THE ROUTE WAS familiar to the point of instinct. Thom Roxburgh moved along it with subconscious ease, staring only into his own mind.
The path was unmarked but clear: a flat furrow of ancient soil that ran from the big house to the hunting grounds. Every once in a while he found Roman pottery under his feet, made as smooth as old soap by earth and time.
The estate was old, and so the way was old—and so the gamekeeper liked it.
Roxburgh was grubby and sinew-thin, sweating in a ragged suit and a layer of waxed cotton. Old tattoos spilled like bruises from his collar and cuffs: wave lines on his jugular, crosses on his knuckles, and swallows behind his thumbs, their wings following the arch of his palm.
He strode past the bracken, thwacking its new limbs with his stick. His terriers, Lundy and Biscay, were chasing vermin somewhere in its thick tangle, silent as they focused on the scent. He’d always kept Patterdales, but he’d never known two as brave as these. A week ago Biscay had been cornered by a badger and Lundy had gone right in after her. They’d have torn it to pieces, Roxburgh thought, if he’d not intervened with a quick shovel.
He looked for the dogs, running his tongue through the spaces of his missing teeth. After a moment he spotted Biscay through a gap in the foliage, something gripped in her jaws. He narrowed his eyes against the needles of sunset that pierced the canopy, but couldn’t see what it was.
It didn’t matter. He’d pick the bloody mess from their teeth later, while they listened to the shipping forecast.
Roxburgh packed some more tobacco into his lip, sucked out its thick syrup, then spat—and saw the ground under his feet had been churned by deer hooves. He shifted the shotgun to his other arm.
He hoped not to fire it, but knew it was a fool’s hope: the air had a raw, animal smell that raised his hackles—the way hot blood smelled in frosty air.
The old gamekeeper carried on—breathing with the forest’s rhythm while his dogs hunted in the darkening shadows—toward the hunting grounds, and the secret thing he’d protected all these years.