Reaching a miniature bay he paused on the edge and looked up at Ellen.

‘Just look at your trousers,’ she said.

The water had come over the top of his boots and his tweed knickerbockers were wet.

‘It’s getting deep.’

They were not exactly disheartened. The river held so much life that their expectations were kept alive; there might be ducks round any bend. Besides, the activity, the sound of moving water, the soft sliding river in its continuous forward progress, made them feel something must be being achieved. It was hard to believe in an unchanging state of affairs beside such evidence of flux; something must be going to happen. Ellen noticed however that Osbert’s face was beginning to have a certain transparent look which was familiar to her; he was getting tired.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Have an apple.’

She had put a few in her pocket after lunch without being seen. She rubbed one on her sleeve and held it out to him, a large red Worcester Pearmaine, a little wrinkled on the outside but still juicy. She sat down on the damp grass and bit into one herself.

In the still air the sound of shots carried easily. The volley heard by Cornelius Cardew on the road from the village and by Minnie and Ida in the Daimler as they waited for the lodge gates to be opened for them sounded very close. On the river bank Osbert and Ellen stopped eating and stared at one another, their apples in their hands. It seemed a long time before the sound of shooting thinned, then faded away.

Ellen found herself speaking in a whisper.

‘It’s not as near as it sounds.’

‘It is.’ Osbert’s voice rose higher as he spoke. All day he had managed to submerge the thought; now it overwhelmed him. ‘It is, Ellen. It is near. They’re going to shoot her. They’re going to shoot her, Ellen.’

Ellen twitched up her skirt and began quickly to unlace her boots. Her hands were shaking with anger. The tears which momentarily filled her eyes were tears of tremendous rage. How dared they? What right had they? All those men with guns after one poor little duck. She wrenched off her boots one by one, slipped down her stockings and stuffed them into the boots, threw her coat over them on the river bank, gathered up her skirt and stuffed it anyhow into her belt, and slid down the bank into the river. The water came over her white knees. She hitched her skirt over one arm and began to wade downstream. Osbert followed.

Glass walked along the line of dead pheasants, crooking two fingers round the neck of every tenth bird and pulling it forward to make recounting easier.

‘Five hundred and four,’ he reported provisionally to Sir Randolph, before going on to count the hares, rabbits and woodcocks (and the jay shot as vermin by young Marcus).

‘Well done.’

Glass knew that Sir Randolph’s congratulations were for his organization of the drive.