Page 95 of The Tempting of Thomas Carrick
The next two hours went in a pleasure he hadn’t so much forgotten as set aside. How to deal with the large, strong, and ever-curious deerhounds instantly returned to him; he joined Marcus in putting the older dogs through their paces, then, once those dogs were satisfied and ready to slump, tongues lolling, and rest, he and Marcus ran through a succession of training exercises with the year-old youngsters. The puppies were too young to train, but the yearlings needed to start learning the signals, whistles, clicks, and waves by which a hunter controlled his dogs.
At the end of the session, assisted by the two kennel keepers, they steered the dogs back to their pens. Thomas paused to rub the shaggy head of one brindle-coated yearling.
Marcus leaned on the gate of a nearby pen. “That’s one of Apollo’s descendants.”
“Really?” Thomas pushed back to study the dog’s lines. “Yes—I can believe that.”
Marcus straightened. “Perhaps we should close the circle, as it were.” When Thomas looked his way, Marcus pointed to the dog. “I could give you a pair of hounds—one from Apollo, one from Artemis.”
The notion tugged at something inside him, but Thomas shook his head and stepped back, allowing one of the kennel keepers to pen the dog. “That’s the one thing I truly dislike about Glasgow—it’s no place for hounds.”
Marcus stared at him for several seconds, his expression—never easy to read—especially inscrutable, but when Thomas arched his brows in question, Marcus merely dipped his head and said, “There is that.”
With a wave, Marcus started them walking out of the kennels.
Thomas had crouched more than a few times; his injured calf was now reminding him that he still carried a wound.
Although he said nothing, and he was damned if he showed anything, Marcus seemed to sense his discomfort and kept to a slow, ambling pace.
They were still some way from the kitchen door when a voice called, “Mr. Carrick, sir!”
He and Marcus both looked and saw a farmer—one from the Vale who Thomas had seen in the Great Hall, but could not put a name to—standing on the other side of the yard fence, leaning on the top rail.
“I was wondering, sir, if you’d mind if I picked your brains over the sheep—the longhairs the Carricks run. I oversee the herd here, which is all white-faced natives, but I wondered if you had any pointers you could share.”
Marcus glanced at Thomas, a query in his eyes. In reply, Thomas changed direction and limped across to lean against the fence. Marcus followed and introduced the farmer as Mr. Gatehouse. Thomas exchanged nods. “They’re Lincoln Longhairs, as I recall.”
“Aye, that’d be them.” Gatehouse nodded solemnly. “We’ve been wondering”—he included Marcus with a tip of his head—“whether there’d be any sense us getting a few in, just to see.”
“That,” Thomas said, settling more comfortably against the rail fence, “depends on what you want to achieve.” To his surprise, details of the breed several of the more isolated crofters ran to supplement their income from logging were still clear in his memories. “The Carrick crofters chose the Lincolns because they could get a decent return even with just a few animals, principally because of the weight of the fleece.”
The three of them stood leaning against the fence, swapping observations and weighing the benefits of the longhairs versus the local white-faced breed, which was highly prized for its silken fleece as well as its succulent meat.
At one point, remembering his earlier exchange with Marcus, Thomas asked, “What do your weavers think?”
And that opened up another field for extensive discussion.
It was nearly an hour later when they parted from Gatehouse and continued their ambling progress toward the manor’s back door.
Halfway across the open section of the yard, Thomas halted. Leaning on his cane to ease the pressure on his leg, he lifted his gaze to the surrounding hills, scanning their forested lower slopes and the higher, bald peaks.
Realizing he’d stopped, Marcus halted a few paces ahead and turned to look back at him.
His gaze resting on the hills to the north, on the ridge that separated Carrick lands from the Vale, Thomas murmured, “It’s been so long since I was here, on the land and with my feet on the ground, so to speak. I hadn’t expected my memories to be so clear—so sharp and precise.”
Marcus considered him for a long moment; Thomas felt his steady gaze, but before he turned to meet it, Marcus, too, looked up at the hills, at the northern ridge. “Once this country claims you, it sinks talons into your soul, and as far as I’ve seen, as far as I know, it never lets you go.”
That sounded like some old saying. Given all he knew of Marcus’s situation—his unquestioning acceptance of his future in the Vale—Thomas wasn’t sure how to respond, so he merely tipped his head and resumed his journey toward the house.
Marcus watched Thomas for several moments, then sighed and followed him.
* * *
Late that night, when the manor had fallen silent and all were abed, Thomas lay sprawled on his back between Lucilla’s pale green sheets, with his head on her pillows and with her stretched half over him, sated and asleep.
He was sinking toward slumber, too, equally sated and so deeply satisfied—so very deeply relaxed on the mental plane as well as the physical—that his mind seemed to be floating, hovering, observing.
Able to see and recognize aspects of himself that normally lay concealed.
