The Grave Maurice Read online

  Now all three were gaping. Not only were they not being punished for their behavior, they were actually being rewarded!

  “Now, run along, and no more fighting over books.”

  They were off and out the door before Melrose had come to the end of his edict.

  The Jack and Hammer was directly opposite the Wrenn’s Nest. Melrose crossed the street after bidding good morning to Ada Crisp, who sometimes sat outside her secondhand furniture shop, sometimes with her Jack Russell terrier, but more often not, as the terrier’s travel agenda took him all over the village. Miss Crisp sat among her china bowls and chamber pots, in a revenant light left over from autumn, rocking and waving at Melrose.

  January and February, Melrose had decided, were the two most luckless and lackluster months on the calendar. It was difficult to get inspired (if one’s bent was inspiration) by the ragged hem of a blown climbing rose around the Jack and Hammer’s windows, or the faded turquoise coat of the Jack up on the beam, simulating bangs with his mallet to count the hours.

  The inside, however, still retained a bit of New Year’s cheer, largely because Dick Scroggs hadn’t as yet taken down the lines of colored lights around the door or from the big mirror behind the bar. Melrose got Scroggs’s attention-difficult, if Dick was buried in the paper-made a sign that he wanted a drink and walked through to where his comrades were seated round their table in the window. It was Trueblood’s turn to get the seat with cushions, and there he comfortably sat, to the left of Joanna Lewes.

  Diane Demorney blew out a thin stream of smoke and said, “We saw you coming out of Theo’s. You know we said we were banning the place because of that library business.”

  Melrose sat down. “Did we? I thought we were already banning it just on general principles.”

  “We were going to make up placards and stand in front of the shop, I thought.”

  “Speaking of banning,” said Melrose, “did you know there was a hunt in Sidbury?”

  “For what?” asked Diane.

  “A fox,” said Trueblood, firing up a match to light a small cigar. “They organized it a year or two ago. Probably to protest the protest. You know, all of these country folk are scared to death their privilege will be taken away.”

  “According to Theo, there are a lot of animal-rights activists in Sidbury.”

  “Oh,” said Diane, “those people who spray-paint fur coats. They sprayed my sable once, in front of Selfridge’s.”

  “You’re kidding! What did you do?” asked Joanna.

  “Bought another one.”

  “I doubt,” said Melrose, “that’s how these people would want to be identified.”

  Joanna looked thoughtful. “Or maybe they would.” Joanna was the author of some two dozen romance novels, which she had advised them all to steer clear of. (“Such drivel.”) She went on: “Maybe their need for publicity is what motivates them, not animal rights.”

  Diane stepped in here. “If my cat had any more rights I’d be the one watching the bung hole nights and she’d be inside with brandy and a book.” She turned to Joanna. “Your latest is quite good, Joanna.” Upon Joanna’s telling them all they’d be wasting their time with her books, Diane had started reading them.

  “Thank you. I just don’t think those are the rights they’re defending, or say they are.”

  “How cynical,” said Trueblood.

  Joanna turned to Diane. “You should do a bit of investigative reporting there, Diane. You work for the Sidbury paper.”

  Diane “working” was an oxymoron. She was languor’s home, ennui’s back garden, apathy’s arbor. However, she did indeed pen the astrology column for that paper-the daily horoscope. Diane was impeded by only two things: she couldn’t write and she knew nothing about the stars. People loved the horoscope, though, for they believed it to be a tongue-in-cheek parody. Diane didn’t know any more about parody than she did about writing or the stars. “You mean go to one of those things and say what they’re doing?”

  Diane had always been, generally speaking, a master of vagueness. Melrose said, “It’s the activists I think Joanna is talking about.”

  Instead of an answer, Diane held out a cigarette for someone to light-God, if no one else was available. Trueblood lit it. She blew a narrow veil of smoke toward them and reflected on this reporting. It was rather restful watching Diane’s mind at work. One never had to venture far and there were a lot of lay-bys along the way. “I suppose I could do.” But her nose wrinkled at the thought as though a displeasing odor had wafted through the room.

  “Do what?” asked Trueblood.

  Diane heaved a sigh. “Go to a hunt. Haven’t you been listening at all? Where is it?” she asked Melrose. “When is it?”

  Melrose looked at his book jacket bearing the image of an American Thorougbred named Spectacular Bid. What a name! “According to Theo, there’s one tomorrow. Why don’t we all go?”

  “Excellent!” said Trueblood. “It’s one of my half days, so I’ll just close the shop.”

  “One of? How many half days do you allow yourself? There’s only supposed to be one a week,” said Melrose.

  “Depends. This week it’ll be three. Well, I’ve got a life to live, haven’t I?”

  They all looked at him.

  “Very funny, very funny. So why don’t we all go?”

  Joanna said, “I’d love to, but I’ve got fifteen pages to write because I didn’t do today’s ten. I only did half.”

  “Your self-discipline is awesome,” said Melrose.

  “My self-discipline is no more nor less than my Barclays account. That’s awesome.”

  This statement was made without a hint of conceit; indeed her implication was that her royalties were so far from being deserved it was pathetic.

  “Okay, when shall we meet? Where?” said Melrose.

  Trueblood said, “As to the when, I’d say eightish-” “Eight is not an hour, it’s pirate’s treasure,” said Diane.

  “They start fairly early in the morning,” said Trueblood.

  Diane’s smile was humorless. “They do; I don’t.”

  “Nine, then.”

  Given Diane’s expression, nine was only marginally better, but she agreed.

  “And where? We can’t do it here because it’s closed till eleven. We’ll meet next door. How’s that?”

  “Fine. Only what about this half-day business. If you leave at nine, that’s more like a full day,” said Melrose.

  “Then I’ll make up for it by staying all day the next day, as the next day is only a half day, too.”

  “That makes sense.”

  ELEVEN

  “We should have signs,” said Melrose, casting his eye over the courtyard of the country hotel appropriately named the Horse and Hounds. There was quite a crowd, an eclectic-looking bunch, from hunters in their pink coats and black hats to a rather seedy-looking elderly man with a piece of white posterboard hanging from a string around his neck that announced BEWARE THE HOUR DRAWS NIGH! Melrose wondered what it had to do with the hunt, or, indeed, the antihunt. Probably nothing, or no more than it had to do with the price of a pint in the Horse and Hounds. The hunt participants were up on horses, the restless hounds milling about, snuffling the brick and pebble-dashed courtyard as if they were looking for heroin, and the master was sniffily regarding the cup being handed him by one of the hotel staff.

  Watching the cup being handed around, Melrose said, “It’s rather like communion, isn’t it? Passing the goblet down the line of the faithful at the altar. In any event, it’s certainly ritual, no doubt of it.”

  “Of course,” said Trueblood. “That’s mostly what it’s all about. Ritual, tradition, class. Always class these things turn out to be. A class war. You don’t honestly think these people with their signs and slogans are interested in the fox’s welfare?”

  “I imagine they think they are. You can’t generalize that way.” Melrose thought the women looked haggard with their rough clothes and flyaway hair; the men
looked better, more convivial, owing, perhaps, to one more round in the Horse and Hounds.

  “We stick out like a sore thumb,” said Marshall Trueblood.

  “We do?” Melrose observed two of the protesters wearing fox kit and masks that covered the upper half of their faces, thus leaving their mouths free to hector the riders. LET’S RIP THE HUNT TO PIECES THE WAY YOU DO US read one of the placards. He felt that could have been better put.

  Taken all in all, hounds and horses were definitely the best-looking gathered there. Diane, who was rooting about in a big black leather bag, said, “That’s a spiffy-looking Master of Foxhounds, I’d say.”

  Trueblood said, “MFHs are always spiffy. I’d be spiffy, too, in one of those pink coats and up on that bay he’s riding. It’s all sex, anyway, isn’t it? Sex, class, politics.”

  “Marshall, it’s almost as if you’d given the matter some thought,” said Diane in a God-forbid tone.

  Hounds, horses, hunters set off down the road for some faraway field and everyone else more or less followed. When Melrose and Trueblood started off, Diane said, “Good Lord, you two. We’re not going to follow on foot. We’ll take the car.”

  Melrose was puzzled. “But, Diane, we won’t be able to follow in a car unless there’s a road that runs beside their route all the way. We’ll lose them.”

  “No, we won’t. You drive, Marshall.” She handed him the keys to her car. “You drive so I’ll be free to do this.” She patted the leather bag slung over her shoulder.

  “Do what? What is that?”

  “Camcorder.” She eased herself into the passenger’s seat of the BMW. “You said I should do some investigative reporting, didn’t you? Well, I’ll need pictures.”

  They shrugged and got in the car, Melrose in the backseat.

  “Just go straight down to the bottom of this road and then turn left.”

  Trueblood turned the key in the ignition and the motor purred into that sort of latent life reserved for BMWs, Jaguars, Porsches and Bentleys. Trueblood accelerated and its purr was a trifle louder, but still a purr. “Nice car, Diane.”

  “You should get one.” They drove down the road, turned left and Diane directed, “A little way on and bear to the right-here.”

  Melrose leaned on the back of the passenger seat, and said, “Diane, you seem to know where we’re going.”

  “Of course. Do you think I’d be out here driving aimlessly if I could be inside the saloon bar at the Horse and Hounds? Here-” She handed Melrose a smallish roll of paper.

  He unrolled it to find a nicely detailed map of the route the hunt was taking, showing the local roads that ran near it, the places that one could get out of the car and see it. “This is terrific, Diane. But wouldn’t the hunt be all over the map? Can you predict where the fox will go? Where’d you get it?”

  “From Eugenie St. Cyr-Jones. She seems to think the route is fairly predictable.”

  “St. Cyr-Jones? Do we know her?”

  “No. She’s the local organizer against FOX. That’s Friends of Xavier.”

  “Who’s that? A saint? A cult figure?”

  “It’s the fox.”

  “Xavier? No,” said Melrose, “the fox is called Reynard.”

  “Well, you can’t have FOR as your slogan. People wouldn’t know what it referred to. We’ll see Eugenie St. Cyr-Jones at”-Diane took back the map, ran a red fingernail over the route and stopped-“here, at the low stone wall.”

  It put Melrose more in mind of Cluedo than an actual place. Go to the low stone wall. “But why are we meeting this St. Cyr-Jones woman?”

  “For the interview. I thought it would best be done in the field. That way you see the hunt run by behind her. Or something like that.”

  “You’ve a finely developed aesthetic sense, Diane.”

  “Thanks. But actually, I just wanted to get one of these maps out of her, so I had to tell her I’d interview her. Who knows? It might be amusing.”

  Diane’s highest priority. “Diane, you surprise me. You’re shifty. Devious.”

  “I’ve always been devious.”

  “There they are! View hal-looooo! Isn’t that what they yell?” Trueblood pulled the car over and they got out.

  Hounds, and behind them horses were pouring over a stone wall, almost as one. Melrose could understand how country people could come all over John Peel-ish at the sight. He had forgotten what a visceral thrill the sight of pink coats and sleek horses could give one.

  Diane didn’t get the camcorder going until they were a field away, whereupon they all got back in the car and followed the hunt for another quarter mile. Melrose yelled, “We just passed a group of people by a low stone wall.”

  “Back up, Marshall.”

  Trueblood reversed and stopped.

  “That’s Eugenie,” said Diane, climbing out of the car. Then she turned back and dropped the leather bag from her shoulder and handed it to Trueblood.

  “I’ve never worked one of these things.”

  “It’s simple.” She removed it from the bag and pointed to a couple of buttons. “You just press this, then this. It just keeps rolling until you stop it, here.”

  Trueblood shrugged, then put the camcorder on his shoulder and walked a little away. He began to feel quite the investigative photographer.

  Eugenie St. Cyr-Jones was a large, stout woman in her early seventies. She was wearing a gray worsted suit of good cut, partially hidden by the white placard hanging around her neck, shouting its ambiguous message: HUNT IN, GOVERNMENT OUT! The woman beside her was introduced as Clarice St. John-Sims, and she was Eugenie St. Cyr-Jones’s diminutive opposite. She seemed to be there to take up the slack. Of what, Melrose couldn’t say. It must have been the names that provided the attraction between them, for he could see nothing else to explain it. Diane might have been the only person around who could have introduced the two of them (“Eugenie St. Cyr-Jones and Clarice St. John-Sims”) without even blinking. Diane was good at things like that, bits of useless-but accurately reported-information.

  Eugenie St. Cyr-Jones looked as if she spent most of her days in a state of high dudgeon, which probably made her a good candidate for protesting the protest. Diane had a tape recorder going and up to Eugenie’s stormy face, a face that told the tale of many past protests.

  While Trueblood moved the camcorder around to take in the scene, Diane suggested that Miss St. Cyr-Jones say a few words about her purpose in being here.

  Eugenie St. Cyr-Jones had many more than a few words to say. “Should our government make the criminal error of trying to ban foxhunting they should be aware they’ll have a real battle on their hands. To pass such a bill would be to threaten the very livelihood of the country. People fail to see beyond the spectacle itself to the repercussions of such government interference. The antihunting contingent-” Here she waved her arm around a group that was steadily forming, hoping no doubt (as were hounds) that blood would be let before the morning was over.

  The antihunting contingent stepped in, in the person of a boisterous middle-aged woman. “Spectacle! That’s all ’tis, just a bunch of country clowns huntin’ a poor animal to its bloody end.” Her hair looked fried in a pan, flat on top, frizzled on the sides.

  Trueblood positioned his camera close up and then back to take in the entire group before his attention was caught by the promise of a melee out in the field. He moved in that direction.

  The woman with the fried hair addressed Diane. “You ast’er this, ast’er ’ow she’d feel gettin’ tore up by a pack o’ them ’ounds! Ast’er!”

  Diane smiled. “As you already have-” and looked at Eugenie St. Cyr-Jones.

  Eugenie was clearly revolted by this person. “That’s so clearly a loaded argument. Listen to me: in Sidbury there’s a saddlery that employs a number of the local townspeople. It’s the way they earn their living. Now, how long would that business last-and that’s but one example-if the hunt was banned?”

  Several of the onlookers exchanged words t
hat Trueblood was hoping would turn into blows, but for the moment quieted down. He heard another commotion in the field, or the same one exacerbated. He turned to see that hounds were swarming. Had they homed in on the benighted Xavier? No, no, a horse must have caught its leg flying over the stone wall and gone down. Several black coats dismounted. Trueblood hoped the horse was all right; he didn’t care much about the rider. The horse rose and shook itself and wandered away, unattended by the rider for the rider and another hunt member seemed to be shouting. Trueblood pointed the camera in that direction. Now the pink-coated MFH unhorsed himself and moved quickly to this little nucleus of persons, ostensibly to quell the fight.

  Horses, the most sensible of the lot, left to their own devices moved about in search of some tasty grazing place.

  Trueblood loved it! There were the hounds roving off, snuffling the ground, mixing in and out between legs of horses and hunters, all of them having a rave-up, hounds and hunters alike. The horses quite sensibly ignored them.

  How often had this sort of thing happened during a hunt? Never, he bet. It was a scoop! Behind him-and now he turned the camcorder back to the protesters-a well-dressed, sensible-looking man interrupted the woman with the fried hair.

  “Naturally, one doesn’t enjoy the spectacle of a fox thrown to hounds, but what sticks in my throat is the sheer hypocrisy of some of your hunting-ban travelers. Some of them aren’t even charities, though they want you to believe they are.”

  A theoretical argument. Who cares? Trueblood turned the camera off toward the right. Wonderful! Fists were flying! The master appeared now to be acting as referee. Oh, good! Someone in the group actually pushed him! Shouting! The rest of the hunt had dismounted now-their steeds making for the spot where their fellow horses were nibbling the frosty grass.