Servants were carrying out a heavy cauldron from which hot rabbit stew was to be dispensed to the beaters, who were already forming themselves into a straggling line along the path by the river some little distance from the boat-house. Albert Jarvis and Percy Maidment finding themselves adjacent moved by unspoken agreement further apart; they were hardly on speaking terms, so acute was their rivalry.

Albert Jarvis came from Derbyshire. The Hartlip estates were close to coal-mining country on the Yorkshire border, and the Jarvises were a mining family. Albert had failed to find a job down the mine on leaving school and had become an agricultural labourer and then an under-keeper instead. He had a keen admiration for his employer, whose remote manner when dealing with subordinates only added to his authority in Albert’s eyes. A good shot himself, Albert’s respect for Lord Hartlip’s skill was unbounded; he looked on him more or less as his personal champion. A bachelor, living in lodgings and seldom visiting his family, working long hours for low wages, his sense of identification with his employer – with whom his function as loader put him at certain times of the year and unlike the other under-keepers into the relation of personal servant – was in many ways his essence; it was as if Lord Hartlip did his living for him. Albert had quickly recognized in the tense little form of Percy Maidment a similar determination that his man should be preeminent. It set them apart from the others. They were like two greyhound trainers among a crowd of onlookers who had not even bothered to place bets.

Tom Harker held both hands cupped round his baked potato and waited for his stew; he had no complaint. The food smelt good and behind and beyond the food the fallen leaves, the dark earth and the river smelt good; so did his own old coat and the hands he held up to his nose, warming them round the potato. They smelt of earth, sweat, the pheasants he had carried over to the game cart and which had left a smear or two of blood behind, and the onions he had cut up that morning to put into his own stolen rabbit stew. The morning’s exercise left his body feeling easy; he had no thought beyond that and the satisfying of his hunger – except perhaps a hardly conscious regret that his collie was not with him. Being a fool, she’d not exercise herself, he’d have to walk her round the field when he got back, tired after the day’s work. Besides, she liked the woods.

‘See the deer?’ he asked Dan Glass.

Dan nodded.

‘I saw them in Bowlers Plantation last, a month or two back. A couple of young they had.’

‘They’ve bred there before. It’s the bracken up the top they like. They hide the young in there. You can walk right on top of them before they’ll move.’

Dan smiled, not saying, ‘And what might you have been doing in Bowlers Plantation, Tom Harker?’ though he thought it.