This was its third morning. He hadn’t liked hearing its screech when Ronnie was in the house; he liked it even less with young Pax and the Irish stranger there.

Or were they there? Lester, a light sleeper, hadn’t heard a motor outside last night. It was still too dark outside to see whether Pax’s little car was parked there. He resented the preoccupation.

It was a Monday Country day, and he refused to countenance negative thoughts when the hunt was meeting in the stud’s home vale, with Eynhope Park providing a particularly fine backdrop. The frost and fog would pass and the Fosse and Wolds hounds would sing. Even after so many years, the prospect made him high with anticipation.

The owl shrieked again.

‘You go hunting too, my feathered friend,’ he said, pulling his checked shirt collar over his jumper neck. ‘Best sport for you.’

His own hunting attire was already laid out on the stand: immaculately ironed shirt and stock, cavalry twill breeches, buff waistcoat now on its third lining, and his elderly but serviceable wool coat, well-brushed, replete with a full set of hunt buttons and blue Wolds lapels in honour of his long years’ service supporting and following their hounds, one-time amateur whip to the Captain as master and Johnny Ledwell as huntsman. Those were Lester’s salad days. The Percy family had led the field, none more fearless and stylish than Ronnie. Then she’d run off, her mother left raising her children, the master, huntsman and whip never really finding their true line again.

Much to the Captain’s disappointment, none of his grandchildren had followed their parents’ hoof trails across Wolds country with great enthusiasm. Some of the hunt’s most legendary Monday runs had once crossed the stud’s land, and Lester had a shrewd suspicion that when the Captain had sold much of that old pasture to a big agricultural holding more than a decade back, the ancient coverts and hedgerows flattened and turned to crop, he’d done so partly from broken-hearted fury. What was the point in maintaining perfect hunt jumps and hedges when Percys no longer led the field? At the time, he’d insisted it was for the good of the stud. After paying off creditors, what was left had bought Cruisoe, the most prolific stallion Compton Magna had ever stood, his great athleticism and distinctive yellow dun colouring passed down to his progeny, winning plaudits across many disciplines, although the Captain was proudest of those who went on to carry the horn. He and Ann had both hunted into their seventies, but as they’d fallen further back in the field, queuing at gateways to avoid jumping the hedges, nobody took their place in the vanguard, just the fading memory of golden-haired Ronnie, whip arm up as she sailed over five feet of birch a length behind the master.

Only Lester still hunted regularly, taking out Ann’s hardy, ageing cob, the last in his line from those bred by the Captain’s grandmother before the war.