Сьюзен Виггс – The Horsemaster's Daughter (страница 10)

“I never thought much of lady novelists.”

She sniffed. “Then you probably haven’t thought much at all.”

“And how many times have you read the Shakespeare?” Calhoun asked.

“I’ve lost count. The Tempest has been my main companion for years.” She hesitated, then decided there was no harm in admitting her fanciful view of the play. “I used to imagine my father and I were Prospero and Miranda, stranded on their island.” She flushed. “I used to wait on the shore after a storm had passed, to see if a prince might wash up on the beach, like Ferdinand in the story.”

He leaned back, hooked his thumb into the waist of his pants and sneered at her. “Honey, believe me, I’m no prince.”

“I’d never mistake you for one.” She put The Tempest and Jane Eyre back on the shelf. “All I know of the world is what I’ve read in these books.”

“How do you know they’re showing you the world as it is?” he asked.

She ducked her head, conscious of his physical proximity and oddly pleased by his interested questions. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“’Course it matters. It’s not enough to understand something in the abstract. Life is meant to be lived, not read about.”

She pressed her hand against the row of books, stopping when she reached The Tempest. “Is it better to read of Antonio’s bitter envy and jealousy, or to feel it myself? What about Caliban’s rage and madness? He was a perfectly miserable monster, you know.”

His mouth quirked—almost a smile. “I know.” He took down the fat calf-bound volume of Jane Eyre and flipped through the crinkly pages. “Do you never wonder what Mr. Rochester felt, being reunited with Jane after all those years?”

She gave a little laugh. “You said you didn’t think much of lady novelists.”

“Not the bad ones, anyway.” He replaced the volume and stood back, surveying the collection. “So you have been raised by a horsemaster and his books.”

“I have.”

“You never missed having friends? Neighbors? Folks to call on you?”

“My friends and family are the birds and wild ponies and animals that have no fear of me.” Her cheeks grew hotter still. She felt so gauche and awkward in the presence of this plantation gentleman. “You must think I’m strange.”

He gave her a look that made her shiver. “I do, Miss Eliza Flyte. Indeed I do.”

He made her want to run and hide. Yet at the same time, she felt compelled to stand there, caressed by his scrutiny.

The strange heat she had been feeling all evening spread through her and intensified. She had the most peculiar premonition that he was going to touch her…and that she was going to let him.

A distant equine whinny pierced the air.

Eliza felt the fine hairs on her arms lift. The lonely, mournful wail of the stallion severed the invisible bond that had been slowly and seductively forming between her and Calhoun. She stepped sharply away from him. “You can bed down in that hammock on the porch,” she said tersely. “And it’s only fair to warn you—I sleep with a loaded Henry rifle at my side.”

Five

When Hunter awoke the next morning, the sun was high and the crazy woman was nowhere in sight. He lay in a sailor’s hammock strung across one end of a rickety porch, feeling the warm sting of the sun on his arms and smelling the fetid sweetness of the marsh at low tide.

He’d slept surprisingly well, considering the rough accommodations. She had lit a small fire in an iron brazier on the porch, laying lemon balm leaves across the coals, and the smoke kept the mosquitoes away. The night sounds—a cacophony of frogs and crickets and rollers scudding in from the Atlantic—created an odd symphony he found remarkably soothing. He usually needed a lot more whiskey to get himself to sleep.

He could hear no movement in the house, so he got up and went inside. Opening a stoneware jug in the dry sink, he discovered fresh water and took a long drink. Then he went to check his clothes, finding them stiff with salt, but dry. He dressed, his mind waking up to the fact that a peculiar woman had turned his horse loose on this deserted island, and that he had been powerless to stop her. Today he’d have to sail the scow home empty.

He tried to blame Noah, but none of this was the boy’s fault. Noah could not have known the horsemaster was dead and that his daughter had lost her wits.

Worse, he would have to face Blue. He’d have to explain to his son that he had not been able to save the stallion.

Muttering under his breath, he found his hip flask and wrenched off the cap. Empty.

“Shit,” he said, then drank more water and stepped outside. If she wasn’t anywhere in sight, he wasn’t going to waste his time looking for her.

Broad daylight didn’t improve the place. If anything, the poverty and ruin of Eliza Flyte’s settlement glared even more sharply. The little broken-back house and the burned-out barn resembled a scene in the aftermath of battle—lonely, eerie, abandoned. Yet despite the desolation, a closer examination revealed that someone actually lived in this place. She had added small, halfhearted touches here and there—a jar of wildflowers on the kitchen windowsill, a glass deck prism hung from the eaves to catch the sunlight, a row of martin houses high on posts in the trampled yard.

He followed a sandy path past an old arena shaded by a tall red cypress tree. Presumably this was where the fabled horsemaster had worked his spells. Now the splintered fence rails hung askew, and thick-leafed groundsel spread lush tentacles across the ground and up the posts. Fallen beams that had once held up a sail canvas sunshade lay collapsed in the middle. A smaller arena appeared to be in better shape, the rails lashed in place and the sailcloth stretched overhead, shading a full rain barrel.

As he continued along the winding path toward the sea, Hunter wondered what he could have been thinking, allowing himself to be persuaded to bring the stallion here. What a fool’s errand it had been. What a waste of time.

The horse was a menace. It needed to be shot.

It was not a duty he embraced, for the truth was, he loved horses. He always had. Against all caution, good sense and advice from well-meaning neighbors, he’d made the breeding and racing of Thoroughbreds his life.

Necessity, as much as desire, had dictated the change. His father, the master of Albion, had left the tobacco plantation to his first-born son. Hunter had expected the legacy. From the day of his birth he had been groomed for it. By the age of eight, he knew the worth of a peck of tobacco on the Richmond exchange. By the age of eleven, he knew how many pickers were needed to bring in a crop.

The only thing he hadn’t been prepared for was bankruptcy. When the will was read and all the dust settled, Hunter discovered something his father had concealed for years: Albion was swamped by debt. The once-prosperous tobacco plantation teetered on the verge of collapse.

Everyone had expected him to either go down with the plantation like the captain on a sinking ship, or to cut his losses, take what he could salvage and rebuild.

But to the amazement of the Tidewater plantation society, and to the consternation of his wife and her family, he did neither. He appalled them all with his actions. Before the small-eyed, hated trader came to sell off the slaves of Albion in order to pay pressing debts, Hunter set each one of the slaves free. Hunter’s father-in-law, Hugh Beaumont, had shrieked that the servants and field-workers were worth a small fortune as chattel, but nothing as free people.

What could Hunter have been thinking?

He knew setting them free was foolhardy, yet the day he signed the stack of manumission papers, Hunter had felt ten feet tall. His father-in-law had accused him of going insane, but Hunter had simply turned away and called in an estate agent to auction off some of the remote tobacco fields and furniture.

When all was done, he was left with a huge, half-empty house and a handful of ex-slaves who stayed on out of old age, infirmity or loyalty. In addition to the house, he kept the barns, the paddocks and acreage in the high meadows suitable for pasturing.

He remembered the day he’d told Lacey what he intended to do with Albion. He and his wife had sat together in the still-elegant parlor; the estate liquidators had not yet come to seize the Waterford candlesticks and chandeliers, the Heppelwhite chests, the Montcalme harpsichord and Aubusson carpets. His voice low and deep with excitement, Hunter had finally confessed his life’s ambition. He told his wife that he wished to make a new start and turn Albion into a Thoroughbred breeding and racing farm.

She had laughed at him. He’d recognized the merry, girlish laugh that had captivated him when he was a boy, only this laugh had a harsh edge of desperation. “Darling, you can’t mean it. Making a horse farm will take far more money than you have, and years of work. And you’ve just set all your laborers free.”

Her lack of belief in him struck hard. He had looked down at his large, pale hands, holding them to the light and splaying the fingers wide. “Sweetheart, these hands have held the reins of the finest horseflesh in Virginia. They’ve cradled bottles of wine worth more than some men earn in a lifetime. They’ve been dealt hands of cards that won or lost a small fortune. And they’ve loved you with all that I am for eight years. The one thing they’ve never done is a day of hard, honest labor.” He turned them palms up, studied his long fingers as if they belonged to someone else. “Right now, these hands are the only thing I can truly claim as mine. So I reckon I’d better get used to the idea of doing the work myself.”