Read The Horsemaster's Daughter Online
Authors: Susan Wiggs
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General
“What makes you think I’m looking for help?” he asked peevishly.
Journey chuckled in that deep, knowing way of his. “That’s your third cup of rum since Isadora came out on deck.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed. When did she come out on deck?”
Laughing harder, Journey took the cup from him. “Oh, you got it bad, don’t you?” He drank the rum with an exaggerated swallow. “So what you going to do about it?”
Ryan parked one hip on the rail, folded his arms and scowled up at the foredeck. The men were giving Isadora dancing lessons. They had already introduced her to sailors’ jigs and schottisches; this evening they’d moved on to ballroom dancing.
While Luigi and Chips played a broken-sounding waltz on mouth organ and fiddle, Ralph Izard led Isadora through the steps. The others clapped the one-two-three rhythm with their hands or drank from their tin cups with little fingers daintily crooked out.
Isadora’s bare feet pattered with increasing assurance on the bare wood of the deck. She wore a simple skirt and blouse and had one of Gerald’s bandannas tied jauntily around her head. Her cheeks glowed in the amber sunset, and above the airy music, her laughter flowed like a banner of silk.
Watching her, Ryan felt a powerful jolt of desire, curiously tempered by a rush of tenderness. Before his very eyes he had watched her turn from a prune-lipped spinster who distrusted the world to a laughing young woman with a lust for life. Her transformation fascinated him.
“Where you reckon Izard learned that fancy-ass dancing?” Journey asked.
Ryan kept his eyes on the waltzing couple. “He grew up the son of a New York shipping tycoon. Had a gentleman’s education, but he had a falling-out with his family and went to sea.” Ryan was relieved when Journey didn’t ask the reason for the rift. The chief mate had outraged his family by taking an African wife.
The waltz ended, and Isadora pantomimed the breathless pleasure of a debutante, fluttering a fan the Doctor had fashioned of chicken feathers.
“Why’d you quit courting her?” Journey asked.
Ryan looked at him sharply. He’d hoped to keep his unwise affair with her a secret. He’d hoped the lunacy of falling in love with her would escape Journey’s notice.
“I never should have courted her to begin with.” He paced across the cockpit as Isadora and the men formed the lines of an elegant country reel. “I didn’t actually.” He turned to Journey with his hands spread in helpless bafflement. “We just…happened.”
A huge grin spread across Journey’s face. “That’s the way love works, honey. It just…happens.” He mocked Ryan’s befuddlement.
“You’re a big help. I’m trying to forget her.”
“And if you think you can, you’re dumber than a box of hair.”
“I have to forget. In a few weeks, she’ll be back with her family and I’ll be off on another voyage. Look at her now. The local swains will be falling all over each other in Boston trying to court her.” Saying it made him want to roar with frustration.
“Maybe,” Journey said. “But the one she wants is you.”
“She doesn’t know what the hell she wants. The way her family raised her—I don’t even think she knows what romantic love is.”
“Then show her. Teach her.”
“To what end?” Ryan plowed his splayed fingers through his hair. “What would it serve?”
“It’d make her believe.”
Ryan stopped pacing and looked at his friend. Journey had always possessed a deep and ancient wisdom that Ryan trusted.
“Believe what?”
Journey toyed with the small leather pouch around his neck, the talisman from his wife. “That someone can love her. How would she know? Other than that grand aunt she talks about, no one ever did.”
“That’s insane.”
“More insane than bickering with each other for the next four thousand miles?” Without waiting for an answer, Journey took the cup and went below.
Ryan stood alone, watching the progress of the dancing lesson and trying to talk himself out of what he was about to do. Why the hell should he trouble himself to instruct Isadora Peabody in the lessons of love? Why should it be his responsibility to show this difficult, fascinating, intelligent, confounding creature about love? Let her think it was all glory and sunshine. It wasn’t his job to show her love had its dark side, too, its moments of fear so all-consuming and dizzying that the whole world listed on its axis like a ship in mountainous swells.
That was what had caught Ryan unawares. The agony of love. The soaring joy so quickly followed by a pounding fear, almost a horror.
When he was young, his father had given him a vial of explosives they were using to blast some of the distant fields to make them level. Ryan had been instructed to carry the fragile glass container, afraid for his very life if he dropped it.
Ryan remembered that feeling now, that mingling of elation and terror. Elation that he had been chosen for a task of such importance, countered madly by the terror of the consequence of failure.
He looked across the decks at Isadora and felt the same thing, only ten times worse.
Swearing between his teeth, he leaped up a companion ladder, ignoring a wave of rum-induced dizziness as he ducked beneath the taut shrouds and strode to the foredeck. The dancing lessons had progressed to a minuet, so badly rendered by Luigi and Chips that it was barely recognizable. With mock solemnity, Mr. Izard and Isadora paraded through the steps. Her face was so suffused with enjoyment that the darkness lifted from Ryan’s heart. An errant shaft of dying sunlight touched her.
In that moment, Ryan was struck with a realization. He wanted her to be happy. He was amazed at how much he wanted that. Another insane consequence of loving her. He wanted her happiness more than he wanted his next breath of air. It was bizarre, surreal almost, to have such powerful feelings. He didn’t want her to feel hurt or fear or uncertainty. It was exactly as Journey had implied. Love wasn’t a selfish thing. It was the kindest, most generous impulse a man could have.
He felt curiously liberated as he stepped up on deck. Heads turned toward him; a few eyebrows raised. Though he had established himself as a skipper of few formalities, he rarely mingled with the crew during their evening skylarking.
As if he had entered a formal cotillion ball, he tapped Izard on the shoulder. “May I cut in?”
“Aye, sir.” Izard surrendered his partner.
The musicians continued their tortured rendition of the minuet as Ryan smiled down into Isadora’s wary face. “From now on, I want you to save the minuet for me,” he said, exaggerating his Virginia drawl. He drew her close, feeling her hips press against his, a move Izard hadn’t dared to attempt. As quick to learn in this as in all things, Isadora followed the steps, and before long they had conquered the deck.
She looked up at him, clearly pleased by the novelty of having a partner who was taller than she. The expression on her face told Ryan everything he needed to know. His cause was good.
That night he began a pattern of behavior designed to please her, to make her forget she was ever the awkward, socially inept spinster of Beacon Hill. He made it his purpose to prove to her that she was worthy of every consideration. He made it his purpose to prepare her to return to her Boston world, to meet it with confidence, not timidity. To expect courtesy from men, not derision. To speak her mind, not stifle it.
He lent her his favorite books. One day when it was particularly balmy out, he climbed to the topmast and sang her a ballad while the crewmen harmonized the refrain. When Isadora made it known she couldn’t bear the idea of butchering the ship’s chickens, he ordered them spared.
Her happiness bloomed in those weeks of the voyage north. And if sometimes her smiling regard was tinged with confusion, Ryan didn’t mind. Nor did he attempt to explain. That was the surprising truth about his love for her. He didn’t mind giving it away.
“Home” is any four walls that enclose the right person.
—Helen Rowland
Mockjack Bay, Virginia,
March 1852
“L
and ho!” came the shout from the main-topmast.
Isadora, who had yelled the observation with all her might, grinned across at Gerald Craven, who clung to the jibboom. “I’ve always wanted to say that,” she confessed.
“You sounded like an old salt,” Gerald assured her.
“I
am
an old salt.” She looked in rueful bemusement at her plain kersey skirt—no petticoats—hiked up between her legs to form pantaloons. Sunshine had bronzed her skin to a rich hue that would have her mother bustling her into a bath of milk and rosewater. Her hair had disintegrated into a mass of hopeless golden brown curls held out of the way with a leather tie. The crew of the
Swan
accepted her this way, perhaps even preferred it, so she rarely thought about her mode of dress.
The voyage from Rio had been uneventful but far from tedious. In the early weeks she’d stayed busy working through masses of paperwork generated by all the transactions Ryan had made on behalf of Abel Easterbrook. It soon became apparent to Isadora and the rest of the crew that the voyage had been enormously successful. No one would desert when they called at Virginia; all would complete the trip home in order to earn a full share.
Anticipation of a lucrative payout raised everyone’s spirits. Yet the prospect of landfall disconcerted Isadora. On the high seas, she enjoyed a peculiar sense of liberation. The men of the
Silver Swan
didn’t judge her by the way she looked or dressed. Day by day she had slipped deeper and deeper into her role—friend, teacher, helpmeet, listener, learner. One day she forgot to don a certain set of petticoats; the next she left them off deliberately. By the time she spied the misty green hills of Virginia, she had taken to wearing her simplest skirt and blouse; more often than not she remained barefoot and bareheaded as she went about her duties.
For reasons she could not fathom, Ryan went out of his way to entertain her, to amuse her and to fulfill even her most capricious wishes. When she became enchanted by a school of dolphins, he ordered the crew to change tack to give her a better look, even though it took them off course. When she wanted to help with tarring down the mast, he rigged her a canvas seat on pulleys and called encouragement as she painted in the sun with one of the men lowering her away.
Yet for all the fun of his antics, the quiet times haunted her. There were moments when she would stumble upon him unexpectedly in the galley or the chart room and she’d freeze, overcome by memories of the rain forest. She had been certain, afterward, that nothing would ever be the same.
And she had been right.
When he turned and looked at her, she remembered the way he’d eyed her when he’d led her out of the lagoon and told her she resembled a goddess. If her gaze should happen to drop to his hands, she would recall the sensation of those hands caressing her. When he spoke, she heard the low timbre of his voice as he said, “Hold on to me, and I’ll show you.”
She remembered that day as one remembers a particularly vivid dream. Wrapped in rainbow mist, the memory dwelt apart from the rest of her life. It was an elusive jewel she could see shimmering in the distance but could never quite touch. On that one day of her life, she had been someone entirely different from Isadora Peabody of Beacon Hill. She had been nameless, a forest nymph who was beautiful for the first time in her life, naked and unashamed like Eve before the fall. She had felt passion and inspired it in a remarkable man. For one glorious day she’d been a stranger to herself.
All these thoughts would tumble through her heart and mind each time she encountered Ryan. But since their last conversation about that day, when all her uncertainties and bitterness and confusion had bubbled to the surface, they hadn’t spoken of it again.
During those discomfiting encounters, she could not guess at his thoughts. His face was an impenetrable mask.
And so by mutual, tacit agreement they had declared the rain forest interlude an aberration. For all practical purposes, the afternoon had never happened. And perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps it had happened to two entirely different people, people who didn’t exist anymore.
Now as she climbed down to the quarterdeck, she nearly ran into Ryan.
“Excuse me,” he said, stiffly formal. “I heard a cry of landfall.”
“That would be me,” she said.
“Oh.”
Stubbornly she refused to give way even though he clearly wanted to get past her. She was sick of being ignored, sick of denying what had happened. “Being invisible was always an advantage in Boston, but I assure you, it is not on a ship.”
“Invisible? I don’t know what you mean.”
“You look through me, not at me.”
“I apologize. I meant no insult.”
His flat, polite manner infuriated her. She knew it was reckless, but she wanted to push him. “I think you’ve set about deliberately to confuse me.”
He scowled. “Trust me, I’ve more important things to do.”
“Then why are you being so polite and cordial?”
“So you can learn what it’s like.”
“All you’re teaching me is that kindness is a false veneer.”
“Oh? Would you rather I treat you as Chad Easterbrook treated you?”
“That,” she said, “is none of your affair.” She couldn’t believe how much her feelings for Chad had changed on this voyage. She had set sail cherishing a dream of him. In a few short months, he had become a distant and faintly absurd memory.
The men scrambled about their duties, making ready for landfall. Ryan handed her the spyglass and pointed.
“That’s Mockjack Bay.”
She peered through the glass, focusing the lens on the distant green shores. A half dozen masts clustered at the port, anchored offshore. Misshapen islands and long fingers of land reached into the water, then rose to blue-tinged hills corrugated by endless, rippling fields. Like spun-sugar palaces, houses and outbuildings crowned each rolling rise of land.
“It looks lovely there,” she said.
“I reckon it is. But I spent my youth looking out to sea.” He pointed to a more distant location. “See that house with the columns? That’s Bonterre, the home of our closest neighbors. Family called the Beaumonts.”
She could tell even from a distance that Bonterre was a huge estate. “It’s hard to conceive of the scale. New England farms are so small in comparison.”
He nodded. “The Beaumonts are the biggest landowners in the county. My half brother Hunter married Lacey Beaumont a few years back.”
She sighed, her imagination caught by the thought of the nuptials taking place at the fairy-tale palace in the distance. She wondered about Ryan’s past, his family, what it had been like growing up here. It was pleasant, also, to have a civil conversation with him. Perhaps friendship was not out of the question. Perhaps.
“Was the wedding terribly lavish?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t know. I was too busy earning demerits at Harvard. Last time I saw Lacey, she was in pigtails and pinafores. She always did have an eye for Hunter, though. Ever since we were kids.”
Isadora tried to guess how he felt about his half brother. But his expression was neutral, his tone casual. She could determine nothing.
“Journey’s wife and little ones live at Bonterre,” he said.
“Will Journey be able to see them?”
His mouth thinned, and his gaze flickered away. “I don’t know.”
“But you’re practically family. You’re related to the Beaumonts by marriage.”
“It gets more complicated by the moment.” He heaved a sigh. The sea rushed away as the bark angled into the bay. “The wedding between Hunter and Lacey was more like a territorial alliance than a marriage.” He shaded his eyes and gazed toward shore. The bark had crossed the bar into Chesapeake and her leeward side offered a closer view of the shorefront estates. A dangerous hissing sound came from between Ryan’s teeth.
“What is it?” Isadora asked.
“Albion.” He grabbed the spyglass from her and peered through it. “Something’s wrong.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The fields are fallow. They haven’t been planted.”
“That’s customary, isn’t it? Leaving sections unplanted to restore richness to the soil?”
“Not for all the fields. Not for more than a season.”
“What do you suppose the trouble is?”
“I don’t know, but I reckon I’ll find out.”