“We’ll freeze our asses off out there,” Alice said.
I’d tried to bow out. “I’ll sit here by the fire and wait for you to bring back my hare,” I said to William.
“Do you want to eat tonight?” he said affably, and I could see his eyes were cold and that whatever had happened between us might never right itself.
We would all have to suffer the outdoors.
Anne had hoped to catch enough rabbits for dinner, and Del said she’d found a recipe, Fricasseed Rabbits, in A Poetical Cook-Book. I trudged through the snowy woods beside the Milton girls, the fog from our breaths huffing out around our heads. We hung back from the orange bobbing of the hunters ahead, sipping from the flasks more than we should have. The woods were filled with thorny bushes that snagged our jacket sleeves, our mittens. The wood smoke smell of Anne’s fire reached us, and over the tree line we could see spires of smoke from distant houses. Finally, we heard the dogs braying, and the retorts of the weapons ahead, and we broke out of the woods to a clearing—an open field of snow splotched with the bloody marks of the various kills. Anne’s voice called out, and the men shouted congratulations, and Randy moved out across the snow to gather the hares. “Four,” he called out. “Good shots.”
“Disgusting,” Lucie said.
Del kept walking across the field, though I tried to call her back, so I followed her. She stopped at one spot in the snow where a rabbit lay, spread out as if sleeping, its eye open, a vivid red spray around its hind legs, and then she turned, her face white, and walked back past the other Milton girls and into the woods. The girls called her. Anne approached me and put her hand on my arm.
“Is she all right?” she said.
Her face was full of color, and her eyes clear and blue. I could see the papery texture of her skin, the way it was scored around her eyes. “She’ll be fine,” I said. “She gets faint at the sight of blood.”
“All snowshoes,” Anne said. “The dogs are good ones. They flushed out quite a few.”
The men decided to stay out, the dogs were excited and racing back into the woods, and Anne said we should head back with the girls. “I’ve got my New Year’s kill,” she said.
I held Anne’s gun and let her lean on my arm. I was leery of the gun, but she laughed at me and assured me it wouldn’t go off. The metal was cold through my glove. The Milton girls were ahead of us, and when Anne and I reached the house, Kitty came out to tell us that no one could locate Del. I said to try upstairs, and Alice found her in the little room with the pine bureau, lying down.
“She’s tired,” Alice said, though, from her expression, she didn’t know what to think.
I climbed the back stairs and went into the little room. It was dim, and I could just make out Del on the bed. She still wore her boots, the treads filled with melting snow wetting the bedspread.
“Those damn dogs won’t stop barking,” Del said.
It was true—from the upstairs you could hear the dogs in the woods, their braying.
“They’re just rabbits,” I said.
“Missing their waistcoats and jackets,” Del said.
I laughed, and then Del laughed, too, although it sounded more like she was crying. I went over and took off her boots and I carried them downstairs. Later, William and the rest of the men filed in—boisterous and red-faced, numb from the cold. They left the rabbits on the terrace—seven in all. Randy and Joseph drank back a few shots of whiskey, and then they skinned the carcasses outside and brought in the bodies—slimy and slick and pink—on a platter. Geoff volunteered to prepare the fricassee, claiming they ate rabbit all the time in England. No one mentioned Del’s absence. Occasionally one of the girls went upstairs to check on her, bringing her bread, and tea, and later, after we’d eaten the rabbit—which was tender, and seasoned wonderfully with fresh herbs—Del made her appearance, like a fairy-tale princess.
She slid onto the couch between Alice and Lucie. Eventually other guests arrived—more Milton girls, more of Anne’s friends from school, one of my own professors, who asked me about work that semester and made a fuss over me, holding his wineglass and his cigarette. It felt strange to be socializing with them, and I noticed that William kept hidden away in Anne’s study. She’d lit a fire in there, too, and he and Geoff and the other men sat with brandy snifters, and cigars, discussing the hunt.
Before midnight, Anne flushed the men out of the study like the hares from the woods. After the usual fanfare—the uncorking and pouring of champagne, the countdown to midnight—she made another toast, and as I’d expected, she announced this to be her last year.
“The last year in this place, in this form,” she said.