. No flourish. No drama whatsoever.
He breaks it, checks it, closes it, and rests it in the crook of his arm.
It’s a stark, night-and-day difference from Raymond’s gaudy display.
Efficiency, stripped of all the spare parts.
Eventually, everyone is in possession of a firearm. This is, as some people might call it, when the fun is meant to begin. I’m not one of those people, but then again, it’s not like anyone gives a crap about my opinion.
We’re all waiting for further instructions when suddenly, there’s a small commotion.
The tweed-capped staff member who assembled us all into the gun distribution line has put one finger to an earpiece.
He’s listening to whoever’s talking on the other end with a deepening frown.
Then, still frowning, he jogs off down the dirt path toward a row of wooden hutches at the tree line.
Soon enough, word filters back up the queue: The pheasant cages are jammed. Some latch issue, they’re saying. It’ll be ten minutes, maybe fifteen, until the birds can be flushed.
A general groan goes up from the men, and the flask reappears.
I sigh out a white cloud of breath and turn in a slow circle, taking in the bare birch trees, the iron-colored sky, the smear of pink sunrise above the tree line.
My boots crunch on the frosted dirt. I muse, vaguely, about whether it’s safe for the baby to be standing this long in the cold, and decide that pregnant women in the Middle Ages tilled fields from dawn until dusk, so I’m probably fine.
“Cassandra.”
I have to stifle a scream. It’s lucky for all of us that I don’t accidentally discharge my shotgun.
I turn slowly. Susan is standing at my elbow, the fur trim of her parka frosted with crystals from her own breath. She’s smiling pleasantly, but I know that doesn’t mean anything. Women like Susan learn early on to always, always be smiling.
“Hi, Susan!” I chirp, matching her expression with a smile of my own that I hope does not look like rigor mortis. “Good morning. Lovely day for it.”
“It’s freezing and we’re about to slaughter a flock of birds,” Susan replies, with more attitude than I’ve ever heard from her. “But yes. Otherwise, quite lovely.”
She takes a sip from her thermos. The steam curls around her mouth. I clock, in the first second, that whatever’s in there is not coffee. Smells like whiskey, actually. So that’s interesting.
I’m learning a lot about Susan here. Not one bit of it is making me feel any better about what she saw and what she intends to do with it.
“Walk with me a moment,” she suggests.
It is clearly not a question, so with a wince, I fall in beside her.
We drift, casually, toward the thin edge of the path where the tree line begins.
Far enough from the cluster of wives that we won’t be heard.
Close enough that, from any distance, we look like two ladies admiring the frost on the birches.
Susan gazes up at the trees and the small woodland creatures flitting around from branch to branch.
“When I was a girl, my grandmother had a gardener,” she says conversationally.
“He came twice a week. Mr. Pell. He always wore too much aftershave—you’d smell him from across the yard—but he could prune a hydrangea like nobody you’ve ever seen.
My grandmother used to take her morning coffee with him in the potting shed every morning.
For about an hour and a half. Sometimes, she came out with hay in her hair. ”
I make a small noise that is, I hope, a polite acknowledgment of this anecdote. Inwardly, I am squirming, screaming, and dying, bit by bit.
“My grandfather knew, of course.” Susan takes another sip. “Everyone did. He had been hitting her since 1958, so nobody, including my grandfather, had any interest in saying a single word about Mr. Pell. He kept the peace.”
The cold has gotten into my throat. I swallow against it.
“Susan—” I start.
“I’m not finished.” She says it gently, almost kindly, but it’s enough to ensure I shut my mouth.
She watches a crow lift from a branch and beat off into the grey.
“My husband,” she says, “is a hard man. Not in the way yours is, mind you. Bill has never raised his hand to me. But he has never had to. Bill is hard the way a… well, let’s say the way a well-written contract is hard.
He’s hard in clauses.” Her mouth turns up at one corner, dryly.
“He renews our post-nup annually. Did you know that? Every five years, on our anniversary, he hands me a pen and a glass of champagne, in that order.”
I remember what Matvei said last night, in The Ice Room. He knew all this already.
“All of this is to say that I understand,” Susan continues, peering down into the depths of her thermos, “the need to escape a hard man. I have understood it for forty-one years.”
She lifts her eyes to mine finally. They are pale green, and far shrewder than I’ve ever given her credit for. I’ve spent four years writing Susan Oglethorpe off as a Chanel-suited, golf-course airhead, but I see now, with a small, hot pang of shame, that I’ve been an idiot.
Susan has been at this much, much longer than I have.
Susan was me before I had my first period.
“I won’t tell,” she concludes simply.
I exhale all at once, a deflating balloon of gratitude. I could easily fall to my feet and spend weeks kissing each one of her manicured toes. “Susan, thank you?—”
“But you should know something, sweetheart.” She lifts her thermos to her mouth and waits a beat, holding my eye over the rim. “There are no secrets in this firm. None. There never have been.”
She reaches out, mittened hand to mittened hand, and gives my fingers one small, firm squeeze. A warning? A reassurance? I’m really not sure.
“So I suggest you be careful.”
Then she lets go and turns away, and walks, in her unhurried country-club glide, back toward the cluster of the other wives. By the time she rejoins them, she’s smiling again, asking somebody about a granddaughter in Greenwich.
I stand at the edge of the path with my mouth dry and my pulse thundering.
A whoop goes up from the men. Down at the tree line, the staff member has emerged from behind the hutches with one thumb up, which can only mean one thing.
Soon, the pheasants are coming.