Сьюзен Виггс – The Horsemaster's Daughter (страница 7)

Cursing, Hunter sprang up. The stallion clattered down the ramp, frantic hooves throwing up a spume of blue-green water. The animal raced ashore, a sleek dark shadow moving with amazing speed. Hunter’s anger drained away as he stood knee-deep in water and saw, for the first time, the full power of the horse.

In a wave of strength and grace, the stallion ran across the ribbon of the beach, loping along as if made of water, one movement flowing seamlessly into the next. The length of his stride and his quickness convinced Hunter that if the sea storm had not driven this horse to madness, he would have been a champion beyond compare.

Still, Finn’s owners had sold him cheaply. Too cheaply. Perhaps he was mad from the start, and the agent in Ireland had failed to see that.

Something scuttled up Hunter’s leg. He jumped, brushing at a pair of quick, busy crabs. Then he waded ashore, the heavy sand sucking at his boots. He still had murder on his mind, but the stallion was out of range. He would murder her.

Eliza Flyte watched him, her mouth quirking suspiciously close to laughter.

If she laughed, he would do worse than simple murder.

She laughed.

And he did nothing but drip, and rage. And glare at her. And despite the insanity of the situation, he laughed too.

He laughed because there was nothing left to do. Because he was a widower with two children he didn’t know how to love, and a fortune he wasn’t able to repair. Because he was considered a rebel among his peers. Because he was raised to be a wealthy Virginia planter and he had become something entirely different. Because losing the stallion would be the final nail in his coffin.

The thought sobered him utterly. The horse would die in the wilderness. Finn was a stable-bred horse that had been raised as artificially as an orchid in a glass house. The purchasing agent in Ireland had sworn the yard did all but chew the Thoroughbred’s food for him. Such a creature had no notion of how to survive in the wild. The humane thing to do would be to hunt the poor animal down and put it out of its misery, but the very idea turned Hunter’s stomach sour.

“Well,” he said to the strange woman, who had finally managed to conquer her mirth and stood watching him expectantly. “You’ve certainly solved my problem for me. The horse’ll starve and thirst to death on this island all on his own.”

Her smile disappeared. Only when it was gone did he realize how attractive she was. She had full, moist lips and straight teeth, and a twinkle in her eye that hinted at a merry intelligence.

“I said I would tame him, and tame him I shall.” She had a weird accent, a combination of Virginia’s lazy drawl and something foreign, from the small shires of England, he guessed.

He regarded the chestnut shadow in the distance. The stallion was tossing his head and trotting to and fro, pausing now and then to browse in the odd spiky grasses that fringed the marsh.

“I see,” he said sarcastically. “And I suppose after he gets tired of being on his own, he’ll simply come knocking at your door.”

“You’re close to the truth,” she said. “Horses are herd animals. They naturally want to join with you. It’s their nature. Their instinct.”

“He’ll kill anything he encounters,” he promised her. “You’ve let Satan out of hell.”

She fixed him with an enigmatic stare. “Why do you assume his madness is a permanent state? That it can’t be healed?”

His mind flickered to events of the past and then recoiled. “Experience has taught me so.”

“Not me.” She started walking away.

“Where are you going?” he called after her.

“Home. It’s nearly dark and I’m hungry for my supper.”

The mere mention of food made his stomach cramp with need. He’d had nothing but whiskey all day, and at last the hunger had caught up with him. He eyed the scow and then the evening sky. It was too late to sail for home tonight. He was marooned on this wind-harried island with the most bizarre young woman he had ever met.

“I’d be obliged for a meal,” he said.

“I didn’t hear myself invite you,” she retorted, her voice growing as faint as her form in the distance.

He hurried to catch up to her. “I’ve money to pay.”

She kept walking, didn’t even glance at him. “I don’t want your money.”

He touched her arm. She yanked it away so quickly that she nearly stumbled over the vines snaking across the sand dunes. “Skittish, aren’t you?” he asked, torn between feeling intrigued and annoyed.

“Why should I trust you?” she fired back. “You’re a stranger. You’ve brought me a wounded horse, which you claim is not your fault, but how do I know you didn’t beat him until he went insane?”

Hunter was nearly out of patience. He planted himself in front of her, stopping her. “You took one look at the horse,” he said, “and you went all weird and misty-eyed, like you could read his mind. Take a look at me, Eliza Flyte.” He glared down at her. “Take a real good look and tell me you see a man who beats horses and crosses dangerous waters in an old scow just for sport.”

Her eyes narrowed, and in the flickering twilight he fancied he could feel her scrutiny probing at him. In the long, tense silence, broken only by the shudder of the wind and the lapping of the waves, he resisted the urge to squirm like a schoolboy.

“I don’t know what I’m seeing,” she said quietly. She gestured at the scow. “Have you any personal belongings you’ll be needing for the night?”

“For the night?”

“You know, things. You’re sleeping on the porch where I can keep an eye on you. So if you need something from your boat, get it now.”

“There’s only my gun,” he said. “And without shot, it’s no good to me at all.”

She made no apology. “Come, then. You’ll want to dry your clothes.”

“I’ll sleep on the boat,” he said.

“The mosquitoes will drive you mad,” she promised him. “And I have no experience restoring a man to sanity. Just horses.”

Four

Eliza felt sick with nervousness as she made her way over the dunes to the path that led to the house. Since her father’s death, no one had come to the island.

Henry Flyte had built the house more than twenty years ago. He had made it of materials salvaged from shipwrecks, and indeed it resembled a ship in some respects, with an observation deck on the roof and spindly rails around the porch. The dwelling had two rooms and a sleeping loft where she had passed each night since she was old enough to climb the ladder. Set upon cedar blocks, the house had a lime-and-lath chimney and sparse furniture, most of it salvage goods or fishing flotsam. An iron stove and a dry sink comprised the kitchen.

He had built it for her—a home. A refuge, a place of safety after he had fled the chaos of the royal racing circuits in England. Eliza had always suspected his self-exile had something to do with the circumstances of her birth, but he never spoke of it, and he’d died before she could wrest the whole story from him.

Now she lived alone in the house he had made with his own hands and shingled with layers of cypress. It had never been a beautiful home, not like the ones in the illustrations in their prized collection of printed engravings. But it was the place Eliza had always associated with love and comfort and safety. When she thought of home, she could imagine no other place but this.

Yet as she brought this angry, damp stranger home, she could not help but feel violated in some fundamental way, intruded upon. This aristocratic planter would judge her by what he saw, and while she shouldn’t care what he thought of her, she found that she did.

Following the curving path, shaded by myrtles, they came to the old barn first. The burned-out stalls and paddock looked haunted, the charred timbers like an enormous black skeleton against the night sky.

“You had a fire here?” Hunter Calhoun asked. His voice sounded overly loud, almost profane, in the stillness.

“Aye.”

“Was it recent?”

“Last year.”

“Is that how your father died, then?”

She hesitated. He had been dead before the fires had started. But to spare herself further explanation, she nodded and said again, “Aye.”

She led him around the end of the once-busy arena where her father’s voice used to croon to the horses, coaxing them to perform in ways most men swore was impossible. A short sandy track led to the house built up on pier and beam to take advantage of the breezes and to protect it from high water in case of a flood.

A weathered picket fence surrounded her kitchen garden, tenderly green with new shoots and sprouts of beans, squash, corn, tomatoes, melons. Peering through the gloom, Eliza could just make out the friendly bulk of Claribel placidly chewing her cud. The milch cow flicked one ear to acknowledge them. She was down for the night, sleeping beneath an old maple tree with branches that swept low to the ground. From the henhouse came the soft clucking of Ariel, Iris and Ceres, the biddies settling for the night.

“You don’t have trouble with cougars or wolves?” Hunter Calhoun asked.

“I’ve seen a few. But they don’t come too near.”

“Why not?”

Before she could answer, a horrible sound bugled from beneath the sagging porch of the house. A shadow detached itself from the gloom and streaked toward them.