Mistress of the Hunt (8 page)

Philippa chuckled. “I shall, indeed, sir. I must confess, however, that I share Lord Alvanley’s belief that the riding is the best part of the hunt. I was not in at the kill when I was here before, nor do I have any desire to be there in the future. To see any small animal suffering must be repugnant to me. But the chase itself—ah, the hard riding and the jumping—there is the thrill, I think.”

“There are many who agree with you,” replied the duke, “and here in Leicestershire, I daresay as many foxes go free as are caught. There are those of us who believe that a fox who successfully avoids the pack long enough to go to ground will be around for a second day’s sport, you see. ’Tis a pity you will not be here often. My mother would enjoy your company. Even on the days she rides, there are few ladies to accompany her.”

“Well, I confess I should much prefer to find a hunt nearer to Chase Charley, so that I might hunt whenever I wished. It seems a pity to me that more women do not hunt in the shires. I know many who would like to, many who have hunted with their family packs over pretty dull ground.”

“Perhaps they prefer what you call dull ground,” the duke said gently. “Leicestershire hunting sets an incredibly fast pace, you know, not one for gently bred females.”

“I think gently bred females can often ride just as well as gently bred males,” Philippa said firmly, “and I can tell you, sir, I mean to discover whether Mr. Assheton-Smith or Lord Lonsdale can be convinced to agree with me.”

“Well, good luck to you,” said the duke, “but I fear you will have little success.”

“Then I shall ask Rochford to permit me to hunt with the Wyvern,” said Philippa matter-of-factly, only to be dismayed when she realized that the argument had ended and the others had fallen silent. They had all heard what she had said. She looked at Rochford, feeling warmth surge into her cheeks at sight of the mocking glint in his eyes.

“Well, Rochford?” The dowager regarded him challengingly. “What have you to say to that, sir?”

“I say ’tis an interesting proposition,” replied his lordship promptly, “and one that deserves careful consideration.”

“Humph,” said the dowager, sharply signaling to her daughter-in-law that it was time to leave the gentlemen to their port.

But Philippa took heart from the fact that the viscount had not delivered a flat negative, and as she followed the other ladies back to the pink saloon, she told herself that if she could not contrive to convince Assheton-Smith or Lord Lonsdale, she would bring Rochford round her little finger, one way or another.

Conversation in the saloon turned to household affairs and children, and the duchess took this opportunity to send for the latest addition to her nursery. There was sufficient time for the other ladies to coo over the young Marquess of Granby and to tell his proud mama how very like his handsome papa he looked before the gentlemen entered the room and the nursemaid was directed to take his young lordship back to his crib.

Lord Robert was speaking as the gentlemen came in, and he seemed to be distressed. Clearly, Philippa thought, the conversation was one begun in the passageway, for they would not ordinarily have carried their port talk to the saloon. “I say, Rutland,” said Lord Robert, “you will have your hands full if someone else gets up to William’s tricks.”

“What’s that you say?” demanded the dowager. “Has someone threatened to post his land, Rutland?”

“Not yet, madam,” replied her eldest son calmly. “I merely expressed the hope that this season would see no more of that nonsense.”

“Well, so I should hope.” Seeing the bewildered looks on Philippa’s and Miss Pellerin’s faces, she added impatiently, “ ’Tis all nonsense, just as he says. Three years ago, Sir William Manners, a kinsman who is no longer welcome in this house, got a bee in his head and came to the conclusion that Rutland had robbed him of his due electoral influence at Grantham. All poppycock, as I said before, and the details are of no consequence to anyone. But the idiotish man retaliated by stopping the duke from hunting over his land and got thirty-five farmers to bring actions for trespass against the Belvoir hunt.”

“Mercy me!” exclaimed Miss Pellerin, her hands fluttering in her lap. “Did he actually find a magistrate who would hear such a case?”

“Man’th got a right to hunt damn well anywhere he liketh,” said Alvanley in mellow tones, indicating that he had enjoyed perhaps a bit more than his share of the ducal port. “Destroying pestilential beasth, after all. Doing everyone a dashed favor.”

“Coming it too strong, there, Alvanley,” said Rochford with a lazy smile. “ ’Tis absurd in this day and age to argue that people feel it is their duty to hunt foxes solely in order to destroy noxious animals. No one will believe, no matter how you might choose to stretch their imaginations, that clergymen descend from their pulpits, bankers neglect their counting houses, brewers run away from their breweries, or that tradesmen, clerks, and others desert London for six full months of the year in order to rid the poor overrun farmers of Leicestershire of their foxes.”

“Indeed, Alvanley,” said Lord Robert, “considering that you yourself fined one of the gamekeepers at your manor house in Cheshire last year for killing two foxes before they could be hunted, you can hardly claim that there is any object other than our own amusement to be had out of the sport.”

“But can you actually be sued for trespass?” Philippa asked.

“Yes,” replied Rutland with a wry grimace. “A case in London four years ago set the precedent, and my dear cousin took advantage of it the following year.”

“Then he won his action?”

“He did not,” declared the dowager.

“Well, that is not precisely the case, you know,” said the duchess before her husband could speak, “for Rutland paid what Sir William demanded, and the row ended before it was well begun.”

“Didn’t want to chance losing the sport,” said Rutland with his gentle smile. “There was quite a rash of suits at the time, but they’ve subsided.”

“The threat still exists,” said his brother, rather grimly, Philippa thought. “Never know but what I’ll scrabble through a bullfinch just for the fun of finding a damned ‘No Trespassing’ sign on the other side. Excuse me, Mama, but ’tis more than a fellow can stomach. What is one to do if the fox don’t read the sign?”

“Well, you know, Robert,” said the duchess, “we really needn’t worry too much here in Leicestershire, for our tenants all have reason to support the hunt. ’Tis only in more hostile territory, where the tenants’ good offices, have not been so carefully cultivated, that hunters need keep a lookout for signs. I daresay you’ll not find a single one in all of these three counties.”

“Perhaps not,” retorted her brother-in-law, “but I for one don’t like knowing the possibility even exists.”

“You are a justice of the peace, Alvanley,” said Rochford. “Surely you ought to be able to find a precedent that will supersede the London decision. I was not in England at the time, of course, but there must have been some opposition to their case.”

“Humph,” said the dowager, who had remained silent longer than was her custom. “ ’Tis all very well to call that young man a justice, but that don’t make him a man of law any more than his having been a captain in the Fiftieth Foot and a member of the Coldstream Guards makes him a soldier.”

“Well, ath to that,” said the short, round baron, “I liked the uniform, don’t you know, and a man mutht eat. But I do recall that the London case wath brought by disgruntled landowners who didn’t like the hunterth tramping down all their newly sown wheat. Called it ‘intolerable damage on valuable land,’ as I recall it. It wath the Old Berkeley Hunt they wath after, and the OBH rethponded thtupidly by treating the whole with indignation, thaying it wath all private pique and perthonal resentment. They also inthisted they had the right to hunt and went tho far as to smash the top rail of a gate to let their mathter get to hith houndth after he had been warned off by Lord Essex’s gamekeeper. ’Twath Essex who brought the action.”

“Of course, Essex himself is a hunter, so it was easy for him to convince the court that he didn’t oppose hunting in general but only the conduct of the OBH in particular,” said Rutland. “Made it difficult for the rest of us when the suits began flying fast and furious.”

“Theems to me,” said Alvanley, who had clearly been thinking furiously as a result of the dowager’s setdown, “that since all land came originally from the crown, ’tith the crown which held hunting rights over all of England. Logically then, the king—or in point of prethent fact, the Regent—should hand over these rights to the local pack. Then hunting would have a prethise, legal status.”

The duchess’s gurgling laughter burst forth. “Cannot you see his face, Rutland, if you were to request that Prinny grant you the hunting rights for the Belvoir hunt over that part of the three counties you are most like to cover?”

The duke smilingly suggested it would be as well for the success of the forthcoming christening festivities if the subject did not come up, and even Lord Alvanley joined in the laughter that followed. It was quite well known that the Prince Regent, despite his oft-avowed love of sport, was more apt to respond to such a suggestion in the manner of a superannuated baby than in that of a dignified monarch ruling on a point of law. He was, at the best of times, a good deal more likely to sulk, wheedle, simper, or throw tantrums than he was to act decisively.

Since none of them was foolish enough to insult the Regent outright in such company, the conversation soon turned to other matters, and it was not long before the party broke up and its members made their way back to their separate bedchambers. As Philippa and Miss Pellerin walked together along the passageway leading to their rooms, Philippa congratulated herself upon having so neatly set matters in train that would presently allow her to hunt.

“ ’Tis a very good thing,” she told her companion, “that I may rely upon Rochford if the others fail me, for I am persuaded that even men who might otherwise follow me to my doorstep will have no interest in wealthy widows on the hunting field.”

“Rochford. did not say you might hunt with the Wyvern,” Miss Pellerin pointed out gently.

“No, he did not, but neither did he say he would not permit it, and I believe he does have a wish to please me, you know,” Philippa replied with a knowing smile.

“Philippa, such immodesty does not become you.”

“No, ma’am, to be sure, it does not. I beg your pardon.” After a brief pause, she essayed another topic. “I like the duke very much, do not you?”

“Indeed, Rutland is very kind. He seems to lay his money out rather recklessly in building and no doubt for his hunting, but I believe he does not game or squander his funds idly,” opined Miss Pellerin before adding conversationally, “I knew him better when he was younger, of course. I daresay the forthcoming christening will provide much the same ill-conceived hilarity as did his coming of age. I was a guest at that celebration, which took place at Haddon Hall, and besides the seventy-odd gentlemen who dined and the hundred other ladies and gentlemen who attended the ball that evening, there were some two hundred fifty tenants and another ten thousand or so residents of Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, and Rutlandshire who came to wish him well. I believe all who wished to be drunk were so, which comprised a considerable number, as you may imagine.”

“Goodness,” said Philippa, but her thoughts were already wandering. Although the thought of hunting while she was in Leicestershire had previously been a vague notion at best, she was rapidly coming to believe that she would like nothing better than to fling herself onto a good strong horse and follow the field neck and crop over every ditch and rail, pounding after the baying yellow hounds with the wind blowing in her hair and her skirts flying. Ah, it was a delicious thought, indeed. Now, if only Rochford or one of the others might prove to be sufficiently conciliating to answer her purpose.

B
Y THE TIME PHILIPPA HAD
been two days back at Chase Charley, she had decided it would be all the better to ride with the Quorn or the Cottesmore if such an opportunity might be arranged than to put herself under an obligation to Lord Rochford by cajoling him into allowing her to ride with the Wyvern. Accordingly, on the third day, a dismal, very cold Monday, having set Jessalyn to the disagreeable task of memorizing a number of improving verses in their absence, she dressed herself in a fashionable carriage dress of gray-and-brown Spanish kerseymere with Cordovan half-boots and York tan gloves and, accompanied by her ever-obliging companion, sallied forth to Quorndon Hall.

It was a journey of slightly under fifteen miles, for the hall was situated a mile and a half southeast of Loughborough, which itself lay to the west of Melton Mowbray. Thus it was that, at ten o’clock, greeted by the chimes in St. Mary’s church tower, Philippa’s carriage entered Melton Mowbray by the Oakham Road, one of the six main roads which formed the popular town. These roads were flanked by stone and stucco houses, mostly residences of the townspeople, some of which were more than a century old and nearly all of which were discreet and modest within their walled gardens.

The lodges, or hunting boxes, which had sprung up everywhere during the past fifteen to twenty years as a result of the near-mania for hunting in Leicestershire, were considered by those same residents to be a vast disfigurement upon the landscape, for the pretentious, overgrown red-brick villas, each with stabling for twenty to thirty horses, simply sprawled without rhyme or reason around the outskirts of the little town. Their general architectural style might tactfully be described as Elizabethan Gothic—the residents were more likely to call them just plain ugly—but in any event, they were badly planned, with rooms that were dark and gloomy. Their alternatives, the George Inn and the Harborough Arms, could in no way be described as first-class; yet, for such accommodations as these, for six months out of the year, the highest and mightiest of the land left their more accommodating estates and flocked to Melton Mowbray to live in discomfort so that they might chase the wily fox.