Read The Horsemaster's Daughter Online
Authors: Susan Wiggs
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General
My dear Lieutenant Butler…
He read at first with mild, perhaps faintly malicious curiosity. But as he continued, realizing what this was, he settled back and absorbed every single word.
These were not trade secrets or notes on Rowan’s devices, as Jamie had suspected. What he held in his hand was something far more compelling.
These were the secrets of her heart.
It was a searing love letter to that human hitching post, Boyd Butler. She must have sat down to pen the letter for her sister, and the truth had come pouring out of her. No wonder she’d hidden it away.
When your letter arrived, I experienced a second sunrise…. Simply knowing that you are somewhere in the world brings warmth to the coldest autumn day. My joy at having a letter from you has only been surpassed by the ecstasy of dancing in your arms….
A stark and scorching envy burned through Jamie. To love like this, to be the object of this depth of devotion—it was the stuff of dreams. He had not thought it possible.
He called for more whiskey, and it was brought by a servant who was nearly as sloppy and disagreeable as Rowan himself. Jamie recalled that his name was Meeks, the man-of-all-work and the only employee who had not stomped away from Rowan in disgust.
“Leave the decanter,” Jamie advised him, then returned to his reading.
Abigail Cabot, he realized, wrote the same way she did everything else. With clarity, precision and an honesty that bordered on the poetic, she let Butler know exactly the effect his stupid letter had had on her. And it was no innocent, maidenly flutter of the heart.
When I think of you, my heart sings with sweetness, and I can only count the days until we meet again. Your words have touched the deepest part of me, probing my sleeping passions to wakeful attention…. The very thought of you…
Someone, somewhere, must have told her that it wasn’t proper for a woman to describe the sort of heat generated by the very thought of him, but Abigail Cabot wrote it anyway.
Although Jamie didn’t know Miss Cabot well, one thing had been clear from the start—she was a gifted woman. Yet she was hopelessly blind, her judgment severely impaired when it came to matters of the heart. Her deep sincerity lashed at him, finding a tenderness that should have been hardened by scar tissue.
You light my world with the brilliance of the moon on a cloudless night. You are cherished as a treasure beyond price…
He knocked back the whiskey and poured another glass. The stinging elixir worked fast, muddling his thoughts and darkening his mood. She was like some goddamn female Walt Whitman, for Christ’s sake. And she was in love with Boyd Butler, a man only slightly more evolved than a Boston fern. A man who fancied himself in love with her sister. A man who would have no idea what Abigail meant by “the dark forest of my imagination” or “a consuming, sweet ache in the very center of my being.”
What struck Jamie hardest was the passion that leaped from the pages. She offered no sugary declaration but a confession with dark edges, physical yearning and a longing of the heart that coaxed a reaction even from Jamie. Hell, by the time he finished reading,
he
was half in love with her. And he didn’t even believe in love.
He hadn’t believed in love since a woman’s betrayal had nearly cost him the ultimate price. On that ill-fated trip he’d made with Noah, he had been filled with a young man’s heedless abandon. In the tiny, old-fashioned principality of Khayrat, he had lost his heart—and the last of his good sense—to a native princess. She was called Layla; the haunting name spilled like a liquid song on his tongue. Even now, he could still smell her scent of jasmine, could still see the smoky surrender in her black eyes. He’d flung himself into the affair, never pausing to consider the consequences—until it was too late. Until Noah had died in his place. What he’d learned from that episode was that love meant pain and danger and even death, not the soaring joy described with such naive exuberance in Abigail’s letter.
Stricken by the reminder of a love so pure and so passionate, he finished reading and drank more whiskey. She had signed the thing not with her name but with a heartfelt grace note:
From your one true love.
Abigail’s words moved him unexpectedly, awakening a terrible yearning he thought he had overcome. Angered by the emptiness inside him, he stood and wandered about the room, offering a few grains of millet to Rowan’s white mouse. “What does it all mean, Socrates?” he asked the bright-eyed rodent. “And what shall we do about it? Can we change this smart misfit of a girl into an object of desire?”
The mouse twitched its nose and burrowed into its nest.
“Will there be anything more, sir?” asked Gerald Meeks, coming up from the kitchen.
In the bottom of his fifth glass of whiskey, Jamie found a sense of humor. Unfortunately he also unearthed a maliciousness that came from a part of him he didn’t much like.
“As a matter of fact, there is,” he said.
There was only one thing to do upon learning a person’s deepest, darkest secret. Use it to advantage. He scooped up the private pages, folded them and secured the little packet with a blob of sealing wax. On the outside, he wrote “Lieutenant Boyd Butler, U.S. Navy, Annapolis.” Then he handed the purloined letter to the servant. “Take this to Lieutenant Butler right away.”
A
bigail flipped the brass knocker a third time and waited, tapping her foot. She cast a glance over her shoulder. The sun was setting over Dumbarton Street, its dying colors riding low across the copper-roofed houses at the top of the hill. The deep indigo sky in the east had already given birth to Venus and the reddish star Antares, the heart of Scorpius and always the first to greet her this time of year.
The tang of autumn air evoked a sense of nostalgia for her schoolgirl days when she’d been allowed to attend classes at the university, quiet and unobtrusive as a piece of furniture in the back of the lecture hall. Those days were gone, tumbled away like leaves dropping from trees.
Across the way, Mrs. Vandivert’s parlor curtain shifted, and Abigail waved. She always did, but the nosy woman never acknowledged the greeting. Calling unchaperoned on a neighbor simply wasn’t done, except by Abigail and Helena. The whole neighborhood had been hearing about the senator’s wayward daughters for years.
“Lightning has not struck us down yet,” she said, pushing open the door. “Hello?” she called.
No reply.
“Professor Rowan?”
Silence. He must still be at work, then.
“Mr. Calhoun?”
More silence. And then a hollow
thunk.
Frowning, Abigail lifted her skirts and headed upstairs to the parlor. Truth be told, she felt more at home in this house than she did in her father’s. The Cabot residence was a monument to past glories, filled with French antiques, Irish crystal and English porcelain, all lovingly tended by a small army of servants. The professor’s house, by contrast, was crammed with utilitarian furnishings and modern conveniences, completely lacking in pretensions. For some reason, the scientific clutter didn’t offend her natural bent for precision and order. She might be clumsy and untidy, but here, at least, it didn’t seem to matter.
“Hello,” she said again as she reached the landing. “Is anyone—oh.” She found herself face-to-face with Mr. Calhoun. Face-to-chest, actually. He was too tall by half, she thought, not for the first time. But at the moment he looked…different.
His hair was unkempt, his cravat hanging loose around the open neck of his shirt. The shirt gaped open to reveal his bare chest. She was quite certain she’d never seen a man’s bare chest before, even a veiled glimpse of it, and the sight had a curious effect on her. An unfamiliar heat rolled through her, and she was hard-pressed to draw her eyes from that place.
But she managed to, noting with a flick of her gaze that he held an unclipped cigar between the fingers of his left hand, a white mouse perched on his shoulder and a crooked grin on his face. “Come in, my dear,” he said expansively. “Socrates and I were just getting lonely for company, weren’t we, my pet?” With startling gentleness, he stroked the mouse with one finger.
Her throat felt dry; she swallowed two times before finding her voice. “Are you quite all right, Mr. Calhoun?”
“I am quite drunk, Miss Cabble—Cab…ab.” He laughed. “Abby. You won’t mind if I call you Abby.”
“I won’t?”
He went into the study and released little Socrates to his glass-front maze, watching the mouse scamper down the length of his arm. “Please come in. I’m sorry I didn’t hear you knock. Must’ve drifted off.” He studied the cigar in his hand with some surprise, as though he’d forgotten he was holding it. Setting it in an ashtray, he picked up a decanter and held it to the sinking light of the window. “Whiskey?”
“It appears you’ve all but finished it off,” she said. “But no, thank you. I’m not fond of strong spirits.”
“Spoken like a true lady.” He upended the bottle, letting the last of it slide down his throat.
Heavens, what was wrong with her? Simply watching his throat reminded her of an illustration she’d spotted in his
Kama Sutra,
and that caused a new spasm of heat to pulse through her.
“The Calhouns are a family of hard-drinking men,” he explained, putting the empty bottle on a side table.
“Congratulations.”
“Oh, believe me, I wasn’t boasting. Truth be told, drinking never did any of us a lick of good. Cousin Hunter of California gave it up entirely, and it made him a new man.”
“Do you think you should give it up entirely? Become a new man?”
He snorted. “Why would I want to do that? It’s all I can do to try to become an old man.”
“Your lofty ambitions impress me,” she said. “Perhaps you should drink faster. You’ll expire and we’ll be shed of you.”
“It’s a pity you cannot get paid for sarcasm, Abby my love. You excel at it.”
She hated the way he called her
Abby my love
with all the sincerity of a trained actor in a melodrama. “Do I? It’s nothing to be proud of.”
“Voltaire made a career of it. Mr. Mark Twain is getting rich off it, too.”
She felt a little agitated, being alone with him in the darkening parlor, seeing him so casually attired, so insolently drunk. “Actually, I came on an errand. I forgot to post the letter I wrote earlier.”
“Not to worry.” He waved a negligent hand. “I posted it for you. Sent Meeks off a good two hours ago.”
She smiled. “Why, that was very thoughtful.” She walked over to the desk. “I’ll just get my other papers and—” Her smile pulled into a frown. “That’s odd. I left something under the blotter and now it’s gone.”
“I told you. I posted it.”
She didn’t understand. She’d written the lieutenant a light, amusing and wholly inconclusive note on behalf of Helena. So where was the other letter, the one meant for her eyes only? The one she never should have written in the first place, the one that expressed all her secret dreams?
An icy thud of dread pounded in her stomach. Bracing her hands on the edge of the desk, she slowly turned. “Do you mean to tell me you posted the letter that was under the blotter?”
He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “You mean, the long, heartfelt one filled with tender declarations and passionate propositions? Yes, that’s the one. You’re welcome, by the way.”
The blood drained from her face. “You read it?”
“Indeed I did.” He grinned with infuriating satisfaction. “Who could have imagined you harbor such passion and fire, Abby? Butler will be amazed. I know I was.”
Terror shrieked through her. She nearly stumbled in her rush toward the door. “We have to get it back.”
He grabbed her arm. “Too late. He probably has it clasped against his heart by now.”
She yanked her arm away from him. “That letter wasn’t meant for anyone’s eyes but my own.” Fury reverberated through her words. “Not Lieutenant Butler’s, and certainly not yours.”
“But you started it out with ‘My dear Lieutenant Butler.’ Or was it ‘Dearest’? Anyway, I quickly ascertained that it was for him, and that the shorter version was a failed first draft—a very boring first draft, I might add—so I put that one in the incinerator.”
He was lying; he must be. Only the lowest of cads would have sent her private letter. But one look at his smug face told her otherwise. “Why in the name of all that is decent would you do such a despicable thing?”
“You just answered your own question, darling. I am not decent at all.”
Moving slowly, like a soldier wounded in battle, she lowered herself to a chair. The phrases of secret admiration she had penned burned through her memory. She’d poured her heart out in that letter and this horrible man had read it, then handed it off to Lieutenant Butler.
“Are you all right?” asked the awful Mr. Calhoun. “You look a bit peaked all of a sudden.”
“Forgive me,” she snapped. “It’s just that I’ve never had anyone do something so openly cruel to me before.”
“I’ve done nothing cruel. You told me yourself you’re eternally in love with the man. He, being a bit molasses-witted, fancies himself smitten with your sister, who, of course, has no genuine interest in him. So he must learn to love the right sister, and what better way than to snare him with your charming letter?”
“It wasn’t my letter.”
“You wrote it.” With each phrase he spoke, he came closer to her, until he had his hands braced on the arms of her chair, his face level with hers. He had the most remarkable eyes, with awful secrets frozen in their depths. And his lips were so full and shapely, damp with carnal promises.
She forced her gaze away. “Yes, I foolishly wrote it, but he expected to hear from Helena.”
“She would have bored even him.”
Stalked, cornered and helpless, she felt her temples pound and struggled not to focus on the hard lines of his face. “And what part do you play in all of this intrigue?”
“Taking action on behalf of my fellow citizens is a congressman’s duty.” Then he startled her by going down on one knee and taking her hand in his. He smelled of whiskey and cigars and for some strange reason she could not bring herself to look away.
“Abby,” he said, all sobriety and earnestness. “I like you. I’ve liked you from the first moment I met you. I like your twit of a sister, and I even confess to a grudging appreciation for the vice president’s son. The three of you need some sorting out, that’s all.”
“And you’ve appointed yourself the one to do that.”
“You weren’t doing a very good job of it on your own.”
“But it was our business.”
“And it still is. Trust me, Abby. I know how these things work. Butler will reply to the letter—Christ, how could he not, given what you said to him?—and the two of you will carry on a correspondence. Eventually he’ll speak to your father, who will crow with delight over the whole business, and everyone will live happily ever after.”
Abigail couldn’t help herself. It was all so absurd and so hopeless that there was nothing to do but laugh. She held Mr. Calhoun’s hands and laughed until she no longer felt the tears burning behind her eyes.
Then a terrible notion occurred to her. “I never signed my name to that letter.”
He looked up at the ceiling. “I believe you signed it ‘your one true love.”’
“Then he’ll assume it’s from Helena,” she said.
“The important thing is that he’ll come to love the author of the letter. Even a potted palm knows that. You must have faith in yourself. And maybe even a little trust in the dear lieutenant’s judgment.”
“How on earth do you think this could work? I cannot will him to love me.”
“Don’t be so sure of that. The human heart has a way of holding on for as long as it takes, until it has been fulfilled.” He stood, insolently touching her cheek. “And your heart, my dear, is probably the most stubborn ever wrought.”
“For a cynic, you certainly have a deep belief in the power of love.”
“No. In the logic of strategy. There’s no magic in love. It’s simply a game. And you play it exceedingly well. That letter was a stroke of brilliance.”
She got out of the chair and pushed past him. This was a fiasco of the first order. In writing, she was as graceful and desirable as a princess, but in person she was a bashful, clumsy cipher. The one would not be mistaken for the other for very long.
“For heaven’s sake,” she said, “that was not a move on a chessboard. That was something that came from the deepest, most honest part of me.”
“Oh, honey,” he said softly, turning her to face him and lifting her chin with two fingers. “I know.”
He spoke to her as though she were a different person from the Abigail the rest of the world saw. As though she were someone delightful and desirable, someone he cared for. But that was impossible. He hardly knew her, and he cared only for himself and his twisted little pranks.
She pulled herself away from his persuasive touch. “I only pray now that you haven’t created a complete fiasco.”
“Impossible. Everybody wins. Butler gets a woman who adores him, your father gets his dynastic alliance, your sister gets her freedom and you get your Prince Charming.”
“And what do you get?”
“The satisfaction of performing a public service.”
She couldn’t help it. She laughed again. “You are horrible and unforgivable, Mr. Calhoun. You deserve a horsewhipping for what you have done.”
“You wouldn’t be the first to say that.” He winked. “Coming from you, the punishment might be diverting.”
“I’m curious, Mr. Calhoun. Why are you so horrible?”
He spent a moment in sincere thought. Walking away, he propped one elbow on the mantelpiece and stared down at Socrates, busily spinning in his tread-mill. “I don’t believe I was born that way. In fact, I distinctly recall my mother saying what a fine baby I was, as fat and happy as a spring possum. I exhibited only average horribleness as a small boy. I think I came into my own as a horrible person when I was sent away to boarding school.”
“Why were you sent away?”
“It was the thing to do. My parents sent me away to a military school in the North.”
An image formed in her mind of a towheaded youngster aboard a gritty train headed to a destination he feared. “It must have been so lonely for you.”
He shrugged. “I was allowed to come home twice a year, at Christmas and for a few weeks in summer. I didn’t think much of the Yankees, and I reckon the feeling was mutual. I wanted to go home, so I did all sorts of things in order to be sent down. But they kept me—God knows why—and I suppose I stayed horrible. I got smarter. I learned at an early age what love is and what it is not. Experience has only proven me right.”
“
Your
experience. And what is that, pray tell?”
He glared across the room at her. Then he struck a match, holding the flame to a lamp. A nimbus of diffuse whiteness glowed, illuminating the room. The new light outlined the bitter set of his mouth. “Nothing I would share with a young lady.”
“Oh, really?” Resentment prickled over her like a rash. “But it’s fine for you to meddle in my most private affairs.”
“You left your love letter on Rowan’s desk.”
“Under the blotter.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s in Butler’s hands now.”
She shuddered at the thought. “There’s a special place in hell for people like you.”
He smiled and even laughed a little. “Believe me, my dear, I would consider hell an improvement.”