The Horsemaster's Daughter. Сьюзен Виггс
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In the cool blue light of the moon, she could see that it was made of silver, engraved with the initials H.B.C.
“No, thank you,” she said.
“It’s good whiskey.”
“I’ve no taste for spirits.” She folded her arms, feeling awkward.
He took a deep breath. “Something smells good.”
“The fish. Come inside. It should be ready.” She tried to steady her jittery hands as she served him the coffee and a plate of onions, potatoes and fillets of rockfish browned in butter. “Caught it this morning,” she said.
He ate ravenously, yet with a curious refinement of manners. At least, she thought, he had good manners. He used a knife and fork rather than fingers, and didn’t wipe his mouth on his sleeve. Despite his claim that he was getting drunk, he ate with steady concentration, polishing off the meal and the coffee quickly.
The kettle shrieked in the silence. Eliza jumped, then covered her reaction by getting up to brew a pot of tea. She made tea every night of her life, yet for a moment she simply stood in front of the stove, her mind a blank. Only by force of will did she remind herself to take down the packet of tea leaves from Eastwick, add them to the pot along with the boiling water and return to the table.
She gave him tea from her black basalt tea service. He picked up a shiny cup, holding it to the light. “Where the devil did you get this?”
“Father salvaged it from a wreck years ago.”
He studied the mark on the underside of the pot. “This was designed by Josiah Wedgwood.”
“Who’s he?”
“A famous potter in England from the last century. This is probably priceless.”
“I always thought it was just a teapot.” She ducked her head and took a bite of her food.
“I guess you don’t get many visitors,” he said.
“I don’t,” she said simply.
“Gets lonely here, then.”
His comment put her on edge again, reminding her that she was alone with a man she did not know. She chewed slowly, unwilling to admit how true his words were. When her father was alive, they’d had visitors from time to time. Folks came from far and wide, bringing their ill-trained but high-spirited horses for him to tame, and most of them left proclaiming him a miracle worker. Once a year, her father offered up a pony or two culled from the island herd. People in need of workhorses prized the ponies her father trained.
Most of the wild ponies were brutally beaten into submission by ignorant farmhands. But Henry Flyte, who had once gentled the finest racehorses in England, treated the island ponies with the same patience and care he had used with the Derby winners.
After his death, no one came. Everyone assumed that Henry Flyte had taken his magical touch to the grave with him.
Eliza alone knew there was no magic in what her father did. There was simply knowledge and gentleness and patience. He had raised her with the same principles, schooling her in the evenings and by day, teaching her the ways of horses and wild things. Her earliest memory was of lying by his side on a sand dune, their chins tickled by dusty miller leaves while they watched a herd of ponies.
“See that dappled mare?” he’d whispered. “She’s in charge of the herd. Watch how she runs off that yearling stallion.” The younger pony had approached with an inviting expression, mouth opened to expose the lower teeth, ears cocked forward. The mare had rebuffed the advance with a flat-eared dismissal.
Eliza had been fascinated by the display. The horses performed an elaborate, ritualistic dance. Each movement seemed to be carefully planned. Each step flowed into the next. The mare lowered her head, menacing the interloper even while capturing his attention. Each time she drove him off, he came back, contrite, ready to obey.
“That’s all we need to do,” Henry Flyte had explained. “Make him want to be part of our herd.”
She stabbed a bite of potato with her fork. “Aye,” she said to Hunter Calhoun. “Aye, it’s lonely here.”
“Then why do you stay?”
“I can leave anytime I want,” she said defensively.
He scraped the last of the potatoes and onions from the pan. “And where would you go if you left?”
She hesitated, thinking that it would somehow diminish her dream if she confessed it to a stranger. The dream was hers and her father’s. She refused to tarnish it by confessing it to this haughty off-islander.
She set down her fork. Turning the subject, she said, “What is the name of your horse?”
“Sir Finnegan. He’s registered in the Dorset books that way. His damned pedigree doesn’t matter now, though. I’ll have to track him down and shoot him tomorrow. He’s mad, and he’s a menace.”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“I saw him kill, saw him cripple a good man’s hand.”
“But you brought him here,” she pointed out. “You must have had some hope that he could be saved.”
“I let my cousin’s boy persuade me that your father was some sort of wizard with horses. Shouldn’t have listened to him, though.” He took a gulp of tea. “How big is this island, anyway?”
“Half a day’s walk, end to end.”
“I’ll go looking for the horse in the morning,” he said. “The infernal creature ran off as if the ground were on fire. Might take me a while to hunt him down.”
“A creature’s only lost if you don’t know the right way to find him,” Eliza stated.
He blinked as if her explanation startled him. “That’s a hell of a thing to say.”
“Let me show you something.” Pushing back from the table, she raised the flame of the lantern and set it on a high shelf where she kept her books, a collection of lithographs and a packet of old farming journals. Taking down one much-thumbed tome, she set it on the old wooden crab trap she used as a table. Flipping open the heavy book, she paged through the text until she found what she was looking for. “’The horse is aware of you,’” she read aloud, “’though he doth appear indifferent, and will with a show of like indifference desire to attach to you.’ That’s from On Horsemanship.”
“Xenophon’s text.”
She felt a cautious smile touch her lips. “You’ve read it?”
“In the original Greek.” Haughty and boastful as a drawing-room scholar, he stood up, running his finger along the spines of her books. “I’ve also read Fitzherbert and John Solomon Rarey and the letters of Gambado.” He angled his head to inspect more titles. “You’re well-read for a—” He caught himself. “You’re well-read.”
“For a pauper,” she said, filling in for him.
“It’s unusual for any woman to quote from Xenophon.”
“The texts on horsemanship were brought by my father from England.”
“Where did these other books come from?” Calhoun asked.
“Father salvaged a few pieces of the King James Bible and one Shakespearean play from a shipwreck. There were many more, but the water spoiled them.” She had been very small the day he’d brought the surviving volume up from the shore. She had a vivid memory of her father stringing a line across the yard and hanging the book with its pages splayed open. She’d begged him to teach her to read that day, and he had given her a smile so filled with pride and affection that the memory was imprinted forever on her heart.
That very night, he had begun reading The Tempest to her. The tale of a father and daughter stranded on an island after a shipwreck had become, in her