He had continued to stare out the window, but now he put his hands on her shoulders, set her straighter on his knees, and looked at her face. She was smiling down at him, her black, luminous eyes so lit with love that his breath caught unexpectedly in his chest. How had he ever done without her? If she were to leave, the hole in his life would be so vast…
"Yes, ma’am," he said. "Where will we hike to?"
" ‘Wootton Fitzpaine, a tiny village a few miles from Charmouth,’ " she said, reading from a booklet, " ‘and one of the vicinity’s most popular rural walks.’ "
"And why Wootton Fitzpaine in particular?"
"Because," she said, "it has such a nice name."
He rose from the chair, lifting her in his arms as he did so, pleased with the solid weight of her. "I can’t imagine a better reason."
THE walk to Wootton Fitzpaine began, according to Scenic Dorset Walks, only a block from The Queen’s Armes, at the opening to a rough and muddy track-two wheel ruts, actually-laughably signposted Barr’s Lane. The track ran for about an eighth of a mile, forming a narrow alley bounded on either side by crude, head-high stone walls of some antiquity. At the end of this lane a stile led into open meadows, but just before this stile the wall on the left side gave way to a sturdy, seven-foot-high chain-link fence that enclosed an extensive dog run at the back of a neat, thatch-roofed house.
As they were about to push through the stile to get into the countryside, they were astounded by a roar so loud that Gideon at first thought it must be a caged and furious lion inside the house. Momentarily petrified, they stood with their hands frozen on the stile.
When he saw it, Gideon thought at first it was a lion-a long-legged nightmare lion-but it wasn’t. It was a dog.
Huge, malevolent, and bellowing-"barking" wasn’t the word for it-it came tearing around the side of the house, racing toward them with death in its red eyes.
Instinctively, Gideon stepped in front of Julie as the thing bounded wildly against the fence. The animal, which must have known from experience that it couldn’t get at them, gave it its best nonetheless. Raging and slavering, it leaped again and again at the shuddering fence, its forelegs as high as Gideon’s head, its thick chest on a level with his own.
"Is that a dog? " Julie asked in a small voice, peeking around his shoulder, and making a move to get out from behind him. He could see fingers of color returning to her cheeks and had no doubt that his own face was also on the pale side.
"I don’t know what else. The Hound of the Baskervilles, maybe."
From the house behind the dog came a petulant call. "For heaven’s sake, Bowser, be quiet!"
Gideon and Julie looked at each other. Bowser?
A stocky man in late middle age, with a military bearing, a gray, bristling military mustache, and a sandy toupee, came grumbling from the back door.
"Be quiet, I said!" The dog, with bad grace, reluctantly stopped trying to devour them and instead satisfied itself with ferocious glaring and panting.
The man approached the animal and grasped it firmly by its wide collar. Its head, Gideon noted, was not far below the man’s shoulders, its neck almost as thick as his waist.
"Hullo," the man said, smiling crisply. "I’m Colonel Conley. I hope the Beast didn’t frighten you."
"Frighten us?" Gideon said. "Not at all. He was just being friendly."
The colonel laughed. "Hardly. He’d as soon eat you as look at you. Americans, are you? Out on a walk to Wootton Fitzpaine?"
"Yes," Julie said. "That’s quite an animal. What in the world is he?"
"Crossbreed," Colonel Conley said. "I went into dog breeding after the war, you see, and Bowser is my prize. Proper name, Pyecombe Sable of Hempstead. Half mastiff, half staghound, with perhaps a little werewolf thrown in. Magnificent creature, don’t you think? Ran in the Count de Vergie’s pack, you know?" Gideon and Julie looked mutely at him. "At Chateau Touffon? Near Vienne? You really haven’t heard of it? Famous for its stag hunts, and the count’s pack is disputably the best in the world. Unfortunately, Bowser tends toward over enthusiasm, and he tore the throat out of a horse." He dug his knuckles fondly into the root of a huge, tawny ear. "And," he whispered respectfully, "came as near as dammit to doing in a man. I’m afraid he has a bit of a mean streak in him."
"Does he really?" Gideon said, eyeing Bowser, who was quivering and twitching with convincing blood lust.
Again the colonel laughed. "I’m sure you’ve noticed. Don’t worry, though. There isn’t any way he can get through." He shook the gate in the fence, jangling a sturdy padlock on a heavy chain. "I take extreme precautions. It’s perfectly safe. Enjoy your walk, and don’t pay any attention to him on your way back. He gets accustomed to you after a time or two."
As they twisted their way through the stile to enter the open country, Bowser thundered again, deprived of his rightful prey, but Colonel Conley tugged on his collar and said, "Bad show, Bowser," and the dog sat down, mumbling and drooling. Julie and Gideon walked a few hundred yards into the meadow, out of sight and sound of the dog, and then Julie sat suddenly on a log and started thumbing through Scenic Dorset Walks.
"Are we lost already?" Gideon asked.
"No, I’m looking for an alternate way back."
"And disappoint Bowser?"
"You better believe it." She chewed the corner of her lip and wrinkled her nose. Strange. Gideon had always thought nose-wrinkling ridiculous and unsightly; on Julie it devastated him.
"No," she said, "we have to come back through Barr’s Lane unless we want to go way out of our way and walk along A-35." She closed the booklet. "Uh-uh. What kind of country walk would that be?"
"Right. Besides, don’t worry about Bowser. I had him in the palm of my hand." He sat down next to her on the log. "Hey, just look at where we are. Can the world be all bad if there are still places like this?"
"This is Dyne Meadow, according to the book. It is nice, isn’t it?"
They were in a green and gently undulating grassy field bordered on one side by a dark copse of pines, and on another by a sparkling, tree-lined stream. To the west they could see a ruined stone barn around which grazed a few placid cattle; and to the north, half a mile off, a farmer plowed his field near a stark, whitewashed farmhouse. The noise of his tractor was like the far-off, lazy buzzing of a bee. It might have been 1940 or 1920. If not for the tractor, it could have been 1720.
"How lovely," Julie sighed. "Let’s just stay here forever."
They stayed, in fact, half an hour, just drinking in the peace, and then, pacified themselves, proceeded hand in hand.
As Gideon had predicted, it was extremely muddy, especially near the stiles, where the ground had been churned into glue by cattle hooves. But it was Dorset mud, of which the locals were justly proud. Gray and gloopy as it looked and felt, it was solid enough so that it hardly wet their feet, yet liquid enough to slide from their shoes without caking. The lowering sky, while it threatened to burst with rain at any moment, held off, and the moisture-heavy air was fragrant with Dorset’s grassy smell.
Rights of way in rural England are not quite what Americans imagine them to be. They are unlikely to be posted, and they frequently do not consist of paths visible to the naked eye. Following a guidebook, one simply skirts the western flank of this coppice of larches, bears slightly right, and walks through the northern end of that beech spinney, then crosses the gravel road, bearing north-northeast at a spot one hundred yards west of the signposts to Knickers-on-Tyne, just beyond a lightning-shattered pine tree. Even with a map, one is likely to spend a lot of time lost and trespassing. After a while Julie and Gideon settled for following the instructions in Scenic Dorset Walks in only the most approximate fashion, taking care to give plenty of room to the bulls they occasionally saw, and to avoid walking over worked fields that weren’t supposed to be there.