Read The Horsemaster's Daughter Online
Authors: Susan Wiggs
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General
“This is Miss Eliza,” Belinda said. “She’s our governess.”
“You don’t say.” Charles took Eliza’s hand and bent gallantly over it.
“I do so say,” Belinda objected. “Didn’t you hear?”
“I heard.” He caught Hunter’s eye and winked. “Well done, cousin. Well done indeed.”
Eliza watched the play of sunlight on Charles’s shining dark hair, and Hunter watched her. His gut twisted with an unpleasant twinge. What was it he didn’t like about this moment? The genuine warmth in her smile as she said “How do you do?” or the clear pleasure in Charles’s eyes when he smiled at her? Or the way he kept hold of her hand and brushed his thumb lightly over her wrist?
Hunter grabbed Charles by the shoulder and drew him away from Eliza. “It’s been too long since your last visit, you old sinner,” he said. “Come and inspect this horse of mine.”
He felt Charles straighten his shoulders as they approached Noah. The youth had slowed the stallion to an easy walk, back and forth at the end of the track.
When the boy saw his father coming, his face drew into sullen and wary lines. The two of them had never known each other well. When the boy was a baby, Charles had given him to a wet nurse at Albion, and he had been raised here, neither family member nor slave, but an uneasy guest who worked hard to earn his keep. Eventually he had found his place by proving himself gifted with horses. His small stature and keen sense of timing and control made him the best jockey in the county.
“Mister Charles,” he said formally.
“Noah, you’re looking fine. Just fine up on that big old Irishman.”
“Thank you, sir.” Noah turned the horse away. “I’d best keep him on the move so he doesn’t get a windgall.”
“I thought you were going to shoot this horse,” Charles said to Hunter, his admiring eye checking out every inch of the stallion.
“I thought I had to,” Hunter admitted.
Eliza and the children had finished planting the flowers at the front of the track. He hadn’t thought flowers could improve the place, but the color added a festive air. Now Eliza took her charges out to the beach. They scurried about, collecting shells and letting the waves chase them. He wondered if his children had always been this playful. He couldn’t recall Lacey cavorting on the sand with them, ever.
“Noah convinced me to get help from the horsemaster of Flyte Island,” he said to Charles.
“I always thought that was a tall tale.”
“Turns out it wasn’t. But once I got to the island, I learned that Henry Flyte died last year.”
“So what did you do?”
Hunter gestured at Eliza, who had picked her skirts up to her knees to let the waves splash over her bare feet. “That’s his daughter.”
Charles slapped his forehead. “Goddamn it, Hunter, where does your luck come from?”
Hunter laughed, genuinely baffled. “What the hell do you mean, luck?”
“You get this stallion for a song, and then its trainer is a goddess who winds up looking after your kids. Most would call that luck.”
“A goddess?” Hunter said. “You think she’s a goddess?”
“Look at her.”
Both of them looked. Unaware of their scrutiny, she frolicked in the waves with the children. Her black hair flew like ribbons on the wind, and she laughed with a ready joy that was infectious. She made the very picture of beauty in full flower—natural, unrestrained, untainted.
Hunter forced himself to tear his gaze away. “I know what she looks like.”
“And?”
“And she’s the horsemaster’s daughter. She’s weird, Charles. Raised all alone out on that island. She’s got some crazy notions.”
“What sort of crazy notions?”
That love is something that happens regardless of who you are or what you think you want, he thought. That two people pleasuring each other is a natural expression of that love.
He gritted his teeth to keep from speaking aloud. He could never confess his thoughts to anyone, not even Charles.
“Unconventional ideas.” He recalled the flurry of speculation that had erupted around her at the Beaumonts’ picnic. “She has no idea what society is like.”
“Lucky girl.”
“She wants to go to California.”
“That’s not so weird. A few years back, everyone on earth wanted to go to California.”
“She’s not interested in gold. She and her father always meant to see the unsettled land on the north coast. Some of the Spanish land grants turned out to be fine horse country.”
“So when’s she going?”
“I convinced her to stay and look after the children until—” Hunter had to swallow, for his throat suddenly went dry “—until I find myself a wife.”
“You’re finally going to do it, then.”
“I reckon it’s past time. The kids need a mother. Belinda’s getting to a girly age, and Blue—well, Blue’s not getting any better.”
“So who’re you going to marry?”
Hunter shook his head. “I’ve got a few prospects in mind. Those two Parks sisters from Norfolk—”
“Tabby and Cilla?”
“Yeah, those two.”
“You can only marry one of them.”
“I know that, numbskull.” He didn’t admit that he had never been able to tell them apart. Pale and conventionally pretty, they made themselves available to him every chance they got. For the life of him, he couldn’t say what sort of girls they were, except that they were wealthy and had nice manners and held the admiration of society.
“You could do worse,” Charles murmured.
“True.”
His cousin turned and started down the track toward the house. “But then again,” he said over his shoulder, “you could do better.”
Blue wondered if he should show Miss Eliza what he had found on the beach. On the one hand, it was special to have something secret and perfect all to himself. But on the other hand, what good was having a secret if you were the only one who knew about it?
He frowned, trying to reason it out. Sometimes, reasoning made his head hurt.
He sat with his bare feet buried in the deep warm sand. Behind him on the track, he could hear the stallion running. Boom
boom,
boom
boom,
like a heartbeat. Only lots faster. Finn was so fast that he could go places no one else could, like maybe to heaven…and back again.
Miss Eliza and Belinda held hands and stood in the surf, giggling when the waves shushed over their bare feet. They didn’t care when they got their dresses wet. He liked that about Miss Eliza. She wasn’t fussy about clothes the way most grown-ups were.
Blue got up and walked over to her, holding out his hand. She turned to him with that open, easy smile that made him feel good inside. “What is it, Blue?” she asked. “Did you find something?”
She talked to him all the time. She asked him questions, but she never waited for him to speak. She never smacked him when he didn’t give her an answer.
He dropped his treasure into her hand.
“A sand dollar,” she exclaimed, bending down to show it to Belinda. “Look, it’s been lying in the sun a good long time. See how bleached-out it is?” She held the round shell on the flat of her palm. “I bet you didn’t know there’s a secret inside a sand dollar.”
Blue perked up. Belinda shook the shell and held it to the light. “What kind of secret?” his sister asked.
“Five white doves,” Eliza claimed.
“Inside the sand dollar?” Belinda wrinkled her nose. Blue frowned skeptically. “Let’s see,” Belinda said.
“I’ll have to break the shell to let them out. We have to make sure that’s all right with Blue.”
He took the sand dollar and thought very hard for a few minutes. In the background, he could hear his papa talking to Noah in a low, friendly voice. Papa talked to Noah all the time.
Blue moved swiftly. He slammed the sand dollar down on a large, flat rock, breaking the shell to pieces. At first, all he saw were little white bits, like tiny bones.
Miss Eliza picked out five pieces shaped like birds in flight. “The doves were inside the sand dollar,” she said, “and Blue let them out. He set them free.” One by one, she lay the tiny pieces on the palm of her hand. “Would you like me to keep them safe for you, Blue?”
He nodded and watched her drop the bits of shell into her apron pocket, treating his discovery as if it were the most important thing in the world.
Blue made up his mind. He would show Miss Eliza his other secret. The big one. The one he was never to say a word about.
E
liza stood outside the door to Hunter’s study. A low rumble of male voices, punctuated by an occasional burst of laughter, drifted from behind the closed double doors. Cousin Charles had proved to be a merry addition to the household, bringing laughter to the empty halls of Albion. She liked him quite a lot, though he seemed a bit young and frivolous, occasionally even furtive in his manner. He had a slender build, refined features and good manners. She knew he admired the way she looked, and she wanted to be moved by that; she tried to be. If she could manage to feel the same sharp sting of attraction for some man other than Hunter Calhoun, she could convince herself she wasn’t falling in love.
But alas, as handsome and charming as Charles was, and as gratified as she was by his admiration, it wasn’t the same. Like Jane Eyre, she was doomed to yearn for a man who had no place in his life for her, a man she could not have.
Impatient with her thoughts, she rapped sharply at the door.
“Come in,” called Hunter.
He and Charles sat on opposite sides of the desk from each other, with racing logs and breeders’ books spread out in a mess across the surface. Charles puffed on a cheroot and Hunter swirled whiskey in a cup. She could see with a glance that he was not drunk. She hated the fact that she knew him well enough to tell the difference.
“Miss Eliza,” said Charles, “I do declare, you get prettier every day.”
She grinned. “I don’t, but your compliments do.” She turned to Hunter. “The children are in bed and want you to say good-night.”
He rose from his seat. When she had first started this nightly practice, he had balked, claiming that telling them good-night after supper had always been sufficient. But she was determined to draw him into their lives, and bringing him upstairs to the nursery each night was part of the process.
“Your voice should be the last thing they hear before they go to sleep,” she had said. “Your face should be the last thing they see.”
“Bossy little thing, isn’t she?” Charles observed as Hunter went to the door.
She suspected that, though Hunter would never admit it, he actually enjoyed seeing them bathed and snuggled up to their chins in their little beds, for he came readily enough. She hoped he wouldn’t change his mind tonight, when he saw what she had done.
Hunter never knew what to expect when he walked into his children’s bedroom. Eliza showed them new things each day, from a starfish to a pheasant feather to a jar of fireflies to a sprouting sweet pea. She drew upon their natural sense of curiosity and wonder in a way that seemed to come easily to her. The lessons they learned from her were the simple, profound laws of nature—that everything was connected to everything else, every cause had an effect, every action had a reaction. He couldn’t remember whether or not Lacey had that sort of ease and intuition with them. It bothered him that he couldn’t remember.
“Look what we did, Papa,” Belinda said. “Are you surprised?” She bounded to the foot of her bed.
He felt as if all the air had been sucked out of him. There on the wall between the two small bedsteads hung a large sepia-toned portrait of himself and Lacey and the children.
It was the only picture that had been made of them as a family. He remembered the day they had sat for the portrait. It was full summer, the lawn lush and the peach trees heavy with fruit. The photographer, a fussy nervous man from Baltimore, had exclaimed over the beauty of Lacey’s gown and hair, the effervescence of the children.
The children wore white, their hair neatly brushed. Lacey and Belinda were seated—Lacey kept shifting uncomfortably on the photographer’s low stool—while he and Blue stood behind them. He and his wife regarded the camera box with smooth-faced dignity. Belinda and Blue weren’t smiling, yet their eyes danced in the lively way that children have even when they’ve been told to keep still.
He remembered the birdsong that day. He remembered the smell of the wind off the bay and the way the summer air felt on his face. He remembered the fleeting prettiness of Lacey’s smile and the laughter of the children when the photographer announced that he had finished his work.
Up to that point in his life, the world had been good to Hunter Calhoun. For a young man who had never done particularly well at his studies and had never been forced to do anything other than breathe, he had a good life, an easy life.
Too easy. Perhaps that was the problem. Only days after the photograph was taken, his father had died, the will had been read and the creditors had come to call.
Nothing in Hunter’s golden life had prepared him to face bankruptcy. He’d listened to the advice of the bankers, his father-in-law, his neighbors. And then he had done as he pleased, freeing the slaves, ceasing the tobacco operations and starting a horse farm.
The rash enterprise had cost him Lacey and the souls of his children.
“We hung it up special, right between our two beds,” Belinda was explaining, oblivious to his agonized thoughts. “That way, Mama’s close to Blue and she’s close to me.”
Hunter couldn’t look at his daughter. If he did, he would see Lacey’s wide blue eyes and cupid’s-bow mouth. Instead, he glared at Eliza Flyte. “Take it down,” he said in a low, angry voice.
“But, Papa—” Belinda began. She lapsed into silence when Eliza put her hand on her shoulder.
“The children wanted a picture of their mother in this room.” Eliza motioned toward the door. “Blue, Belinda, go and see if Nancy will give you a glass of water before bed.”
The children slipped out, clearly aware that there was to be a Discussion.
“I said, take it down—or I will,” Hunter ordered.
She moved between him and the picture on the wall. “Why?” she demanded.
He couldn’t believe she didn’t understand. “Because it’s morbid, that’s why. It’s disheartening. Every time they come into this room, they’ll see her—”
“They’ll see her whether her picture’s on the wall or not,” Eliza said softly.
“It hurts them to look at her,” he blurted out.
“You’re wrong. You won’t let them finish with their feelings for her. They have to grieve, and they have to heal. You’re not letting them do that.”
“How the hell would you know?”
“Because I’ve been watching you. I’ve spent practically every waking hour with the children, and it couldn’t be clearer. They’re afraid to stop pining for their mother because they think that’s the first step in losing her forever.”
“Isn’t it?” he demanded, surprising himself with the question.
Her eyes narrowed. “You seem to think so.” She sat down on one of the little nursery beds. “When my father died, I wept and raged for weeks,” she said.
He studied the angle of her slender neck, the sweet curve of her cheekbone, and in spite of himself he wanted to touch her.
“But mostly,” she admitted, “I was afraid. Not of being alone. Not of never seeing him again. I was afraid I’d forget. Terrified. One day I woke up, and I couldn’t remember the sound of his voice. Another time, I tried to think of what his hands looked like, and I couldn’t make a picture in my mind. I was losing him bit by bit. Do you know how frightening that was?”
Hunter felt a fullness in his throat, and he couldn’t speak. Eliza was so honest, so open. Didn’t she know people weren’t supposed to talk about things like this?
But his heart responded to what she was saying. He knew exactly what it felt like to forget the shape of someone’s fingers or the sound of her laughter. Some days, he could picture Lacey sitting in her salon sipping tea from a china cup, and others, all he could see was a blistered and wheezing carcass on a bed, a bandaged hand grasping for his. He swallowed hard, but the thickness in his throat wouldn’t go away.
“I felt,” Eliza said, “as if my father was being stripped away from me, layer by layer. Little details that didn’t seem important when he was alive were suddenly all I had left of him. The way he’d set his elbows on the arms of his chair before telling me a story. The look on his face when he whistled a birdcall. Those things kept fading away one by one. I took to sleeping in his nightshirt because I thought some part of him lingered there.”
She drew in a deep, pain-racked breath. “Then one day, I tried his birdcall. There was a little wren in the trees on the west side of the island I wanted to coax over. I whistled, just like my father used to do. And the bird came to me. It alit right on the ground not five feet from me.”
Her eyes were damp and distant, and Hunter wanted to look away from them, but he found himself spellbound by her honesty and her agony.
“And you know what I discovered in that moment?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “He never left me. My father never left me. He can’t be taken from me, even if I have trouble picturing his face or remembering the sound of his voice.” She touched her chest gently with her open hand. “He’s here, and he’ll always be here, in a place that will never let him go.”
Hunter felt humbled and astonished by the depth of her love for her father. Had he ever loved his father in that way?
Jared Calhoun had been less a father than a figurehead, marching through life, not looking back to see who followed. He had been a formidable man, worthy of respect. But he had never taken his son to a marsh and taught him birdcalls.
And what of Lacey? Did she live in his heart, or was she merely a fading memory? He suspected, to his horror, that she was the latter.
That was why he slept badly at night. That was why he drank.
Belinda and Blue came back into the room, bounding into their beds. “Can we keep the picture up, Papa? Can we?” Belinda asked. “Can we, Papa?”
He felt them all looking at him. Waiting. He could think of only one way to clear the stinging thickness from his throat. He gave a curt nod, then left the room to find something to drink.
When Eliza had first come to Albion, she had been overwhelmed by the number of books in the library. Hunter claimed there had been many more in the past, but auctioneers had sold many of the more costly volumes to pay off debts and back taxes. Even so, dozens of books lined the shelves of the long, narrow study. She got a bit dizzy each time she went there to find something to read.
It was late, and her candle was guttering low in its brass holder as she perused the shelves. She had finished some books by Jane Austen—
Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice
—that had nearly made her swoon with fascination. She had enjoyed the dark, ironic works of Daniel Defoe, though
Robinson Crusoe
had made her ache with missing Flyte Island. She thought tonight she might read a nonfictional book—the essays of Rousseau or Emerson, perhaps.
In a breath of wind from the doorway, the candle flame wavered against the wall of books. Startled, Eliza looked up.
“Blue?” she said, climbing down from the step stool and hurrying across the room. “Blue, it’s very late. What are you doing awake?”
The boy slipped furtively into the room. In his arms, he carried a large wooden box.
“What is it, Blue?” she asked.
He set the box next to the lamp on the battered oak library table. When the light wavered over it, she could see that it was of dark, polished rosewood with brass fittings.
“May I open it?” she asked.
Blue stepped back, holding out his hand, palm up.
Slowly she lifted the lid. It was an enchanting piece, cleverly made. It had a slanting tooled-leather surface with the letters
L.B.C.
embossed in gold. Lacey Beaumont Calhoun? At the top was an array of ink jars and pen nibs. “It’s a lap desk,” she said. “Where did you get this, Blue?”
He stuck his finger through a satin loop of ribbon at the edge of the tooled leather. The surface of the lap desk folded back, exposing the interior of the box.
She raised the flame in the lamp. The stale smell of dried lavender and old wax struck her as she looked at the contents. “What is this, Blue?” she asked.
No answer.
She flipped through the stack of folded letters—the ink fading—that lay within. Her gaze swept over some of the writings, and what she saw chilled her blood. Dear God, how long had Blue been keeping this secret?
“Have you read these?” she asked.
He shook his head.
No.
“Do you want me to read them?”
No response.
“You’ve had these since your mother died, haven’t you?” Her heart broke at the burden he’d carried, but she made herself smile down at him. “How very brave you’ve been to keep these for so long. Shall I keep them for you now?”
A clear, emphatic nod.
Yes.
She shut the lid on the box and said, “Then I shall, and you never have to worry about what’s inside here ever again.”
He drew in a long breath, shuddering with relief as he did so. And then she saw it—a single tear sliding down his cheek. The sight shocked her, and for a moment she couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. Then she set aside the lamp and pulled Blue against her.
“Shh, it’s all right,” she said, cupping his head to her chest. “Hush, my sweet boy. It’s all right now.”