The Witch of Exmoor (38 page)

The hind trembles with terror, and Emily is exultant with indignation. She is fearless. As some kind of calm obtains amongst the huntsmen, Emily opens the window and leans out.

‘What are you doing?' she demands, in a voice as firm and as clear as a bell. Her hair flames with its own light, and those who were to tell the tale swore that she appeared as an avenging angel. Terror now fills the huntsmen, for who is this maiden, what is she doing here, and where is their quarry? ‘Away with you!' cries Emily. ‘This is my grandmother's property!'

The scene is majestic, ridiculous. The hounds are subdued, and the Master of the Staghounds approaches to offer a gallant apology. He touches his hat with his whip, he bows like a gentleman. But still he wants his deer. The house and the lawn may belong to her and her grandmother, but the hind belongs to him.

Emily cannot believe her ears. The scene descends into bathos. She turns into a fishwife.

‘Are you suggesting I let this poor creature out to those murdering monsters?' she yells. ‘You must be mad! I'll have you all for trespass! And get those dogs off my roof!'

For two of the hounds in their excitement have taken the short cut, and jumped from the path above on to the guttering: now they perch nervously, not sure how they got there or how to get off again.

‘Get off, get away, get off!' repeats and exhorts Emily. ‘You have no right to come here, and I grant the beast sanctuary!'

She is worried about what the beast is up to, behind her: she has heard the crashing of glass, but dare not look round to examine the damage. She must confront these intruders until they sound the retreat. She knows nothing of stag hunting, she knows neither its rules nor its seasons; she does not know that at this season of the year the hunted deer will be a female and therefore fortunately unantlered. But she does know that she must stand her ground. That is the role that has been given to her, and she will not betray it. She is the heroine of the chase, the protectress of the deer at bay. It is a fine role, and one she knows she looks good in: nevertheless she is surprised when a chap in helmet, lifted goggles and leathers drives his motorbike on to the lawn and into the middle of the mêlée and starts to take her photograph. The grass is a sea of mud by now, but then one couldn't have said it was very well kept in the first place. Can the chap on the motorbike be a friend and an ally? Is he, by any happy chance, a hunt saboteur?

Not quite, it proves, but he is good enough for her purposes. He is a press photographer, and he has been following the stag hounds for an article about the League Against Cruel Sports. He cannot believe his luck. This will be the picture of the decade, of the century. It will be reproduced until there are no more hunts and no more hinds and no more hunted, until the moors and woodland are no more. Emily and the hind have made his fortune. He snaps and snaps, as Emily stands there in the window, until he realizes that other cameras are beginning to emerge from the leafage, from the woodwork; hunt followers, even hunters, appear to be equipped with all kinds of photographic apparatus, and the scene is transformed from panic and chaos into a photo-opportunity, as lights flash, lenses dilate, tits are pressed, dogs whine, horses stamp and snort. Nobody wants to miss out, but our professional photographer is not keen to share his prize, and also wakes up to the fact that he badly needs a shot of the deer indoors as well as a shot (which he hopes to God he has got) of it leaping in panic over the window-sill. So he runs forward and rushes across the mangled grass and the one-time herbaceous borders and yells at Emily: ‘Let me in! Let me in!'

Emily hesitates, takes in the features of his face, likes what she sees, and opens a pane. He scrambles over, less elegantly than the hind, which is cowering at the other end of the room immobile with shock.

'Western Press,'
says the young man, who is almost as young as Emily herself.

‘Emily Palmer,' says Emily, dazed.

They gaze at one another, astonished. The young man lifts his camera at her, lets it fall. He is open, eager, unwary. He has learnt no guile. Is he, perhaps, the one?

‘Sorry,' he says, apologizing for his professional reflex.

‘That's OK,' says Emily. She is panting slightly, with excitement. Her nostrils are dilated, her colour high, her eyes brilliant.

‘Are you all right?' asks the young man.

'I'm
all right,' says Emily. ‘But I don't know about
him.'

She indicates the trembling beast, at which she dares not look: she is afraid it is damaged, injured, will have to be put down.

'Hi'r,'
says the young man. it's a hind.'

The manner in which he says this convinces Emily that she has found a friend, and she bursts into tears of shock and relief.

‘A hind?' she weeps. ‘Do they chase hinds?'

‘You bet they do. Hinds in calf, hinds with calf. In December they only chase hinds.'

‘Is she all right?' asks Emily.

‘I'll have a look,' says the young man. ‘Do you mind if I take a pic while I do it?'

Emily is busy shutting and bolting the windows against the milling confusion of the thwarted throng. The young man kneels gently by the frightened animal, speaks to her quietly, then flashes at her. The beast jerks in alarm, then quivers into stillness.

‘Don't do that,' says Emily.

‘Sorry,' says the young man.

The hind seems to be in one piece, but they agree that they will have
to
keep her indoors until the crowd has gone. Emily says she is afraid the poor thing will die of fright, but the young man says he thinks she will recover. What next? Shall Emily go out and parley?

‘We'll have to get rid of them,' says Emily. ‘Can't I tell them just to get off my property?'

‘Not as easy as all that,' says the young man, beginning to look around him with interest, taking in not only the beautiful maiden but also the bizarre decor of skulls and bones of the house she inhabits. ‘The horses can get out, but there's been an accident in the drive. An Isuzu's gone over the edge and a lot of other stuff is stuck behi nd it. It's a scene up there, I can tell you. It'll take hours to clear.'

Emily is beginning to calm down, and the animal too seems less distressed. Emily is delighted to hear that the hunt followers have plunged themselves into a muddy impasse, and cross-questions her new friend about how it happened. He assures her there is considerable damage to the drive. ‘Somebody will pay for that!' declares Emily, glaring angrily through the window at the crowd. She has triumphed over the hunt in every way: it has been utterly routed and wrongfooted. May all its Land Rovers crash after Frieda Haxby into the sea!

The young man (who has declared himself to be Jim from Bristol) allows her to think that he shares her anti-hunt feelings, which he now does, although he had set out on the day's chase as a neutral observer. He offers to go out and negotiate with the Master of the Staghounds, and, if Emily will permit him, on his return to take some more pictures. Emily assures him that she can deal with the Master herself, and climbs over the window-sill to do so, leaving Jim in charge of the hind. She confronts them all, boldly. She tells them roundly that they are trespassing, that she gathers they have blocked her drive, and that she is about to ring the police. It is no good their telling her that they thought the house was uninhabited. That is no excuse. They had better get out of her grounds as quickly as they can. And to whom should she send the bill for damage to property?

The undifferentiated mass of black-jacketed, white-stocked, fawn-breeched, red-nosed, hair-netted, khaki-jacketed, black-booted folk begins to mumble, thin, retreat. Emily tosses her golden mane and scrambles back over her window-sill.

Jim says it would be better to ring a national paper than the police. He wants to sell the story, and so should she. They compromise: they will ring the press, and the police, and a vet, and Emily will make them both a cup of coffee.

 

It takes three hours to clear the drive, and two days for Emily to get back to Wiltshire with the spoils of Ashcombe. By then she has become a small-scale national heroine, for Jim's pictures have come out uncannily well. He had been following the hunt since the moment the hounds left their kennels, and he has a whole portfolio covering the meet outside the Royal Oak at Moulton, the pursuit over the moor, the lemming leap down the hillside, the overturned Isuzu, the gathering on the lawn, the damsel with upstretched arms at the window, the confrontation of the damsel and the Master. And indoors, he has portrait after portrait of Emily Palmer and of the shy creature she has saved. The hind had not been persuaded to lie down with her head in Emily's lap, as she had continued to cower behind the sofa amidst the debris of skulls and glass; eventually she had been rescued by a vet from Lynton and an Exmoor Ranger who had managed to coax her into a van, and had promised to release her with the herd. But we were able to see Emily leaning over the back of the sofa, fruitlessly extending an apple; Emily attempting to pat the trembling head; and the delicate head itself, with its lucent, long-lashed, harmless female eyes.

The vet was of the opinion that she had calved within the last three months. The calf, he optimistically assured Emily, would be running with the herd. He did not tell Emily that the hind was probably suffering from myopathy, leading to excess lactic acid and kidney failure, and might well be pregnant again. His heart and local loyalties were with the hunt, despite the pathos and drama of the brave, lone and desperate flight. He would leave the dirt to the League Against Cruel Sports. They would make a mountain out of it, he guessed.

They would, they did, and they do, they will.

Emily does not know what to make of it all. She quite forgets Grandma Frieda in the flurry of her nine-day-wonder notoriety. She is not used to being interviewed, but keeps her cool remarkably well, as a lawyer's daughter should, and indeed the press does itself credit in some of its descriptions of the event. The connection with Frieda Haxby's disappearance is not missed, and for the second time in two months remote Ashcombe is in the news. A place of mystery and drama, of legends in the making. There is a particularly stirring piece in one of the quality Sundays by a columnist who had happily been reared in the neighbourhood and who knew all its stories: he retold the old tale of the noble huntsman who had in ancient times pursued a hind across the brow of the moor, up Countisbury Hill, and down through the thickets of the steep hillside towards the sea. At the perilous spot now known as Hindspring Point the hind had paused, glanced backwards at her lone pursuer–for all save the noble knight had fallen back in the chase–and then with three mighty leaps had bounded down the cliff into the sea. There, legend has it, she swam away to the west, across the channel, and out of sight. The penitent knight had marked her tracks, and at each set of the hoofmarks of the hunted beast had planted a stone–three stones which may be seen to this day. They commemorate her valour.

And what will Emily Palmer raise as monument to the hind which sought sanctuary in her arms? To her grandmother who fell from this cliff?

Emily Palmer is not sure what she thinks about hinds and hunting, about blood sports and cruelty and conservation. She does not tell the gentlemen of the press that for perhaps two years of her life her greatest desire had been to hunt with the Bessborough Foxhounds, and that for two years she and her friend Sally Partington had talked ponies, dreamt ponies, read about ponies, collected rosettes, studied form, and longed to leap over hedges and ditches and smear themselves with the blood of the stump of the severed brush of the red beast. Their bedrooms had been shrines to the show-ring and the stable, and they themselves had smelt of straw and bran and oatcake and manure. How Simon had sneered, how Daniel and Patsy had yawned! And then all this passion had passed away, and both Emily and Sally had been filled with a transitional shame. Yet the shame, Emily begins to guess now, and will believe later, attached as much to her feelings for Sally Partington as to the blood lust of the hunt.

Sally Partington had graduated from ponies and the clitoral orgasm to unsuccessful attempts at the vaginal orgasm with Simon Palmer. Emily Palmer had given up the lot, had deliberately forgotten and expunged the lot. And now everybody seems to be asking her what she thinks about horses and hunting. She answers very coolly, and gives nothing away. She insists that she is neither saboteur nor fanatic.

The field is full of ironies. Some of the arguments of the anti-league strike her as unconvincing, and some of its supporters as insupportable: a few of the hunters and hunt followers seem quite nice. (The chivalrous owner of the crashed Isuzu writes her a charming apology and asks her round for tea.) What is one to do? Does one have to have an opinion?

Animals have no opinions. Animals have no sense of irony. They leap, they run, they tremble.

Emily the heroine is perplexed. She knows the hind had brought her a message, but what was it? And where is the poor creature now? Did she die from the shock? Did her calf die? Perhaps she should advise Benjamin to turn Ashcombe into a bird sanctuary, a deer sanctuary. As human habitation, it is doomed. Those who stay there must stick or leap.

 

Four roods the hart of legend leaped to Hartleap Well, four roods the hind of legend to the sea, and four roods Frieda Haxby fell to her death. The story of Hartleap Well is told by Wordsworth, and it is set in Yorkshire, but many other counties have such legends. (Lincolnshire has one about a blind horse, and it is commemorated at Bayard's Leap, near Sleaford; Frieda, as we have seen, had been taken to see the giant horseshoes by her father. Brewer says the horseman was Rinaldo, but the locals say he was called Black Jim.) A rood (or a pole, or a perch) is five and a half yards (or five metres) and in early drafts of his ballad Wordsworth had allowed his hart to leap nine roods, not four; in his unromantic, stampmaster old age he scaled down that leap, but maybe he was wrong to do so. In the genre of legend, all things are possible, and exaggeration bears conviction. It is only in this real world that the mud is heavy and sticks.