"Smith, Wilbur - Courtney 04 - Golden Fox" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

He had been far beyond all her previous experience. With the others, even the most skilled and patient and perceptive of them, she had always been aware of their separate bodies, their divergent existences, of the deliberate attempts to please and to reciprocate. With Ramsey, there 48 had been no division. It was almost as though he had taken over her mind as well as her body. They had blended into each other in some semidivine osmotic process; their flesh and their minds had become one.

So many times during the night, she had believed that they had reached the pinnacle together, only to discover that they were still upon the foothills and before them towered an alp and then another and another. Each higher and more magnificent than the last. There had been no end to it, only at last the oblivion of sleep so deep that it had been like dying, and a resurrection into this new charmed and joyous existence.

"I'm in love,' she whispered in almost religious awe, and she looked down on her own body, amazed that such a frail vessel could contain so much happiness, such abundant emotion.

Then she noticed"her wristwatch lying beside her car keys on the bedside table.

"Oh my Godv she breathed. It was half-past ten. 'Daddy's lunch!' And she leapt to her feet and flew to the bathroom. On the washbasin, Ramsey had placed a brand-new toothbrush still in its sealed plastic container for her, and this small kindness touched her out of all proportion.

She hummed the lyric of 'Faraway Places' through a mouthful of foaming toothpaste.

She decided there was just time for a quick bath, and she lay in the hot water and thought about Ramsey and found there was a great void in her body aching for him to fill it.

"Enough of that, girl,' she laughed at herself. 'With a wave of his magic wand, he has transformed you into a shameless little raver." She jumped out of the bath and reached for the towel. It was still damp from his body, and she pressed a fold of it over her mouth and nose, and inhaled the faint but distinctive aroma of his skin. It excited her all over again.

"Stop itv she commanded herself in the steamy mirror. 'You have to be at Trafalgar Square in an hour."

She was just about to let herself out of the flat when she exclaimed again, and darted back into the bathroom. She rummaged in her sequinned handbag for the Ovanon pills in their calendar-marked pack and broke one out of its sealed compartment.

She placed the tiny white capsule on her tongue while she ran half a tooth-mug of water from the tap and then saluted her image in the mirror with the raised glass.

"To life, love and freedom,' she said, 'and to many happy returns.' And washed down the pill.

Blood sports did not revolt Isabella Courtney. Her father had always been a hunter, and the walls of Weltevreden, their home at the Cape of Good Hope, were decorated with trophies of the chase. Amongst the family assets was a safari company that owned a huge hunting concession in the Zambezi valley.

Only the previous year she had spent an idyllic fortnight in that enchanted wilderness with her elder brother, Sean Courtney, who was a licensed professional hunter and ran the outfit for Courtney Enterprises. On a number of occasions Isabella herself had ridden to hounds at Harriet Beauchamp's invitation. Isabella was a passable shot with the lovely little gold-engraved Holland & Holland 20-PUge shotgun that her father had givenher for her seventeenth birthday. With it she had shot snipe in the Okavango Delta, sand grouse in the Karoo, duck and geese on the great Zambezi, grouse on the highland moors, and pheasant, woodcock and partridge on some of the great English estates to which she and the ambassador had been invited.

She felt no offence at the sight of blood deliberately spilled, and in addition she had inherited her fair share of the family's gambling instinct, so the contest intrigued her.

This was the second day, and the original field of nearly three hundred contestants had been whittled down to two, for it was a 'one miss and out' and a 'winner take all' competition. The entrance fee was one thousand US dollars 5a head, so there was well over a quarter of a million in the pot, and the tension was as hot and thick as minestrone soup as the American went to the plate.

He and Ramsey Machado were the only two remaining contestants and they had shot level for the last twenty-three rounds. Finally, to break the deadlock and decide the winner, the Spanish judges had decreed that double birds must be taken from now on.

The American was a full-time professional. He followed the circuit in Spain and Portugal and Mexico and South America, and until last year in Monaco.

Now, however, the tournaments had been banned in that tiny principality, after a mortally wounded pigeon had escaped from the stadium and winged its way over the palace walls to crash at last on to Princess Grace's tea-table, spraying the lace table-cloth and the ladies'tea-gowns with its blood. Prince Rainier had heard the screams halfway across his tiny realm, and that was the end of live pigeon tournaments in Monaco.

The American was Isabella's age, not yet twenty-five years old, but his income was reputed to be well over a hundred thousand dollars a year. He was shooting a 12-gauge 'side by side' that had been made by that legendary gunsmith James Manton almost a century ago. Of course, the weapon had been rebarrelled and proofed to accommodate the longer modern cartridges and smokeless powders. However, the stock and action, complete with the engraved hammers, were original and retained the marvelous balance and pointability that old man James had built into it.

The young American took his stance on the plate, cocked the hammers, tucked the butt-stock under his right armpit, and pointed the double muzzles just over the centre of the semicircle of five woven wicker baskets that were placed thirty yards from where he stood.

Each basket contained a live pigeon. They were the feral birds of the type that live in flocks in the centre of most large cities. Big robust birds of variegated colours, bronze and blue and iridescent green, some of them with dark bands around their necks or patches of white in their wings. To ensure a supply of birds, the shooting club had built a feeding-shed on the premises, a structure containing trays that were replenished daily with crushed maize and enclosed by drop-sides that could be released by remote control and trap the feeding birds within. Often a pigeon that escaped untouched from the killing-ground would head straight back for the feeding-shed. Many birds had been shot at numerous times before, and these were wily creatures who had learnt subtle little tricks to disturb the aim of the marksmen. In addition the bird-handlers who loaded them into the baskets knew how to pluck a feather or two from wing or tail to make them fly an erratic unpredictable course.

The baskets were operated by a random mechanism, with a delay of up to five seconds after the shooter had called'Pull'for the release of a bird. Five seconds, for a man with sweaty palms, a racing heart and tens of thousands of dollars at stake, could seem like all eternity.

The baskets were thirty yards out, and the effective range of a 12-gauge shotgun was generally reckoned to be forty yards. Thus, the birds were released at almost extreme range, and in addition the retaining circle was a mere ten yards beyond the line of baskets.

The retaining circle was a low wooden wall, only eight inches high, painted white, which demarcated the boundary of the killing-ground. To qualify as a hit the carcass of the bird, or, in the event of the blast of pellets tearing a bird into more than one piece, the largest portion of the carcass, calculated by weight, had to fall inside the low wooden wall. In this way, the shooter had to kill his bird as it rose from the release-basket within the ten yards before it passed over the periphery of the killing-ground.