At the end of the morning, however, I saw something of the two of them that set their seal upon my heart. We had perfectly guessed the direction of the hunt, and were able to wait at the edge of a field to watch the whole body of riders sweep down a hillside towards us. They were galloping across a green field, their red and blue torsos crouched low in the saddles, their white legs clenched tight around heaving brown flanks. The terracotta smear of the fox streaked under the bars of a high wooden gate, and the squirming mass of the hounds flattened their bodies underneath it, heedless of the master’s horn. As the riders came up to the jump, they broke upon it like waves on the rocks and flowed away to either side, seeking for the safe way into the pasture beyond. Francis and Jessica were bringing up the rear. He spurred his brown gelding with a fierce dig in the ribs, and the animal catapulted forwards towards the gate. It was five or six feet high; his stern black face looked well under the bill of his top hat as he trained his eyes on it. The horse leapt over the bars. As it landed its front legs buckled, and it stumbled forward on to its knees, tossing him over its head so that he spun through the air, still holding the brown thongs of the reins in his hands. For a second, it was as if he hung frozen by his own momentum in the air, and the thing had the look of a surrealist painting, with a young black man in a top hat hanging upside down in the cold glory of an English autumn morning. The impression ended when Francis’s heavy frame met the turf with a sickening thump.

Jessica, the moment she saw his horse begin to stumble, spurred her own on towards the same jump. She arced gracefully over it, landing perfectly on the soft ground, and reined her mare back in. She gripped the pommel and swung her leg over the saddle before it had even come to a stop, and ran over to where Francis was lying on his back in the grass, twitching but not rising. She sprinted to his body and fell on her knees at his side, staining her long cream legs with grass and cow shit. I too was running across the field, and as I gripped the bar of the gate with my hands, I saw a thing I could not explain. Jessica was still kneeling in front of the fallen body, but she was slapping and beating his chest in fury. It was not until I came closer that I saw the reason Francis could not rise. His whole trunk was shaking with uncontrollable laughter, so much so that it racked him like pain. His horse stood a few yards away from him, unimpressed by his display, cropping the grass, steam wreathing its flanks and back. When they went for the jump, Francis was not thinking of himself, and Jessica was thinking of nothing else.