Geoffrey grew older, turning from a little boy into a young lad and then a bigger lad, wisely catching his father’s eye only occasionally.
Then one day McTavish saddled a horse for him and they rode over to the fields at the edge of Lord Swivel’s estate and crept quietly to a fox’s earth in the woods. There, as they had done many times before, they watched the vixen play with her cubs.
‘Nice to see ’un like so,’ whispered McTavish. ‘A fox mun eat and feed yon cubs. But they has too much of a taste for me chickens for my liking. They kill things as matter to us, an’ so we kill them. ’Tis the way of the world.’
‘It shouldn’t be,’ said Geoffrey, sorrow in his voice as his heart went out to the vixen.
‘But we needs the hens and mun protect ’em. That’s why we hunts foxes,’ said McTavish. ‘I brings you here today, Geoffrey, for the time is coming when your father will want you to join the hunt. Of yon vixen mebbe.’
‘I understand,’ Geoffrey said. He knew about the hunt, of course, as he had been made to watch them ride out every year since he was a baby. ‘We must protect our hens, and the world can be cruel and merciless. But making a game of it is not right. That’s terrible! It’s just execution. Must we kill everything? Kill a mother who is feeding her cubs? We take so much and we give back nothing.’ He rose to his feet and went back to his horse. ‘I do not want to hunt, McTavish. My word, I do not like to hate — I don’t even hate my father — but the hunt I would like to see put in a dark place.’
McTavish looked worried. ‘I think thee needs to be careful, young Geoffrey. You knows what your father is like. He’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud.’
‘My father is not a stick-in-the-mud; he is the mud!’ Geoffrey said bitterly.
‘Well then, if you tries talking to him — or your mother — mebbe he might understand that you are not ready to join the hunt?’
‘No point,’ said Geoffrey. ‘When he has made up his mind, you cannot get through to him. I hear my mother crying sometimes — she doesn’t like to be seen crying, but I know she cries.’
Then it was, as he looked up to watch a hawk hovering, that he thought to himself: There is freedom. Freedom is what I want.
‘I would like to fly, McTavish,’ he said, adding, ‘Like the birds. Like Langas.’[7]
And almost immediately, he saw a witch flying overhead on a stick, following the hawk, and he pointed up and said, ‘I want one of those. I want to be a witch.’
But the old man said, ‘It’s not for thee, boy. Everybody knows men can’t be witches.’
‘Why not?’ asked Geoffrey.
The old man shrugged and said, ‘Nobody knows.’
And Geoffrey said, ‘I want to know.’
On the day of Geoffrey’s first hunt he trotted out with the rest, pale-faced but determined, and thought, This is the day I must try to stand up for myself.
Soon the local gentry were galloping across the countryside, some taking it to the extreme by careering into ditches, through hedges or over gates, often minus their mounts, while Geoffrey carefully held his position well to the back of the throng, until he could slip away unnoticed. He circled the woods in the opposite direction to the hunt, his heart aching, especially when the baying of the hounds turned to joyous yelps as the prey was brought down.
Then it was time to return to the house. There, everyone was at that happy stage of a hunt where ‘tomorrow’ is a word that still means something and you have a mug of hot beverage that is liberally laced with something not too dissimilar to Tiffany’s grandmother’s Special Sheep Liniment. A reward for the returning heroes! They had survived the hunt. Huzzah! They swigged and swilled and the drink ran over their non-existent chins.
But Lord Swivel looked at Geoffrey’s horse — the only animal not to be lathered in sweat with its legs besplattered in mud — and his wrath was unquenchable.
Geoffrey’s brothers held him while his mother looked on imploringly, but to no avail. She averted her face as Lord Swivel smeared vixen’s blood on Geoffrey’s face.
His lordship was almost incandescent in his rage. ‘Where were you? You should have been there at the kill!’ he roared. ‘You will do this, young man — and like it! I had to do it when I was young, and so did my father before me. And so will you. It is a tradition. Do you understand? Every male member of our family has been blooded at your age. Who are you to say it’s wrong? I’m ashamed of you!’
There it came, the swish of the crop, across Geoffrey’s back.
Geoffrey, his face dripping with the vixen’s blood, looked to his mother. ‘She was a beautiful thing! Why kill her in such a way? For fun?’
‘Please don’t upset your father,’ his mother pleaded.
‘I see them in the woods, and you just hunt them. Can you eat them? No. We — the unspeakable — chase and kill what we cannot eat, just for the blood. For fun.’
Swish.
It hurt. But Geoffrey was suddenly full of … what? All at once he had the amazing feeling that things could be made right, and he told himself, I could do it. I know I can. He drew himself up to his full height and shook himself free of his brothers’ grasp.
‘I must thank you, Father,’ he said with unexpected vigour. ‘I have learned something important today. But I won’t let you hit me again — never — and nor will you see me again unless you can change. Do you understand me?’ His tone was oddly formal now, as if befitting the occasion.
Harry and Hugh looked at Geoffrey with a kind of awe and waited for the explosion, while the rest of the hunt, which had given Lord Swivel space in which to deal with his son, stopped pretending that they weren’t watching. The world of the hunt was out of kilter, the air frozen but somehow contriving also to seem to hold its breath.
In the charged silence, Geoffrey led his horse off to the stables, leaving Lord Swivel standing there like a stone.
He gave the horse some hay, took off its saddle and bridle, and was rubbing the beast down when McTavish walked up to him and said, ‘Well done, young Geoffrey.’ Then, surprisingly outspoken, the stable-lad added under his breath, ‘You stood up for yourself, right enough. Don’t let that bastard grind thee down.’
‘If you talk like that, McTavish, my father could turn you out,’ Geoffrey warned. ‘And you like it here, don’t you?’
‘Well, lad, you’re right there. I’m too old to be changing my ways now, I reckon,’ McTavish replied. ‘But you stood your ground and no man could do better nor that. I expect thee’ll be leaving us now, Master Geoffrey?’
‘Alas, yes,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But thank you, McTavish. I hope my father doesn’t take it out on you for talking to me.’
And the oldest stable-lad in the world said, ‘He won’t do that, no, never, not while I’m still useful like. Anyways, after all these years, I know him — like one of them volcanee things, he is. Powerful dangerous explosions for a while, and no care for who gets caught by the red-hot boulders spewing every which way, but it still blows out in the end. Smart folks just keep out of sight until it’s over. You’ve been very pleasant and respectful to me, Master Geoffrey. I reckons you take after your mother. A lovely lady, always so good to me and so helpful when my Molly was dying. I remember that. And I’ll remember you too.’
‘Thank you,’ said Geoffrey. ‘And I will remember you.’
McTavish lit up a most enormous pipe and the smoke billowed. ‘I reckon you’ll be wanting to take away that dratted goat of yourn.’
‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But I don’t think I have any say in the matter — Mephistopheles will make up his own mind. He usually does.’
7
The legend of Pilotus and his son Langas, who wanted to fly like the birds, was known by every well-educated boy. They did indeed build themselves wings by sewing together feathers and thistledown. The boy at least flew a little way, but his elderly and portly father crashed. The moral of the story is: understand what you are doing before you do it.