I swung my leg behind me but my other foot was wedged in the stirrup and I landed heavily on the dirt.
Edelweiss made a little noise at the back of her throat, her hooves kicking up dust clouds from the track.
The dog did not slow when it neared us, its feet drumming the grass and its tail whisking the air as it ran. It had a large head, the jaws gaping in a manic smile, but when it jumped up at me I felt the softness of tongue not teeth.
‘Iris!’ I cried, ruffling the dog’s ears. ‘Iris, look – isn’t he funny!’ but when I looked round I saw the track in shadow and the white of the horse’s belly above me, the flare of nostrils and the thrashing of hooves against the air.
Iris held the rope tightly in her hand as the horse strained against it, its eyes wide as if it stared into hell itself.
‘Get the dog away!’ she shouted.
I tried to grab the dog by its collar but it licked all over my hands. ‘Come, boy!’ I said, but it just quivered with excitement, its large head flicking back with the force of its bark, and I felt stupid for not realising the trouble it would cause.
‘Charlie!’ It was a man’s voice and I turned to see a figure hurrying towards us, a man dressed in black with a large rifle case slung over his shoulder – the man I had seen watching Haughten Hall from the trees.
‘P-Please!’ I stammered. ‘We are not alone. Her father is an important man and not long behind us…’ But my words were swallowed up in the thunder of the hooves as the horse reared again.
The man said nothing, his pale eyes locked on mine for just a moment too long, and my heart seemed to skip a little just as it had when I had seen him from the window of Haughten Hall when I thought he had noticed me but not looked away.
But then another voice, this time a woman’s: ‘Hold him fast!’
I scooped up the dog by its belly but he writhed in my grasp and I dropped him on to the path where he spun in the dirt and sped like a bullet in the direction of the cry.
The woman strode through the grass. She might have been my mother’s age but she could not have been more different. She was a tall, thin woman, with long limbs and the top of her back slightly hunched. She wore a pair of puffed cycling trousers and a small hat with a couple of feathers in it.
When she reached the track, she caught the dog by the collar. It spun circles on the ground, its tail thumping in the dirt as she buckled its collar on to a short leash.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Elliot-Palmer,’ said Iris, glancing back at the horse who still picked her hooves off the track as if it was on fire.
‘No harm done, Iris,’ said the woman briskly.
Then Iris added quickly, ‘My father is behind us.’
They seemed to share a look, but they had little time to say anything more as we could already hear Sir Howard’s shouts as he caught up with us.
‘Iris!’ he called as he reached us, panting heavily. ‘Are you hurt, darling? I saw that dratted horse and unruly dog. Did you fall?’
Iris opened her mouth but he did not wait for her response.
‘That beast is a menace!’ he shouted at the woman in the feathered hat, and I couldn’t help flinching at the force of his words, the gentle bounce I had heard in his voice when he first greeted me now gone.
‘You should expect dogs on the common!’ she shouted back. ‘I told you the horse was skittish when I sold you it. You should expect it from a mare. My stable lad recommended a gelding, but you still took her.’
‘The beast is not just skittish,’ he yelled, ‘she is clearly uncontrollable!’
‘Well,’ she hissed. ‘I suppose that is the trouble with us mares – we do not know our place!’
They glared at each other for several seconds, and I sensed that they would have continued to shout had it not been for the others around them.
Then the man in black walked slowly over to the woman. He held the dog by its collar in one hand and held the other out to her. She took it reluctantly. Together they turned and headed back up the track, the woman cursing loudly and the dog whimpering as it was pulled along with them.
Sir Howard watched them in silence until he was sure that they would not return, then he took the rope from Iris and handed it to me as the horse was quite calm now. Without a word, he began walking back in the direction of Haughten Hall and we all followed him in silence – my mother still panting and bewildered, and Iris trudging along sulkily. The friendly atmosphere I had felt that morning was now gone and the woman’s curses rang in our ears.
I looked back at the two figures walking side by side in the distance – the man with the long rifle case and the woman with the billowing trousers – and I noticed that the woman was waving her hands wildly in the air, as if the walk had done little to calm her anger. There had been something about the row I had just witnessed, something that told me that the words I had heard were not the first to be shouted in anger, and that they would not be the last.
The little dog was now loose again and trailing at their heels, but then it stopped and I thought that it must have seen me watching. Suddenly it raised its head and then it was running again, back down the track towards us, its dark shape flying over the earth, its large mouth low and gaping and its legs flailing out behind it.
I opened my mouth, but by then it was too late and I could hear the pant of its breath and the patter of its feet. I gripped the horse’s rope with all my might but the dog was not heading for me, nor Edelweiss – as Iris turned, it leapt up on her as if her open arms had willed it, nose sniffing and tail wagging.
Iris laughed a little and cupped her hands against the dog’s wide muzzle, his tongue licking flat against her palms.
‘Get away!’ roared Sir Howard, his hand held high and his fist clenched.
The dog dropped to the ground, cowering for just a second, its ears back and eyes wide. Then, just as soon as it had come, it was gone again, no more than a dark shape disappearing into the distance.
It was then that I saw Iris – head bowed and shoulders hunched – her body turned away from her father and her arm drawn across her face as if she was shielding herself from the force of his fist. I had thought Sir Howard’s raised hand a threat directed at the dog, and intended only as a warning, but Iris had not seen it that way. I watched her now as she shrank away from her father – from the rage in his voice, and from the blow that never came.
10
I would not have come across the tall woman in the feathered hat again had it not been for her dog. I found him tied up outside the church hall one afternoon as I was returning from the bookstand at Partridge’s. When I set down my basket, he looked up at me, a whine straining from his throat. As I patted his head, his tail began to wag excitedly, sweeping crescents into the dust, his body circling close to the ground as if he found the commands of ‘sit’ and ‘stay’ too much to bear.
His nature seemed changed now he was leashed, and I was reminded of the changes in others I had seen that day on the common barely a week ago: the docile horse that had reared at the sight of a little brown dog; the mild-mannered father, who had raised his hand to a small excitable animal; his headstrong daughter who had steadied a rearing horse then cowered at the sight of her father’s raised hand. So much had been said as we set out that day, but we had returned from the common in silence, with only the curses of the woman in the feathered hat carried on the breeze.