A Place Called Freedom (1995)

First they all shot from fifty yards. Lizzie went first and made a perfect hit, her shot striking the target in the killing spot just behind the shoulder. Jay and Sir George did the same. Robert and Henry struck farther back along the body, wounding shots that might allow the beast to get away and die slowly and painfully.

They shot again from seventy-five yards. Surprisingly, Lizzie hit perfectly again. So did Jay. Sir George hit the head and Henry the rump. Robert missed altogether, his ball striking sparks off the stone wall of the kitchen garden.

Finally they tried from a hundred yards, the outside limit for their weapons. To everyone’s astonishment Lizzie scored another perfect hit. Robert, Sir George and Henry missed altogether. Jay, shooting last, was determined not to be beaten by a girl. He took his time, breathing evenly and sighting carefully, then he held his breath and squeezed the trigger gently—and broke the target’s back leg.

So much for female inability to shoot: Lizzie had bested them all. Jay was full of admiration. “I don’t suppose you’d like to join my regiment?” he joked. “Not many of my men can shoot like that.”

The ponies were brought around by stable hands. Highland ponies were more surefooted than horses on rough ground. They mounted up and rode out of the courtyard.

As they jogged down the glen Henry Drome engaged Lizzie in conversation. With nothing to distract him, Jay found himself brooding over his father’s rejection again. It burned in his stomach like an ulcer. He told himself that he should have expected refusal, for his father had always favored Robert. But he had fueled his foolish optimism by reminding himself that he was not a bastard, his mother was Lady Jamisson; and he had persuaded himself that this time his father would be fair. His father was never fair, though.

He wished he were the only son. He wished Robert were dead. If there were an accident today and Robert was killed, all Jay’s troubles would be over.

He wished he had the nerve to kill him. He touched the barrel of the gun slung across his shoulder. He could make it look like an accident. With everyone shooting at the same time, it might be hard to tell who had fired the fatal ball. And even if they guessed the truth, the family would cover it up: nobody wanted scandal.

He felt a thrill of horror that he was even daydreaming about killing Robert. But I would never have had such an idea if Father had treated me fairly, he thought.

The Jamisson place was like most small Scottish estates. There was a little cultivable land in the valley bottoms, which the crofters farmed communally, using the medieval strip system and paying their rent to the laird in kind. Most of the land was forested mountains, good for nothing but hunting and fishing. A few landowners had cleared their forests and were experimenting with sheep. It was hard to get rich on a Scottish estate—unless you found coal, of course.

When they had ridden about three miles the gamekeepers saw a herd of twenty or thirty hinds half a mile farther on, above the tree line on a south-facing slope. The party halted and Jay took out his spyglass. The hinds were downwind of the hunters and, as they always grazed into the wind, they were facing away, showing the white flash of their rumps to Jay’s glass.

Hinds made perfectly good eating but it was more usual to shoot the big stags with their spectacular antlers. Jay examined the mountainside above the hinds. He saw what he had hoped for, and he pointed. “Look—two stags … no, three … uphill from the females.”

“I see them, just over the first ridge,” Lizzie said. “And another, you can just see the antlers of the fourth.”

Her face was flushed with excitement, making her even prettier. This was exactly the kind of thing she would like, of course: being out of doors, with horses and dogs and guns, doing something violently energetic and a little unsafe. He could not help smiling as he looked at her. He shifted uncomfortably in his saddle. The sight of her was enough to heat a man’s blood.

He glanced at his brother. Robert looked ill at ease, out in the cold weather on a pony. He would rather be in a counting-house, Jay thought, calculating the quarterly interest on eighty-nine guineas at three and a half percent per annum. What a waste it would be for such a woman as Lizzie to marry Robert.

He turned away from them and tried to concentrate on the deer. He studied the mountainside with his spyglass, searching for a route by which the stags could be approached. The stalkers had to be downwind so that the beasts could not pick up the scent of humans. For preference they would come at the deer from higher up the hillside. As their target practice had confirmed, it was nearly impossible to shoot a deer from farther away than about a hundred yards, and fifty yards was ideal; so the whole skill of deer stalking lay in creeping up on them and getting close enough for a good shot.