The Horsemaster's Daughter
Susan Wiggs
An unbroken horse, a broken man, an estate that needed herOnce a privileged son of the South, Hunter Calhoun now stands a widower shadowed by the scandal of his wife's death. Burying himself in his success with breeding Thoroughbred racehorses, he's left his family to crumble and forgotten how to comfort his grieving children.When a prized stallion arrives from Ireland crazed and unridable, Hunter is forced to seek help for the beast. Removed from the world of wealth and social privilege, Eliza Fylte has inherited her father's famed gift for gentling horses. And when Hunter arrives with his wild steed, her healing spirit reaches further yet, drawing her to his shattered family and to the intense, bitter man who needs her, just as she needs him.Eliza understands what Hunter refuses to see–that love is the greatest healer of all. But can her kind, humble being manage to teach such an untethered man what truly matters in life?
Praise for the novels of
SUSAN WIGGS
“Wiggs is one of our best observers of stories of the heart. Maybe that is because she knows how to capture emotion on virtually every page of every book.”
—Salem Statesman-Journal
“The Charm School draws readers in with delightful characters, engaging dialogue, humor, emotion and sizzling sensuality.”
—Costa Mesa Sunday Times
“Will appeal to fans across the board.”
—Library Journal on The Charm School
“[A] delightful romp…With its lively prose, well-developed conflict and passionate characters, this enjoyable, poignant tale is certain to enchant.”
—Publishers Weekly on Halfway to Heaven
“A bold, humorous and poignant romance that fulfills every woman’s dreams.”
—Christina Dodd on Enchanted Afternoon
“A rare treat.”
—Amazon.com on The Firebrand, an Amazon.com Best of 2001 title
“With this final installment of Wiggs’s Chicago Fire trilogy, she has created a quiet page-turner that will hold readers spellbound as the relationships, characters and story unfold. Fans of historical romances will naturally flock to this skillfully executed trilogy, and general women’s fiction readers should find this story enchanting as well.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Firebrand
“Wiggs’s uncomplicated stories are rich with life lessons, nod-along moments and characters with whom readers can easily relate. Delightful and wise, Wiggs’s latest shines.”
—Publishers Weekly on Dockside
“Empathetic protagonists, interesting secondary characters, well-written flashbacks, and delicious recipes add depth to this touching, complex romance.”
—Library Journal on The Winter Lodge
“With the ease of a master, Wiggs introduces complicated, flesh-and-blood characters into her idyllic but identifiable small-town setting, sets in motion a refreshingly honest romance, resolves old issues and even finds room for a little mystery.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Winter Lodge (starred review)
“Wiggs explores many aspects of grief, from guilt to anger to regret, imbuing her book with the classic would’ve/could’ve/ should’ve emotions, and presenting realistic and sympathetic characters…. Another excellent title [in] her already outstanding body of work.”
—Booklist on Table for Five (starred review)
“A human and multilayered story exploring duty to both country and family.”
—Nora Roberts on The Ocean Between Us
The Horsemaster’s Daughter
The Horsemaster’s Daughter
Susan Wiggs
For Reed Alexander Brown and Jamie Gatton
Lifelong friends
With love and gratitude
And for Nicholas J. Klist
My beloved father—
I will always be “the engineer’s daughter”
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part Two
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Part Four
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Part Five
Chapter Thirty-One
Epilogue
Afterword
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks as always to the steadfast Joyce,
Christina, Betty and Barb; to my wonderful editors
Dianne Moggy, Amy Moore-Benson and
Martha Keenan; and to the supercharged librarian
Pat Mason, who leaves no stone (or sand dollar)
unturned in the quest for story facts. Any mistakes
are my own, but for the inclusion of such perfect
details as mating ospreys and suicidal piping plovers,
I am indebted to Pat.
Part One
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
—William Shakespeare,
The Tempest, III, ii
One
Mockjack Bay, Virginia
April 1854
Hunter Calhoun started drinking early that day. Yet the sweet fire of the clear, sharp whiskey failed to bring on the oblivion he thirsted for. Lord above, he needed that blurred, blissful state. Needed to feel nothing for a while. Because what he felt was a lot worse than nothing.
Gazing out a window at the sluggish, glass-still waters of the bay, he noticed that the buoy was sinking and a few more planks had rotted off the dock. The plantation had no proper harbor but a decent anchorage—not that it mattered now.
“That poor Hunter Calhoun,” folks called him when they thought he was too drunk to notice. They always spoke of him with a mixture of pity and relief—pity, that the misfortune had happened to him, and relief, that it had not happened to them. In general, women thought it romantic and tragic that he’d lost his wife in such a spectacular fashion; the men were slightly disdainful and superior—they’d never let that sort of disaster befall their womenfolk.
Calhoun glared down into his whiskey glass, willing the amber liquid to numb him before he talked himself out of what he knew he must do. He experienced a strange, whimsical fantasy: the whiskey was a pool he could dive into, headfirst. If the ocean was whiskey and I was a duck, I’d swim to the bottom and never come up.
A sound of disgust from the adjoining room alerted him that he’d sung the lines of the old ditty aloud.
“Don’t go clucking your tongue at me, Miz Nancy,” he called out. “I can sing. A man has every right to sing in his own house.”
“Humph. You call that singing? I thought the neighbors’ hounds just treed a coon.” The gentle clack of her knitting needles punctuated the statement.
He finished his drink with a long swig, and oh-so-silently set his glass on the age-scarred sideboard.
“Don’t matter how quiet you try to be,” Nancy called. “I know you been at the spirits.” A moment later she stepped through the open pocket doors and came into the shabby parlor, her cane tapping along the floor until it encountered the threadbare carpet. Her African face, wizened by years she had never learned to count, held equal measures of patience and exasperation. Her eyes, clouded with blindness, seemed to peer into a deeper part of him even he didn’t see. Nancy had the uncanny ability to track his progress through a room, or worse, to track his very thoughts sometimes.
“Humph,” she said again, this time with a self-righteous snort. “How you going to shoot a gun if you all full up with Jim Hooker’s whiskey?”
Hunter gave a humorless laugh, poured another drink and gulped it down. She was the only person he knew who could actually hear a man drinking. “Drunk or sober, Nancy, have you ever known me to miss a target?”
Setting his empty glass on the smoke-stained mantel, he said, “Excuse me. I’ve got something I have to do.” He paused to fill his silver hip flask with more whiskey. Nancy waited in silence, but he felt the cold bluster of her temper as if she’d scolded him aloud.
It was too much to hope she wouldn’t follow him. He could hear the busy tap-tap of her cane as she shuffled along behind him, down the central hall toward the back of the big house. In his parents’ day, the gun room had been a hive of activity on hunt mornings, when neighbors from all over Northampton County came to call. Now the room contained only the most necessary of firearms—a Le Mats revolver, a percussion shotgun and a Winchester repeating rifle. He went to the gun cabinet and took down the Winchester, cocking open the side loading gate to make sure it was well oiled.
It was. He had known this moment was coming. In preparation, he had lit himself with whiskey, but suddenly strong drink wasn’t enough.
He looped a deerskin sack of .44-40 cartridges to his belt, then stood for a moment at the window, staring out the wavy glass at the broad gardens of Albion. Dogwood and rhododendron grew profusely at the verges, though the flower beds had a weedy, untended look.
“You best get a move on,” said Nancy. “Miz Beaumont took the children off to lessons at Bonterre for the day, and you want this dirty business done ‘fore they get back.”
“I reckon I do.” He flinched, picturing his son Blue’s silent censure when the boy learned what had happened in his absence. Blue had suffered so much loss already, and here his own father was about to take something else from him.
A wave of self-loathing washed over Hunter. Earlier that morning, he had sat down to breakfast with the children, putting jam on Belinda’s biscuit and pouring the cream for Blue, pretending—God, always pretending—that things were right between them.
With her strange, unerring sense of direction, Nancy joined him at the window and caught hold of his arm. “I’m real sorry, son. I’m just as sorry as I can be,” she said, gently fingering a rip in the sleeve of his shirt.
“I know you are, honey.” He stared down at the dark, papery-dry hand, the knuckles gnarled and shiny with rheumatism. That hand had soothed his feverish brow when he was a baby and dried his little-boy tears. It had mended his breeches with a lightning flash of the needle, and, when the occasion warranted it, delivered a smack to his backside a time or two, though never without drawing him into a hug afterward.
And when he had signed the manumission papers to set her free, that trembling hand had cupped his cheek, her touch more eloquent than the words she could not summon.
Nancy’s mothering hand couldn’t soothe him now. His nervous fingers strayed to the slim hip flask in his pocket, but he didn’t take it out. Nothing could soothe him this morning.
“I’ll be back by and by, honey,” he said to Nancy, then stepped out on the veranda.
Setting his jaw, he jerked open the gate of the rifle and loaded the cartridges. Then he hitched back his shoulders and strode down the steps to the walkway. The brilliant Virginia morning mocked him with its bright promise. Thready high clouds veined the April sky, and sunlight flooded extravagantly down through the twisted live oaks of Albion. The long misty acres rose up into the sloping green hills.
At one time the tidewater plantation had been as busy as a small village. Tobacco fields had covered hundreds of acres; the cultivation and curing of the leaves had occupied hundreds of hands. Now everything had changed. All that remained were Hunter and his children, a small staff of misfits and a dream that was about to be shattered.
Not for the first time, he contemplated giving up, selling out. Would a prospective buyer notice the chipping paint on the soaring columns that flanked the entranceway? Would he see the brambles and creeper that encroached on the once-pristine lawn?
Would a buyer see the work and sweat that had gone into the riding hall, the round pen and lunging ring, the barns and paddocks and the only mile oval racing track in the county? Would the mares and foals in the hills show themselves? Would a stranger be dazzled by Albion’s wild promise, or disappointed by its failed glory?
He simply didn’t know. These days, he had no answers.
He sucked in a deep breath, tasting the cool green tang of the Spartina grass that fringed the marshes by the bay. The weight of the Winchester pressed insistently on his shoulder. His strides kicked up droplets of dew as he walked, dampening the toes of his scuffed riding boots. No matter, there would be no riding today.
A cluster of farm buildings lay in quiet morning shadow. A stone boat of thick planks laid over heavy runner beams had been brought out in readiness for the dead body.
A high-pitched whinny broke the silence, and on the farthest hill to the west, the herd appeared, moving like a banner of silk across the spring meadows. No cart horses or farm plugs these, but Thoroughbreds. Against the green-draped landscape, they were magnificent and primal, their loping forms stretching into one entity, like a mythical beast, as they traversed the hill. As always, Hunter’s heart caught at the sight of them.
At one time the racehorses that had beggared his fortunes had also brought him true happiness. The enterprise was the beginning of his hope and the end to the troubles that had shadowed the years since he’d inherited Albion. But after Lacey’s death, he’d turned away from the dream, for a dream seemed too auspicious a thing to have when your world was falling apart.
Still, through everything, his affinity for the unusual horses remained a powerful force. Most days, “Hunter’s Folly” as the neighbors called them, were the only things in his world that made sense.
Putting two fingers to his lips, he loosed three shrill whistles. The lead stallion—once declared unridable, which was why Hunter rode him—broke away from the herd and headed down at an angle, answering the summons with his customary mixture of obedience and disdain. Hunter walked over to the fence and treated the horse to a piece of barley sugar. “There you are, Julius,” he said quietly. “How’s my old boy?”
From the time he was very young, and had no inkling of the troubles ahead of him, Hunter Calhoun had possessed a God-given way with racehorses—the more spirited, the better. The stallion called Julius had been his triumph, the most remarkable Thoroughbred Virginia had ever seen.
But Julius had run his course and could no longer race or stand stud. He finished his barley sugar and nudged at the pouch of cartridges on Hunter’s belt.
“That’s not for you,” Hunter said, stepping away from the fence. “Though Lord knows, some breeders would put you down since you no longer earn your keep.”
Julius lifted his big, dumb head in a nod and flapped his lips. Hunter tried to smile, but his mind lingered on less pleasant matters. He’d best not put this off any longer. With the rifle over his shoulder, he walked to the cluster of barns and arenas.
At first glance, the paddock appeared deserted. Just for a moment Hunter’s spirits lifted. Perhaps he didn’t have to do this at all. Perhaps it had all been a mistake, a horrible mistake—
A low rumble of rage came from the green darkness beneath a sweeping branch of live oak. In the shadows at the corner of the pen, a malevolent gleam flickered. Approaching the weathered cedar fence rails, Hunter pretended not to notice. He watched obliquely, and from a corner of his eye he saw the quivering of a filthy patch of hide, caked with mud and manure.
The nightmare lived yet.
He took a step closer to the paddock. If the beast stayed cornered, they wouldn’t have to drag it far to load the carcass onto the stone boat. If Hunter’s shot was true, there wouldn’t be too much of a mess.
And the shot would be true, for the bite of the morning air had evaporated every drop of whiskey Hunter had consumed. Icy sobriety overcame him. Nothing stood between him and the pain.
He should be swift, have done with it. But for some perverse reason he took his time, surrounded by the false serenity of the shady paddock and stables. No trace of the mare’s blood marred the sandy surface of the paddock. The crazed pacing of the stallion had kicked up the sand, covering over the stain.
Hunter squeezed his eyes shut, remembering the way the stallion had attacked the broodmare, racing toward her with his mouth wide open, sinking his teeth into her flank and hanging on like a mountain lion on the hunt. The deafening squeals of the mare had gone on and on, echoing across the flat water of the nearby bay, finally stopping when the mad stallion fought her to the ground, causing her foreleg to snap. Only by swinging six-foot bludgeons had Hunter and the grooms been able to beat the stallion off and back him into the paddock.
It had been too late for the mare, though.
No one had dared to come near the fence, not since that night.
Hunter had been so excited about the stallion’s arrival. More important, the idea of importing a racehorse from Ireland had captivated his son Blue, and for the first time since his mother’s death, Blue’s eyes had shown a spark of interest. When he learned the fate of the stallion, the boy would probably retreat once again into his silent, impenetrable world.
The acquisition of the champion Thoroughbred was supposed to have turned the tide of Hunter’s fortunes. Instead, it had dug him even deeper into disaster.
The beast—called Sir Finnegan—had been brought off the ship wearing an eight-pound iron muzzle. Offended by the cruel measure, Hunter had removed the muzzle immediately—and nearly lost a hand for his pains. The stallion had gone on the attack. He reared time and time again, screaming, strong teeth snapping at the air. The chafing of the muzzle had created raw, running sores on the beast’s head, making him look as ugly as his temper.
“He’s just spirited,” Hunter had remarked, and like a fool he had brought the mare in season to the paddock. In addition to ruining the mare, the stallion had nearly killed a groom, a hired man from Norfolk. More predator than horse, Finn had rushed the man back against the fence, then slashed out viciously. Rearing, striking, bellowing, the stallion had focused his fury on the groom. If Hunter hadn’t distracted the horse with a bludgeon blow, the stallion would have murdered the man.
Now the stallion’s breath heated the air, making little puffs of fog. His eye, filled with an iron-hard malevolence, rolled back. The shallow veins beneath the surface of his skin formed angry, distended rivulets, and the hide itself quivered as if to cast off flies.
Cold purpose enclosed Hunter like a crust of ice. Emptying his mind of everything save the task at hand, he braced one leg on the lowest fence rail. Then he slung the other leg up and over, steadying himself there while he jammed the butt of the rifle against his shoulder.
The stallion exploded. A furious energy stiffened his back, and in a great wave of movement he reared. Filth-clotted hooves raked the air. Hugely muscled haunches bunched in his thighs, supporting his great weight. A shriek of pure equine wrath broke the quiet.
A hard knot formed in Hunter’s chest. Even crazed and covered in muck, the horse was magnificent. Buried beneath the madness, the fire and heart that had made this horse the swiftest in Ireland still beat strong.
All of Hunter’s fortunes rested with this magnificent, ruined animal.
He should have drunk more whiskey.
Grimly, he once again set the butt of the rifle against his shoulder and waited for the horse to settle. But the blood of champions flowed in this stallion’s veins and he had enormous reserves of stamina, despite the grueling sea voyage from Ireland.
After a time, the horse dropped his front feet to the ground. He hung his head, sides bellowing in and out, the banked fires of malevolence still burning in his eyes.
Hunter took aim. A single shot between the eyes and it would all be over.
He took in one long breath, then let half of it out. His forefinger tightened, squeezing slowly and steadily on the trigger. In the notch of the rifle’s site, the stallion stood hanging his head. Puffs of dust scudded outward as the horse exhaled through his distended nostrils.
“Mr. Hunter, sir!” yelled a voice across the lawn. “Wait!”
Hunter’s concentration shattered. The stallion swung his head toward the noise and his front feet pawed the ground. Gritting his teeth in frustration, Hunter lowered the gun.
“What the hell is it, Noah?”
The mulatto boy was out of breath from running, and his eager face ran with sweat. His breeches were soaked from the knees down. He’d probably just left the launch at the plantation dock.
Noah’s one passion in life was horses, not tobacco nor even, thus far, girls. Though only sixteen, he was regarded as a local expert at breeding and racing, and his small stature made him a talented and sought-after jockey. He had been nearly as excited as Hunter over the arrival of Finn, the Irish Thoroughbred.
“You mustn’t put him down, sir. I know of a way to save him.” Noah’s face was pale and taut with earnestness.
Exasperated, Hunter climbed off the fence. “Noah, it’s not possible, you know that. I’ve had the best trainers in Virginia down to have a look at him.”
“But I heard tell of someone—”
“Son, there’s no hope. Every one of the experts I consulted assured me the horse is ruined.” He gestured at the shadowy dark beast in the pen. “His mind is gone. He probably injured himself during a storm at sea, so he could be ruined for racing anyway. No one can get close enough to examine him. I’m sorry,” Hunter said. “I hate like hell that I have to do this.”
“Then don’t—”
“Damn it, you think I want to, boy? If this horse had a broken leg, you wouldn’t want him to suffer. You’d want me to put him down, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” Noah stared at the ground, his bare foot stabbing at the grass. “But listen—I been trying to tell you something.”
“All right,” Hunter said, setting the rifle aside, muzzle down. Each time he looked at Noah, he felt a piercing tenderness, for the boy was his kinsman. The son of Hunter’s young cousin and an African laundress, Noah had grown up at Albion. He was an everyday reminder of the sweetness of first love—and of the bitter aftermath of forbidden passion. “Of course I’ll listen, but my mind is made up.”
“I was in Eastwick, at the drovers’ club there, and I heard tell of a man at the eastern shore who can gentle any horse.”
“I believe I heard from his advance man,” Hunter said cynically, angry that someone would play upon the youth’s hopes. “Would he be the one with the magical healing powder? Or maybe he’s the one who wanted to sell me a book of incantations.”
“No, this is for real. Honest and true!”
Hunter hesitated. Were it anyone save Noah he would dismiss the idea out of hand. But this was Noah, the boy he had educated when no school would have him, a horseman who had proved time and again that he had the head and heart for the business of racing horses.
Hunter took a long, hard look at the stallion. Once his dream, now his nightmare. Then he shouldered the rifle and walked with Noah away from the paddock. The ripening sun brought out the sweetness of lilacs and hyacinths in the air.
“His name is Henry Flyte, and he was horsemaster to Lord Derby in England. Grandson of the Lord Derby,” he added, referring to the famous Englishman who had inaugurated the first running of the Derby Stakes at Epsom more than half a century before. “Henry Flyte trained Aleazar.”
Hunter came to attention. The story of Aleazar was known throughout racing. The three-year-old had been bred out of the Royal Studs, but was declared unridable by the best trainers and jockeys in England. Then, seemingly out of the blue, Lord Derby had raced him at Epsom. The stallion had broken every record in memory, and Derby gave full credit to a trainer whose unusual methods had worked wonders on the horse. There followed some tragedy and upheaval, but it all happened when Hunter was a boy and he remembered no details.
“And the claim is,” Hunter said, “this wonder of a trainer lives in Virginia now.”
“It’s what the drovers are saying.” Noah shifted from foot to foot, clearly agitated. “Been here for years. They say he keeps to himself. He lives on an island across the marsh from Eastwick.”
The low islands were lawless, dangerous places where shipwrecks happened, and not always by accident. The favored haunts of pirates and fugitives, the long, shifting islands had become the stuff of legend, featured in spooky bedtime stories and tall tavern tales.
Noah took a rolled pamphlet from his hip pocket and shoved it at Hunter. “His name’s listed here in the Farmers’ Register.” He stabbed his finger at an article called “The Horsemaster of Flyte Island.” “Claims he tames wild ponies for riding and farmwork.”
“Why would such a gifted trainer leave Lord Derby’s Thoroughbreds for a herd of wild ponies?”
“I don’t know,” said Noah.
Hunter flipped through the yellowing pages. “This Register is two years old. How do you know the horsemaster is still there?”
“How do you know he’s not?” Noah’s solemn, handsome face was drawn taut with intensity and pleading. “He can save this stallion,” Noah added. “I know it, I do!”
“Son, a miracle wouldn’t save this stallion.” Hunter turned back toward the paddock, angry that he was letting himself be swayed by this earnest, hopeful youth. Earnestness and hope were alien notions to Hunter—for good reason.
“Don’t matter whether you put him down today or wait until tomorrow,” Noah persisted, an edge of anger in his voice. “We got to go see the horsemaster.”
“He’d have a chance to kill again.” Hunter lengthened his strides, thinking of the broodmare, dead because of the crazed stallion’s punishing hooves and wolf-like mouth. He thought of the hired groom slumped against the well house, cradling a crushed hand but thanking God he’d been spared his life. “And what makes you think this horsemaster would come to Albion for the sake of this Thoroughbred?”
Noah hesitated. “They say he won’t travel.”
Hunter let loose with a bark of laughter. “Even better. You’re saying I have to go to him?”
Noah danced ahead in his agitation. “It could be done, sir. I’ve thought and thought on it. You and I can drive the horse into the squeeze and I’ll get him blindfolded and muzzled. Then we’ll get the drover’s scow, the one with the pen. It’s shallow draft. It can dock right here at Albion so we can use the penning chutes, and at high tide it can be poled over to the horsemaster’s island.”
The drover’s scow plied between the low-browed peninsula that reached like a long, stroking finger down the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay and the mainland. Herds of horses, sheep and cattle grew fat on the rich salt grasses of the peninsula and islands, and each season drovers came eastward to pen them and bring them back across the water to market. But the drovers worked with tame livestock, not demonically possessed horses.
“It can work, sir,” Noah said, his voice rising with desperation. “I know it can.”
“Step aside, son,” Hunter said in exasperation. “This is hard enough without you calling up all sorts of false hopes.”
“Shoot him and you’ll have a dead horse for certain. I ain’t digging no grave for him,” Noah said defiantly. “Take him to the horsemaster and you’ll get your champion back. Sir.”
Hunter eyed the horse with its nervously twitching skin, all caked with mud and filth. The agent in Ireland had praised this stallion’s coat and conformation, the depth of his chest and the breathtaking sight of him running at top speed. The horse had, the agent claimed, that elusive quality known as “heart.”
“There’s nothing but madness in this beast,” Hunter said.
“Can you be sure of that?” Noah looked not at him but at the horse. Every muscle in the youth’s compact, slender body was tense, as if he wanted to leap into the paddock and tame the beast himself. “Can you be sure entirely? Look at that beauty.”
“I can be damned sure this horse killed an expensive mare and he’d do the same to you or me if we let him. He’s ruined, Noah. I don’t want that to be so, but it is.”
Noah’s head came up sharply as he confronted Hunter. “I never did ask you for much. You been good to me, I ain’t denying that, and I count myself lucky. But now I got something to ask. Do this for me, sir. Sure as I’m your cousin’s born son, give this horse a chance.”
Not prone to displays of emotion, Noah swung away and snuffled, wiping his face on his voluminous sleeve. He faced the horse in the paddock.
Hunter’s hand closed around the rifle stock. The oiled barrel had grown warm with the coming of the day.
And then he too looked at the stallion.
Two
Eliza Flyte’s favorite time of day was evening, when the light of the setting sun fused the sea and sky into a single wash of color. The flood tide turned the salt marshes into a green, floating kingdom with the shorebirds gliding silently by to roost for the night. A breeze rippled through the beach grass and sea oats, and frogs and crickets started up, marking the end of another day.
At such moments, when the beauty of nature burst with such force across the island, she felt she had all the riches of the world. She liked the unspoiled wilderness and the safety of being completely alone.
She stood at the shore of the island, shading her eyes against the coppery glare of sun on sea, and watched the flight of the wild swans that had taken up residence in the reeds along the freshwater estuary that seeped into the Atlantic. Every bird in the sky, it seemed, chose to roost in these parts. She knew why they came, for this was a place apart from everything else, separated by time and tide and the mists that fogged it in so that it appeared to be drifting, unanchored to the rest of the world.
It was a safe haven for creatures whose only defenses were flight and camouflage.
The cry of the departing swans always sounded inexplicably sad. Eliza imagined the piercing obligato to be some terrible wordless lament for a lost mate, and the sound never failed to make her shiver.
She was about to turn away from the shore, to step over the tangle of trumpet vines and the dunes clad in beach heather, when another movement caught her eye. She noticed a flicker, low on the diffuse waterline, and she paused, squinting, holding herself tense, ready to flee.
Something was there, in the distance, coming from the lee shore. At first she thought it was a whale. She had seen one once, a finback strayed in from the briny deep to beach itself and die with a horrible exhausted shudder on the strand. For weeks afterward she had avoided the stinking blue-tinged carcass, and when a wild autumn storm skirred in and sucked the carnage back out to sea, she had wept with relief.
But she realized as it drew near that this new apparition was no whale. It was the drover’s scow.
She recognized the low profile of the wooden craft from the old days, when her father would bring horses from the annual penning on Chincoteague Island. But no drover had visited Flyte Island recently. There was nothing here for him, nothing at all, and there hadn’t been in a very long time.
A man worked on the deck of the scow, his brawny form silhouetted against the sky. Alarm spread through Eliza in a swift, silent wildfire, radiating out along limbs and spine and scalp, seemingly to the very tips of her hair. She responded with the same instinct as the wild ponies that ranged across the island. Her nostrils filled with the scent of danger, a thrill of panic quivered across her skin, and she fled.
She sprinted up the beach, vaulting over the wrack line choked with refuse from the sea. Her bare feet were soundless on the dunes, and she covered a hundred yards before reason took hold and she slowed her pace. In a grove of whispering cedar trees, she stopped running. Still breathing hard, she scrambled up the curved scarp of a dune that had been bitten away by the tides. The vantage point gave her a clear view of the shore.
What would a drover want here? Did he think to graze his sheep or goats on the island? It was well-known that the grazing was poor, and could only support a handful of animals. What wild ponies there were would not welcome an intrusion. Aggressive and territorial, the herd would close ranks against any outsider.
The ponies would be up on the high ground for the night, huddled together for protection. Sometimes when Eliza watched them, she felt a tug of yearning, for the animals lived in a herd, their society regulated by the turning of the seasons and the sense of social order that seemed ingrained in the mares.
By watching the herd, Eliza had learned long ago that some animals were meant to live in groups. Living alone was unnatural, and the single, unconnected individual never survived for long. Perhaps people, like horses, were meant to live together too. But despite her loneliness, Eliza had never found any humans she wanted to live with.
She edged back out to the lip of the dune where it dropped off sharply to form a cliff. Her gaze tracked a meander of the marsh current. The tide had risen so that only the tips of the cordgrass showed, marking a passage deep enough for a flat-bottom vessel. The barge, rigged with two canvas sails, lurched awkwardly up the beach, propelled by a gust of wind and helped along by the drover’s long pole. Then the craft beached itself upon a shoal of fine sand and crushed shell.
She wondered how in heaven’s name he intended to correct such a haphazard landing. The pole came up, touching the top of the mast, and with a windy sigh the sails collapsed onto the deck, covering the tall-sided narrow pen in the middle.
Eliza stood perfectly still in the sweeping shadows of evening and watched while her heart sent her another message of danger. It took all of her will not to flee deeper into hiding.
A lone figure stood aboard the shallow-draft scow. The golden fire of sunset outlined his form in a strange flaming nimbus. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing fitted trousers and a blousy shirt with sleeves so generously cut that they blew in the breeze. She could make out his silhouette, a sharp-edged shadow against the coppery sky, but was unable to discern his features. He seemed unnaturally big, a threat, as he cast down the two bowlines and stepped into the thigh-deep surf to secure the lines to an ancient, worn stump of heartwood.
Eliza mustered her courage on a breath of marsh-scented air, then descended the dune in a tumble of crumbling sand. She strode out to the beach, unconsciously tightening the rope that held her smock cinched around her waist.
The boatman struggled with the sails, pulling them to one side of the pen. He unhitched a long wooden plank, creating a walkway to shore. His movements were sharp and angry.
A frightened whinny came from the pen.
The sound raked over her senses, calling to her like the song of a siren. Her every instinct screamed warnings but that sound, above all others, cut through her timidity and brought her out of the shadows. She forced herself to go nearer the intruder. He straightened, rubbing at the small of his back. The movement alarmed her, and she fell still, waiting. She could hear him muttering under his breath. He had a low, mellow voice that seemed curiously at odds with the barely restrained violence of his movements as he hauled on the canvas.
From the tall-sided pen she could hear a thump, then another. And finally a low, eerie growl, unmistakably equine.
She hurried the rest of the way to the beach and stepped barefoot through the wrack line, where changing varieties of flotsam were heaved up by the tide. The tattered hem of her dress swirled in the surf.
“Are you lost?” she asked, raising her voice over the roar of the sea.
His shoulders jerked up in surprise. He turned to glare at her. She could tell he was glaring even though the sun behind him obscured his features. Shading her eyes and squinting, she was able to catch a glimpse of his face, and for a moment she felt disoriented, adrift, confused, because it was such a striking, cleanly made face. In her entire life she had met few people, but she knew that here was a man who happened to be gifted with an excess of beauty. He looked like Prince Ferdinand in her illustrated Tempest.
For some reason that disturbed her more than anything else she’d seen so far. With a face as idealized as any artist’s fancy, he made a romantic sight; despite the circumstances, he possessed the sort of unsmiling demeanor of a man of great dignity and stature. He regarded her with a haughty aloofness, as if he lived in a kingdom not of this world.
But when he spoke, she knew he was very much of this world. “Is this Flyte Island?” he demanded, rude as any two-legged profane creature known as a man.
“It is,” she said.
“Then I’m not lost.” He yanked on the bowlines, testing them. “Who the hell are you?”
She cast a worried eye at the pen on the scow. “Who’s asking?”
His shoulders, remarkably expressive for such a nondescript part of the anatomy, lifted stiffly in annoyance. He turned to her once again, a shock of fair hair plastered with sweat to his brow.
“My name is Hunter Calhoun, of Albion Plantation on Mockjack Bay.” He paused, watching her face as if the name was supposed to mean something to her.
“Hunter. That’s a sort of horse, isn’t it?”
“It happens to be my name. I am master of Albion.” His eyes—they were a strange, crystalline blue—narrowed as his gaze swept over her. At a thud from the barge, his brow sank into a scowl. “I’ve come to see the horsemaster, Henry Flyte.”
The sandy earth beneath her feet shifted. Even now, after so much time had passed, the mere mention of the name disturbed her. He had been her world, the gentle-souled man who had been her father. He’d filled each day with wonder and wisdom, making her feel safe and loved. And then one day, without warning, he was gone forever. Gone in a raging blast of violence that haunted her still.
She felt such a choking wave of grief that for a moment she couldn’t speak. Her throat locked around words too painful to utter.
“Are you simple, girl?” the intruder asked impatiently. “I’m looking for Henry Flyte.”
“He’s gone,” she said, her small horrified admission stark in the salt-laden quiet of twilight. “Dead.”
A word she’d never heard before burst from the man. From the stormy expression on his face, she judged it was an oath.
“When?” he demanded.
“It’s been nearly a year.” Her pain gave way to anger. Who was this intruder to order her about and make demands, to pry into her private world? “So you’d best be off whilst the tide’s up,” she added, “else you’ll be stranded till moon tide.”
“He’s been dead a year, and no one knew?”
She flinched. “Those that matter knew.”
Hunter Calhoun swore again. He took out a hip flask, took a swig and swore a third time. “Who else lives here?”
“A small herd of wild ponies, up in the woods. Three hens, a milch cow, a dog and four cats, last I counted. More birds than there are stars.”
“I don’t mean livestock. Where’s your family?”
A wave of resentment rose high, crested. “I don’t have one.”
“You’re all alone here?”
She didn’t answer. He drank more whiskey. Then, bending down, he fetched a long-barreled rifle. The scent of danger sharpened. Was he going to shoot her?
“What do you mean to do with that?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he cocked the gun and lifted the barrel toward the latch of the pen. With horror, she realized his intent. “Stop it,” she said sharply. Animals were sacred to her, and she wouldn’t stand by and see one slaughtered. “Don’t you—”
“I’ve a mad horse aboard,” he interrupted. “You’d best move aside, because when I open the gate, he’ll escape, and I’ll take him out.”
Eliza stood her ground.
Scowling, Calhoun lowered the gun. “Without Mr. Flyte’s help, the beast is a mortal danger to anyone and anything. He’s got to be put down, and it’s best done here, in this godforsaken place.” His haughty glare encompassed the marsh. Ever-softening light spread over the low ground, the placid water reflecting the rise of dunes and the forest beyond.
He paused for another drink of whiskey. Eliza scrambled aboard and grabbed the gun, using her finger to pry the shot out of the pan. “This godforsaken place, as you call it, is my home, and I’ll thank you not to be leaving your carrion on the shore.”
He wrenched the gun away, elbowing her aside with a hard, impatient nudge. He lifted the heavy latch to the pen. “Stand aside now. This horse is a killer.”
Eliza burst into action, planting herself in front of the pen, her back flat against the gate. She could hear the heavy breath of the horse within, and she fancied she could feel its heat. The smells of hay and manure brought back waves of remembrance from the days when her father was alive. She let her emptiness fill up with fury.
“Who in God’s name are you, that you think you can simply do murder right here in front of me?”
“Who the hell are you that you think you can stop me?” As he spoke, he touched the barrel of the gun to her shoulder, where a long tangle of her hair escaped its carelessly done single braid.
Though she’d unloaded the rifle, she stood frozen with fear. In an obscenely gentle caress, he used the barrel of the gun to move aside the lock of hair and the edge of her blouse with it, baring her shoulder.
“Darling,” said Hunter Calhoun with a low, false endearment in his voice, “I’ve had a long, trying day. I’m armed with a deadly weapon. You don’t want to cross me, not now.”
She ignored him and battled the fear, closing her eyes as the sweet fecund aroma of horse and the sense of a big animal’s warmth reached her, entered her, plunging down to her heart. She hadn’t worked with a horse since her father had died, and she had sworn she never would again. But the magic was still there, the potency, the wanting.
She should walk away now, let him shoot this hapless beast and finish his whiskey flask. Her father’s magical way with horses, legendary on two continents, had got him killed. Ignorant, superstitious men had gone on a witch-hunt after him.
But there was something the world didn’t know. The magic had not died with Henry Flyte.
“Step aside, miss,” Calhoun said brusquely.
She opened her eyes, put her hands on the cool gun barrel and shoved it aside. Then she turned and peered through the gaps in the pen siding. She caught vague glimpses, obscured by the movement of the scow and by the twilight shadows, of a proud head, arched neck and a cruel iron muzzle. An old rag blindfolded the animal. Moist sores ran with pus that coursed down the horse’s cheeks, and he swayed with a sunken-ribbed hunger. The sight tore at her heart, and the pain she felt was the animal’s pain. Rage at Hunter Calhoun made her bold.
“Was this horse mad before or after you muzzled and starved him?” she demanded.
“Look, I came here hoping to save him.”
“Well done,” she said sarcastically.
“It’s no fault of mine he’s in this condition,” Hunter Calhoun said. “He came off the ship from Ireland crazed by a storm at sea. Killed a mare and nearly did in a groom before we were able to stop him.”
“What did you need a horse from Ireland for anyway?”
“For racing and breeding.”
The precise things that had given her father his start. Racing had elevated the horse, but it had also been responsible for unforgivable abuses.
“And you’re absolutely certain this horse is ruined.” Even as she made the comment, she realized his opinion didn’t matter to her. She sensed the horse’s fear—but she also knew that the fear could be penetrated.
“Look, I’m good with horses,” said Calhoun. “Always have been. I can ride anything with hair, I swear it.”
“Lovely.”
“Horses are my life. This is the first one I haven’t been able to handle.”
“So you’re going to shoot it. Do you deal with all your problems that way?”
“Damn it, I won’t stand around and debate this with you, woman.”
She turned away from him and peered through the slats of the pen. She saw the filth-caked coat shudder. An ear twitched, angling toward her. And then she felt it. An awareness. A connection. The stallion could feel her presence. He sensed she was different from the brute who had blinded and muzzled him.
She clutched the rough wood of the pen, battling her own instincts. Her need to reach out, to heal, was acute. For a moment, she felt very close to her father, who had taught her to respect all living things. The horse made a sound low in his throat, and in an odd way he seemed to be pushing her, forcing her toward a decision that could mean nothing but trouble.
The dilemma lay before her, demanding a course of action. If she healed this horse, she would unmask herself to the world. As they had in her father’s day, ambitious trainers and jockeys would come calling, begging her to rehabilitate their badly trained stallions, and in the next breath condemning her as a necromancer.
“Get away. Now!” Hunter Calhoun tried to shoulder her aside. “You think I like doing this? I just want it to be over—”
“I can help you.” The words rushed out of her, unchecked by reason. The sensible response would be to turn her back on this stranger and his abused stallion. But when it came to horses she had no will of her own.
Calhoun gave a short, sharp laugh, and in the pen the horse huffed out a startled breath.
“You can help?” he demanded.
Eliza felt torn. By revealing her secret ability, she would end her own self-exile. She would make herself vulnerable to the same ignorant prejudice that had killed her father. She wanted to curse this poor, damaged horse for forcing her to choose. Yet another part of her wanted to discover how the animal had been hurt, to bring him out into the light.
She took another look at the furious muzzled creature in the shadowy pen. Her special affinity, which had always been a part of her, gave her a glimpse of the tortured confusion that muddled the horse’s mind. A wave of compassion swept over her.
“Aye.” She used the old-country affirmative of her father.
“The horsemaster is dead. You said so yourself.”
“I did. But his craft is still very much alive.” She made herself look the intruder square in the eye. “I am Eliza Flyte. The horsemaster’s daughter.”
Three
Hunter didn’t know whether to laugh or curse. It was a minor wonder he had actually made it to this godforsaken place. Having grown up on a tidewater bay, he was a good seaman and knew the shoals and currents, but making the crossing to the barrier islands with a wild horse aboard a clumsy scow had not been easy.
Now that he had finally reached the island, this ragamuffin of a female claimed Henry Flyte was her father. Her late father. Unless Hunter wanted to go traipsing off around the island, he had no choice but to take her word for it.
“Eliza Flyte, is it?” He tasted her name, let it find its way over his tongue. It suited her, somehow. In her tattered brown smock and bare feet, she seemed wild and a bit fey, quite unlike anyone he had ever met before. A darkling girl, possibly of slave or Indian stock, she had a flawless complexion enhanced by the silkiness of her long eyelashes and the blue-toned sweep of her indigo-black hair. She had eyes of some indeterminate color beneath two dramatic slashes of eyebrow. The expression on the pale oval of her face was a mixture of annoyance and compassion—annoyance at him, and compassion for the murderous stallion in the pen.
When the breeze blew the dress against her legs, he saw that this was no girl. She lifted her face to the light, and he noted a woman’s maturity in the clear, fine-boned features. And in her strangely light eyes, eyes the color of mist on the water, he saw a look that was a thousand years old.
She stood no more than thirteen hands high, the top of her head barely reaching his shoulder. Yet she claimed she could tame this horse.
She was a liar, a cheater, a marshland bumpkin taking advantage of him.
“How much do you want for your services?” he asked suspiciously.
She frowned, then said, “The life of this horse, no more.”
“Right.” He snorted in disbelief.
“Why would I lie?” she asked peevishly. “Do you think I came out here expecting to meet some whiskeyed-up planter and the horse he beat half to death?”
“I never—” He stopped himself. It was pointless to argue. He needed to do what he should have done first thing that morning instead of listening to Noah. He eyed the landing. The scow was positioned just right for the horse to exit down the ramp to the hard-packed sand of the long, lonely beach. Hunter could simply take aim, shoot and leave the carcass lying on the beach to be taken out with the next tide.
“So let’s have a look at him,” the woman said, a brisk bossiness in her voice now. She reached for the latch of the pen.
He pushed her hand away. “Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said?” he demanded. “This animal is dangerous. Now, stand aside.” He grabbed his rifle and rammed the butt against his shoulder. “I need a moment to reload—”
A distinct sound interrupted him. He looked up in time to see his cartridges spin through the air, stark against the twilight sky, before plopping into the water about fifty yards out.
His first thought was one of amazement. He had never seen a woman throw so far. His second was one of fury. “No wonder you live like a hermit on this island. You’re completely mad.”
She flinched, a strangely animalistic movement, as if he had struck her physically. Then she glared at him, pain hardening into an anger to match his. “You are the one who can’t seem to hear. You won’t be shooting this horse.”
He anticipated her move and stepped in front of the gate. She made a sound of exasperation and bent down. Complete disbelief held him immobile just long enough for her to grab him around the ankle. She pulled up sharply, surprising him with her strength. Arms wheeling in the empty air, he fell backward over the gunwale of the scow and landed in the chilly shallows.
While he sat, half stunned, in the silty muck, she climbed up and spoke quietly to the horse. Then she reached over the side of the pen and untied the blindfold. The iron muzzle fell with a thunk. She lifted the latch of the gate, drew aside the bolt and opened the pen.
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.
“Shit!” Calhoun swung his rifle over his shoulder, preparing to use it like a club. “You picked the wrong damn time to throw away my cartridges.”
“Caliban, no!” Eliza said sharply, unable to keep the amusement from her voice. “Heel, that’s a boy.”
The huge beast loped to her side and collapsed at her feet, peeping and quivering in ecstatic obeisance. Belly up, he resembled a small, uncoordinated pony.
“What the hell is that?” Calhoun lowered the rifle.
“That,” Eliza said, dropping to her knees to give Caliban a friendly rub, “is the reason I don’t worry about wolves and cougars.” She got up and patted her thigh. The huge dog lumbered up and trotted along beside her. “He’s part mastiff, part Irish wolfhound. Part horse, you’d think, the way he eats.”
How odd, she thought, to be talking to another person. Other than the occasional trip to the mainland for supplies, her only companions had been animals. Hearing replies and questions in response to her was disconcerting. The nervousness seemed to bunch up in her throat, and she began to wonder if it had been a mistake to bring him here, into her world. But she had a natural inclination to heal wounded creatures, and something told her this man had wounds she could not see.
“Delightful,” Calhoun said dubiously. “Any other surprises?”
She forced herself to swallow past the taut anxiety as she stood up. “Not unless you count Alonso and Jane. The fawn and the doe. They’re both rather timid. Oh, and the cats—”
“Four cats,” he said.
She nodded, intrigued that he had actually been listening to her earlier. “Miranda, Sebastian, Antonio and Gonzalo.” She counted them off on her fingers.
“Why do all these names sound so familiar to me?” he asked.
“We stole them,” she said simply. “From Shakespeare.”
He gave a short laugh as realization dawned on him. “The Tempest,” he said. “Of course.”
They reached the house as night closed over the island. So near to the sea, the darkness fell fast, like a pool of black poured over the inverted bowl of the sky.
“I’ll just light a lamp, then,” she murmured, striking flint and steel and holding the flame to the betty lamp at the base of the porch steps. Climbing the stairs ahead of her visitor, she felt overly conscious of her bare feet and the ankle-length smock brushing against the backs of her legs. What on earth was she doing, bringing this stranger into her house? She should have left him at the shore, or better yet, driven him off entirely.
She stole a glance at him, and the large, looming shadow behind her did little to allay her fears. She had seen the worst men could do, and now this stranger was upon her. How could she be certain he wouldn’t turn feral on her?
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.
“Because I don’t trust you,” she blurted out.
He laughed. “Woman, I don’t blame you a bit. I haven’t done a damned thing to earn your trust. But remember, you haven’t earned mine either.”
Affronted, she opened her mouth to protest, but he held up a hand. “You claim you’re my only hope of helping the stallion. I’ve yet to see it. All you need to know right now is that I’ve got no possible interest in harming you.”
She quelled a shudder of fear, then raised the lamp and showed the way inside. Neatness was her natural inclination, but somehow the painstaking order of the house seemed to add to its air of empty poverty. For a wild moment, she wished for a room full of abundant clutter, the way it had been when her father was alive. Since his death, she had brought a sterile order to the house, lining the precious few books up on the shelves, the wild cherry and muscadine grape syrups and beach-plum preserves in a neat row of jars in the kitchen, the bins of supplies carefully closed and stowed.
Her hand quavered as she hung the betty on a peg and turned to face her guest. Hunter Calhoun’s presence seemed to fill the austere keeping room and kitchen to overflowing. She studied him by lamplight and could well imagine him the master of a place with the grand name of Albion, ordering slaves about and sipping mint juleps while his Negro grooms and jockeys spurred and whipped his racehorses into submission.
Pinching her mouth into a pucker of disapproval, she turned away. “I’ll find you something dry to put on.” Without waiting for a reply, she went to the old sea crate containing her father’s belongings. The scent of him lingered there as if woven into the very fibers of the fabric: cedar and soap and a faint lovely essence that had no name—it was unique to her father. She told herself she should be used to the elusive fragrance by now. She should be prepared for all the memories that rushed over her when she caught that fine, evocative scent, but as always, it took her unawares. Tears scorched her throat and her eyes, but she conquered them, breathing deep and slow until the crippling wave of grief passed.
She rummaged in the trunk, shifting the contents. Her father had owned the silk breeches and blouses of a professional racing jockey, though now the clothes were outdated by decades. On the island he had worn a workingman’s garb, and she never remembered him any other way. Her hand brushed a parchment-wrapped parcel. Only once had he shown her the contents. It was the yellow silk jacket he had worn when he’d ridden Lord Derby’s stallion, Aleazar, to victory in the most important race in England, so long ago.
“That was the night you were made,” he had once said.
She shut her eyes, remembering his pride as he’d told her of the race. He had always promised to tell her more about her mother, and why, bearing his infant daughter in his arms, he had suddenly taken ship for America. But he had died before the tale could be told.
Darting a glance over her shoulder at Hunter Calhoun, she drew her mind away from memories. She had a stranger in the house, and it wouldn’t do to turn her back on him until she discovered just what he was about. With brisk, decisive movements, she selected a pair of brown homespun trousers and a white shirt. Closing the lid of the trunk, she shoved the clothing at her guest. “Here,” she said. “You can put these on and hang your own things out to dry on the porch.”
“Much obliged.” He took the clothes, then stood waiting.
When she made no move, he did, bending slightly forward and peeling off his wet shirt. His damp chest was broad and deep, gleaming in the lamplight. When Eliza saw it, she experienced a peculiar knot of sensation low in her belly. Embarrassed, she realized that if she didn’t turn away, he would simply undress right in front of her.
“I’ll see about supper,” she said, yanking the half curtain across the room, separating it into two parts. Her father had put up the curtain when she had come to him one day in her fourteenth summer, terrified, convinced she was dying.
“It’s your estrous cycle. You’ve seen this happen with the mares,” he had said simply.
“You mean I’m…in season? Like a mare?”
“Not quite like that. But…similar.”
She remembered, with a rush of affection, how flustered he had been.
“It means your body is that of a woman,” he’d explained awkwardly. “But not your heart, my daughter,” he’d added. “Not yet.”
And that day he had strung up the curtain, made of an old saddle blanket pierced by an awl, for privacy.
In the small corner kitchen, she opened the iron stove and pumped the bellows at the banked embers there. Coaxing a fine wood fire under the two iron plates, she put on the coffeepot and heated the skillet. Fixing a meal for someone other than herself gave her a faint but undeniable stab of pleasure. Why was that? she wondered. Why did it please her so to have company? Because she had been alone for so long, she decided. She would have been pleased to welcome Bluebeard himself, she was that pathetic.
With a flourish, Calhoun moved aside the curtain and affected a haughty bow, like a gentleman at a cotillion dance. Not that she had ever been to a cotillion dance, but she had certainly read of them in her favorite—her only—novel.
He was, she noticed immediately, a much bigger man than her father had been. The breeches were tight, outlining every curve and bulge of strong thighs and hips. The shirt pulled taut across his shoulders, and he had rolled back the sleeves to reveal large, muscular forearms. The arms of a workingman. Odd, she thought. He was a planter. He forced slaves to do all his work for him. Yet he lacked the lazy, limp-wristed physique that came from idleness.
“In the absence of a mirror,” he said, “I have to judge by your expression that it’s not a perfect fit.”
“Um, my father was a rather small man.” She hoped Calhoun would attribute the redness of her cheeks to the heat from the stove. To herself, she couldn’t deny that the sight of him created a soft melting sensation inside her. She knew she was no different than she had been an hour before, but since meeting Hunter Calhoun she felt more…aware. More alive. More womanly. Because he was so…so manly. Nature had made them that way, she told herself, so why did she feel embarrassed? Flustered?
Living as she did, she knew the ways of horses and wild animals. She’d seen a stallion cover a mare with a strength and power that left her weak with awe. She had seen the strangely compelling mating of the ospreys, the rhythmic, almost violent beating of the male, the taut-throated response of the female. She thought she understood such things, but judging by the chaotic feelings churning inside her, she knew she was totally ignorant.
Calhoun took a flask from the pocket of his wet breeches and went outside, draping the pants and shirt over the clothesline strung across one end of the porch. Then he leaned back against the weather-beaten rail and tipped the flask, taking a long, thirsty pull.
Watching him through the screen mesh door, Eliza felt a small spark of shame, and hated herself for feeling it. There was no shame in being poor, in living simply. She harmed no one. But she couldn’t help wondering what this man thought of her shabby little house, the abandoned outbuildings, the swaybacked milch cow in the yard.
She put the fish on to fry and stepped outside. Calhoun didn’t turn, but kept staring out at the almost-dark sky, the pinpricks of stars and the moon riding low over the water.
“You’ve got a fine place here,” he said.
She gave a sharp laugh. “Do I, now?”
“It’s mighty peaceful.”
“You just said it was godforsaken.”
“But I’m getting drunk. The world always looks better to me when I’m drunk.” He held out the flask to her. 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 mind, a gilded mirror of their lives. Her father was Prospero, the wizard, bending wind and weather to his will. She, of course, was Miranda, the beautiful young woman awaiting her true love.
We are such stuff as dreams are made of, Prospero said in the play. And she had embraced the truth of it with her whole heart. But believing in dreams did not prepare her for the discomfiting reality of encountering a man like Hunter Calhoun.
“This other one is my newest,” she said, showing him. “Jane Eyre was a special gift my father brought me from the mainland last year. I’ve read it four times already.”
“I never thought much of lady novelists.”
She sniffed. “Then you probably haven’t thought much at all.”
“And how many times have you read the Shakespeare?” Calhoun asked.
“I’ve lost count. The Tempest has been my main companion for years.” She hesitated, then decided there was no harm in admitting her fanciful view of the play. “I used to imagine my father and I were Prospero and Miranda, stranded on their island.” She flushed. “I used to wait on the shore after a storm had passed, to see if a prince might wash up on the beach, like Ferdinand in the story.”
He leaned back, hooked his thumb into the waist of his pants and sneered at her. “Honey, believe me, I’m no prince.”
“I’d never mistake you for one.” She put The Tempest and Jane Eyre back on the shelf. “All I know of the world is what I’ve read in these books.”
“How do you know they’re showing you the world as it is?” he asked.
She ducked her head, conscious of his physical proximity and oddly pleased by his interested questions. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“’Course it matters. It’s not enough to understand something in the abstract. Life is meant to be lived, not read about.”
She pressed her hand against the row of books, stopping when she reached The Tempest. “Is it better to read of Antonio’s bitter envy and jealousy, or to feel it myself? What about Caliban’s rage and madness? He was a perfectly miserable monster, you know.”
His mouth quirked—almost a smile. “I know.” He took down the fat calf-bound volume of Jane Eyre and flipped through the crinkly pages. “Do you never wonder what Mr. Rochester felt, being reunited with Jane after all those years?”
She gave a little laugh. “You said you didn’t think much of lady novelists.”
“Not the bad ones, anyway.” He replaced the volume and stood back, surveying the collection. “So you have been raised by a horsemaster and his books.”
“I have.”
“You never missed having friends? Neighbors? Folks to call on you?”
“My friends and family are the birds and wild ponies and animals that have no fear of me.” Her cheeks grew hotter still. She felt so gauche and awkward in the presence of this plantation gentleman. “You must think I’m strange.”
He gave her a look that made her shiver. “I do, Miss Eliza Flyte. Indeed I do.”
He made her want to run and hide. Yet at the same time, she felt compelled to stand there, caressed by his scrutiny.
The strange heat she had been feeling all evening spread through her and intensified. She had the most peculiar premonition that he was going to touch her…and that she was going to let him.
A distant equine whinny pierced the air.
Eliza felt the fine hairs on her arms lift. The lonely, mournful wail of the stallion severed the invisible bond that had been slowly and seductively forming between her and Calhoun. She stepped sharply away from him. “You can bed down in that hammock on the porch,” she said tersely. “And it’s only fair to warn you—I sleep with a loaded Henry rifle at my side.”
Five
When Hunter awoke the next morning, the sun was high and the crazy woman was nowhere in sight. He lay in a sailor’s hammock strung across one end of a rickety porch, feeling the warm sting of the sun on his arms and smelling the fetid sweetness of the marsh at low tide.
He’d slept surprisingly well, considering the rough accommodations. She had lit a small fire in an iron brazier on the porch, laying lemon balm leaves across the coals, and the smoke kept the mosquitoes away. The night sounds—a cacophony of frogs and crickets and rollers scudding in from the Atlantic—created an odd symphony he found remarkably soothing. He usually needed a lot more whiskey to get himself to sleep.
He could hear no movement in the house, so he got up and went inside. Opening a stoneware jug in the dry sink, he discovered fresh water and took a long drink. Then he went to check his clothes, finding them stiff with salt, but dry. He dressed, his mind waking up to the fact that a peculiar woman had turned his horse loose on this deserted island, and that he had been powerless to stop her. Today he’d have to sail the scow home empty.
He tried to blame Noah, but none of this was the boy’s fault. Noah could not have known the horsemaster was dead and that his daughter had lost her wits.
Worse, he would have to face Blue. He’d have to explain to his son that he had not been able to save the stallion.
Muttering under his breath, he found his hip flask and wrenched off the cap. Empty.
“Shit,” he said, then drank more water and stepped outside. If she wasn’t anywhere in sight, he wasn’t going to waste his time looking for her.
Broad daylight didn’t improve the place. If anything, the poverty and ruin of Eliza Flyte’s settlement glared even more sharply. The little broken-back house and the burned-out barn resembled a scene in the aftermath of battle—lonely, eerie, abandoned. Yet despite the desolation, a closer examination revealed that someone actually lived in this place. She had added small, halfhearted touches here and there—a jar of wildflowers on the kitchen windowsill, a glass deck prism hung from the eaves to catch the sunlight, a row of martin houses high on posts in the trampled yard.
He followed a sandy path past an old arena shaded by a tall red cypress tree. Presumably this was where the fabled horsemaster had worked his spells. Now the splintered fence rails hung askew, and thick-leafed groundsel spread lush tentacles across the ground and up the posts. Fallen beams that had once held up a sail canvas sunshade lay collapsed in the middle. A smaller arena appeared to be in better shape, the rails lashed in place and the sailcloth stretched overhead, shading a full rain barrel.
As he continued along the winding path toward the sea, Hunter wondered what he could have been thinking, allowing himself to be persuaded to bring the stallion here. What a fool’s errand it had been. What a waste of time.
The horse was a menace. It needed to be shot.
It was not a duty he embraced, for the truth was, he loved horses. He always had. Against all caution, good sense and advice from well-meaning neighbors, he’d made the breeding and racing of Thoroughbreds his life.
Necessity, as much as desire, had dictated the change. His father, the master of Albion, had left the tobacco plantation to his first-born son. Hunter had expected the legacy. From the day of his birth he had been groomed for it. By the age of eight, he knew the worth of a peck of tobacco on the Richmond exchange. By the age of eleven, he knew how many pickers were needed to bring in a crop.
The only thing he hadn’t been prepared for was bankruptcy. When the will was read and all the dust settled, Hunter discovered something his father had concealed for years: Albion was swamped by debt. The once-prosperous tobacco plantation teetered on the verge of collapse.
Everyone had expected him to either go down with the plantation like the captain on a sinking ship, or to cut his losses, take what he could salvage and rebuild.
But to the amazement of the Tidewater plantation society, and to the consternation of his wife and her family, he did neither. He appalled them all with his actions. Before the small-eyed, hated trader came to sell off the slaves of Albion in order to pay pressing debts, Hunter set each one of the slaves free. Hunter’s father-in-law, Hugh Beaumont, had shrieked that the servants and field-workers were worth a small fortune as chattel, but nothing as free people.
What could Hunter have been thinking?
He knew setting them free was foolhardy, yet the day he signed the stack of manumission papers, Hunter had felt ten feet tall. His father-in-law had accused him of going insane, but Hunter had simply turned away and called in an estate agent to auction off some of the remote tobacco fields and furniture.
When all was done, he was left with a huge, half-empty house and a handful of ex-slaves who stayed on out of old age, infirmity or loyalty. In addition to the house, he kept the barns, the paddocks and acreage in the high meadows suitable for pasturing.
He remembered the day he’d told Lacey what he intended to do with Albion. He and his wife had sat together in the still-elegant parlor; the estate liquidators had not yet come to seize the Waterford candlesticks and chandeliers, the Heppelwhite chests, the Montcalme harpsichord and Aubusson carpets. His voice low and deep with excitement, Hunter had finally confessed his life’s ambition. He told his wife that he wished to make a new start and turn Albion into a Thoroughbred breeding and racing farm.
She had laughed at him. He’d recognized the merry, girlish laugh that had captivated him when he was a boy, only this laugh had a harsh edge of desperation. “Darling, you can’t mean it. Making a horse farm will take far more money than you have, and years of work. And you’ve just set all your laborers free.”
Her lack of belief in him struck hard. He had looked down at his large, pale hands, holding them to the light and splaying the fingers wide. “Sweetheart, these hands have held the reins of the finest horseflesh in Virginia. They’ve cradled bottles of wine worth more than some men earn in a lifetime. They’ve been dealt hands of cards that won or lost a small fortune. And they’ve loved you with all that I am for eight years. The one thing they’ve never done is a day of hard, honest labor.” He turned them palms up, studied his long fingers as if they belonged to someone else. “Right now, these hands are the only thing I can truly claim as mine. So I reckon I’d better get used to the idea of doing the work myself.”
Lacey Calhoun had wept, certain her husband had lost his mind. She had begged him to consider their young children, Belinda and Blue, and what this would do to their position in society. But Hunter had stood firm. For once, he was going to go after something he truly wanted. For the first time in his life, the dream belonged to him. Not to his father or to the other planters, to his neighbors or Lacey’s family, but to him.
Lacey had not understood. Hysterical, she had run from the room to pack her things. Then she’d taken the children to her father’s house, refusing to see Hunter until he regained his senses.
That day had marked the end of their marriage. He hadn’t noticed it at the time, of course, because he had given himself, to the last inch of his soul, to the new enterprise. He’d worked like a madman on stables, arena, round pen, racing track, starting gates. Working side by side with Noah, he had sought out broodmares and studs—bargaining, borrowing, buying, breeding and praying his luck would hold. Slowly, as time passed, things began to happen. His horses won races. He received invitations to run his horses at Clover Bottom, Metairie and Union Course. Breeders from Virginia and Maryland, Tennessee and Kentucky sought out his studs. The foals out of his mares were considered to be among the best in racing. He inaugurated an annual yearling sale at Albion.
But as he gained a hold on the racing world, he lost it on his wife. The daughter of Albion’s nearest neighbor, Lacey had been groomed to be a planter’s wife and had no idea how to cope with a husband who worked like a man possessed and didn’t seem to care whether or not he profited from his labors. The tobacco culture, which made up her world, no longer welcomed Hunter Calhoun. Planters looked down on him, branding him a brawler, a gambler, a horse racer. If he’d grown wealthy from his enterprise, they would have changed their minds, but despite the success of his horses, the expenses always outpaced the profits. He should have known the change would be too much for Lacey. But he had been naively certain she would come to believe, as he did, that there were better ways for a man to live his life than employing slave labor to grow a weed that would make him rich.
By that time, it was too late to win Lacey back. He tried—Lord, he tried—but to no avail. His pleas and promises fell on deaf ears. His reminders of their marriage vows and their duties to the children were met with stony silence. He had humiliated her in front of the society that meant everything to her, an unforgivable offense. Never once did Lacey crack, never once did she allow herself to show a flicker of feeling for the man she had pledged to love until the day she died.
Then she had died, in the most hideous possible way, leaving the shattered wreckage of a broken family in her wake—a husband whose only solace lay in a dented silver flask of whiskey, a son whose soul had been sucked away by shock and grief and a daughter who was too young to understand anything except the fact that all the joy had gone from her life.
The prospect of repairing his fortune became the only thing that gave shape and meaning to Hunter’s future. Importing the swiftest Irish Thoroughbred on record should have been the culmination of his ambitions. Deemed a bad foal-getter, Finn was undervalued, and Hunter’s agent in Ireland had acquired him at a low price. Even so, it had cost him all the proceeds of his first yearling sale, and he could not afford to insure the animal through Lloyd’s. He had not once paused to consider that a disaster could befall the horse on the voyage from Ireland.
By the time Hunter breasted the broad dunes facing the southeastern end of the island, he had worked himself into a black and thirsty mood. The need for whiskey sharpened to a gnawing hunger in his gut, and until he reached Albion he had no way to assuage it.
At the high tide line, he reached the scarps in the dunes, forming cliffs where heaved-up surf had clawed into the sand. The roots of sea oats dangled in a dense snarl from the underlip of the cliff. Hunter stood at the crumbling edge, scanning the shore for his scow. He could make out the shadow of a cove, and noticed that the sea changed color not far offshore, indicating a decent deepwater anchorage.
Pirates had probably haunted this place long ago. All Virginians had been raised on stories of Bluebeard, who had visited the islands, leaving at least one wife on Assateague. This island was a place where people with secrets might come. He wondered what Henry Flyte’s secret had been.
As he surveyed the landscape, a movement on the beach below caught his eye.
In a dazzle of sunshine, Eliza Flyte walked along the broad ribbon of sand. Her bare feet left a trail of imprints. She moved slowly, though a curious sense of purpose marked her demeanor. She was strange indeed, with her bare ankles and tattered skirts, and thick, indigo hair pulled back in a long tail. She was as slender as a girl, and at first glance yesterday he had mistaken her for one. One look at her full breasts and curving hips had disabused him of that notion. She was no girl, but a woman. A crazy woman, alas.
In one hand she carried a loose length of rope, and she held a halter looped over her shoulder.
He was about to call out, but then he caught another movement at the edge of his field of vision. His jaw dropped. It was the stallion, a huge rust-colored shadow trailing in her wake.
A single thought streaked through his mind. The horse was a killer.
Half running, half falling down the slope of the dune, Hunter raced toward the beach. He had seen what the stallion could do. The woman had no idea of the danger she courted. Hunter wished he had his gun, but the fool woman had drowned all his shot. He had to make do with yelling, waving his arms as he ran down the hill.
Both horse and woman turned to him at the same moment. The stallion whistled and snorted, then reared and landed with front feet splayed, ready for battle. Eliza Flyte regarded Hunter with fury in her eyes. The horse tossed his head to one side, and Hunter feared he would attack her.
He redoubled his speed, pausing only to pick up a length of driftwood. He flung it with all his might at the horse. He missed, but the stallion broke and ran. Hunter released a sigh of relief, but he knew the danger wasn’t past. He had to get Eliza Flyte to safety.
“This way,” he yelled, grabbing her arm and pulling her toward the dunes. “For Chrissake, hurry!”
She pulled back, her strength surprising as she wrenched free of him. “Are you mad?” she demanded. “I almost—”
“I’m not the crazy one around here.” He reached for her again.
She feinted away. “It took me half an hour to get him this far,” she snapped. “Now you’ve spooked him and I’ll have to start all over again.”
He cast a look at the horse. Finn stood tensely some yards away. His skin twitched, and his tail flicked nervously over his flanks. His nostrils were distended, eyes wary.
“I’ve seen what this horse can do,” Hunter said. “I won’t stand by and watch him attack you.”
“He won’t attack me.”
“Damn it—”
“Look.” She edged away from him as if fearing he’d try to touch her again. Her long hair twitched in a manner that reminded him of the horse. “Give me a chance with this horse. That’s all I ask. Just a chance.”
“No. It’s too dangerous.”
“Please,” she said, her anger draining away to desperation. “I need to try. Just let me try.”
He didn’t know why she moved him. What was she, anyway, but a strange hermit woman with crazy ideas? Yet he found himself softening, relenting. “I’ll wait there,” he said, pointing to a gnarled, budding tree at the edge of the marsh. He stooped and picked up the stout piece of driftwood. “And if he goes on the attack, so will I.”
“But you have to promise you won’t unless I call for your help.”
He hesitated. Then, surprising himself as well as her, he said, “I promise.”
She didn’t smile, though her eyes shone in a way he shouldn’t have noticed, but did. “I hope you have a lot of patience,” she said, hefting the rope over her shoulder. “You’re going to need it.”
Hunter waited quietly in the shadows, feeling the wind dry the sweat on his face. He was convinced he’d have to save Eliza Flyte from herself, from her own fool notions. He was amazed at how scared he’d been, seeing her stalked by that horse. He was even more amazed that she’d convinced him to let her try her weird training again.
Walking along the beach as if just taking a stroll, she completely disregarded both Hunter and the horse. The stallion turned at an angle, but Hunter could tell Finn was watching her with one wary eye. She continued walking, elaborately and disdainfully ignoring him. Like an inquisitive child, the stallion sidled closer.
Hunter’s fist closed around the makeshift club. Instinct told him to act quickly, spook the horse, but he forced himself to stay still. And watchful.
The horse moved closer and closer, inexorably drawn to the woman walking along the empty beach. Hunter could relate to that level of curiosity even as the tension churned in his gut. He tried not to think about the hired groom almost fainting from the pain in his shattered wrist.
The horse closed in near her shoulder. She sent Hunter the swiftest of looks, warning him not to interfere. His muscles quivered with the urge to act.
Eliza turned, quite calmly, and made a shooing motion with the rope. Snakelike, the rope sailed through the air and dropped on the sand. The horse immediately shied back, pawing the sand and dipping his head in irritation.
But he didn’t spook the way he had when Hunter had run at him. He wondered why Eliza would do that with the rope. Why provoke a dangerous animal? What was she thinking?
She continued walking, unconcerned. She reached a tall brake of reeds where the sand disappeared into the spongy estuary leading to the marsh. Making a wide turn, she headed back the way she had come, staying on the beach. To Hunter’s surprise, the horse followed her, though he gave her a wide berth.
After a few minutes, the stallion approached her obliquely again, and again she shooed him away, flicking the rope in his direction. She behaved like an exasperated mother flapping her apron at a wayward child. And like the wayward child, the horse never did lose interest, but kept trying to move in closer. They repeated the bizarre exchange several times more, always with the same result.
Then, with her shoulders square and her eye fixed on the horse, she moved abruptly toward the stallion.
Her motion alarmed Hunter. He took a step forward, then remembered his promise and made himself stop. Finn cantered in a tight loop, his attention fixed on her. Hunter expected him to disappear, but instead, he loped around and came back again. She kept pushing, taunting, startling him into flight over and over again. She never looked away from the horse, and the horse never looked away from her. It was an intricate dance of aggression and surrender, the partners intent on one another. The fascination was mutual.
Hunter kept expecting her to call for help, because the horse had moved in too close for comfort. Then he realized, with a start, that Eliza was controlling the situation completely. She dictated when the horse could come near, and when she wanted him to flee. There had to be a point to her actions but he couldn’t quite decide what that point was. She had the posture of ritual—the fierce attention of her stare, the dignified stance of her body, the solemn flick of her arm shooing him away.
After a few minutes, her gaze underwent a subtle change. Rather than staring so intently into the horse’s eyes, she looked away once. Then twice, thrice. The horse’s cantering slowed. It flicked back one ear. Still he feinted, but the loops he ran were tighter; he came back more readily. His head dropped a little, and Hunter could see his jaw working.
Each time the stallion approached her, he became bolder. Each time she shooed him away, he came back again. To Hunter, it resembled a subtle flirtation of sorts. She was clearly interested, yet full of disdain. The stallion played the ardent suitor, persistent, refusing to be put off, yet not gregarious enough to force himself on her. There was a curious grace in the interplay between girl and horse.
Perhaps she was stranger, even, than Hunter had originally thought.
Then, right before his eyes, the dance changed from a wary flirtation to a tentative partnership. The stallion stayed at her side now, his muzzle practically nudging her shoulder. They walked along side by side, their pace unhurried and their steps oddly synchronized, as if they were moving together to the same silent music.
Hunter started to relax a little. The horse perceived no threat from the woman, so he posed no menace to her. When Eliza Flyte turned, the stallion turned. When she quickened her pace, so did the horse. When she slowed down, he did the same. And finally, as if it were the most natural movement in the world, she stopped walking and touched the horse, her hand resting at the side of his head.
Hunter heard her whoa across the broad stretch of beach. The horse halted. Hunter froze, held his breath. He couldn’t have taken his eyes off her if he’d wanted to. But he didn’t want to. He was as much her prisoner as was the horse. Finn’s ears flickered but he didn’t pull back, and she didn’t take her hand away.
She turned her body toward the stallion, though she held her gaze faintly averted. He dropped his head, submitting with something almost like relief. His muzzle hung so low to the ground that he probably inhaled grains of sand into his nostrils. The pose of submission looked incongruous on the big horse.
The girl, like an angel, ran her hand down the length of the horse’s head. Even from a distance, Hunter could see the stallion’s shivered reaction to that gentle caress, and it had a strange impact on him. He felt Eliza’s hand on the horse as if she had touched him. It was absurd, but he found himself so captivated by her that he wanted that caress for himself.
It was an unorthodox way to train a stallion, one Hunter had read about in the writings of the great horsemaster, John Solomon Rarey. He had never thought the method could be put to practical use, but the mystical ritual had taken place before his eyes.
She had made the stallion want her—to be near her, to be touched by her.
Hunter lowered himself to the ground, looping his hands loosely around his drawn-up knee. He wondered what she would do next.
Just then, a flock of gulls rose as one from the shallows. Their wings flashed white against the sky and they made a sound like a gust of wind. The horse panicked, rearing so high that his hooves nearly struck Eliza in the head. Hunter roared out a warning, leaping up and running toward her.
She calmly stepped away. The horse landed heavily, then twisted his big body and galloped away toward the thicket behind the dunes.
“You’re crazier than the horse is,” Hunter said, his nerves in shreds. “I won’t have any part in this. I’m leaving with the morning tide.”
Eliza appeared not to hear him as she coiled the rope carefully. “That’s enough for today anyway,” she said. “There’s always tomorrow. Best not to rush.”
“You might not be able to find him tomorrow.”
She shaded her eyes and looked up at the rise of the dunes. The stallion turned, showing his profile, and reared against the sky, a whinny erupting from deep within him. Then, with a flick of his tail, he was gone.
“He’ll be back,” Eliza said.
Six
Eliza set out some of last autumn’s apples she’d preserved in a charcoal barrel. In the morning she slipped out early to find that they’d been eaten. She tried to quell a surge of excitement, reminding herself that her father’s first rule was to work at the horse’s pace, peeling away his fears layer by layer rather than trying to rush things. There were more good horses ruined by haste than by any sort of injury, she reminded herself.
In the half-light she inspected the training facility that had been the hub of her father’s life. It was sad, seeing it like this, broken, burnt and neglected. He had died here, she thought with a shudder. He had died for doing the precise thing she was about to do.
The area inside the pen was overgrown with thistle and cordgrass. She would have to spend the day clearing it. Backbreaking but necessary work. Perhaps Hunter Calhoun would be of some use after all.
The thought of her unexpected visitor seemed to have summoned him, for when she untied the halter and turned to pull the gate, he stood there, behind her.
He discomfited her. There was no other word for it. Wearing his own clothes rather than the ill-fitting ones he’d worn yesterday, he managed to appear as broad and comely as a storybook prince, with the breeze in his blond hair and his sleeves rolled back to reveal the dark sun-gold of his forearms. On closer inspection she saw that a golden bristle shaded his unshaven jaw, but that didn’t make him less striking. It only served to soften the edges of his finely made cheeks and jaw, and added to his appeal.
She had never heeded her own looks. She’d never taken the time to make sure her dress fit nicely or her hair was properly curled and pinned. Living on the island with her father, and lately all on her own, made such vanities seem unimportant.
But now, feeling the heat of this man’s stare upon her, appearances were everything. Absolutely everything. She wanted to shrivel down into the ground like a flower too long in the sun. She found herself remembering a group of gentry that had accompanied the drovers to the island to buy ponies from her father one year. They’d made a holiday of it, much as people did on penning day up at Chincoteague to the north. She was twelve, and until that day she had not known a girl wearing breeches and haphazardly cropped hair would be considered anything unusual.
But as she walked past the freshwater pond where the herd of ponies grazed, she became aware of a hush that swept over folks as she walked by, followed by a buzz of whispers when she passed.
“I never knew Henry Flyte had a boy,” someone said.
The dart had sunk deep into the tender flesh of her vanity. She recalled actually flinching, feeling the sting between her shoulder blades.
“That’s no boy,” someone else declared. “That’s the horsemaster’s daughter.”
That day, Eliza had stopped wearing trousers. She had painstakingly studied a tattered copy of Country Wives Budget to learn how to make a dress. She let her hair grow out and tried to style it in the manner of the engraved illustrations in the journal. In subsequent years, visitors to the island still whispered about her, but not because she looked like a boy. It was because she had become a creature recognizable as female no matter what she wore. The stares and whispers carried quite a different connotation. But she never managed to fix herself up quite right. Never managed to capture the polished prettiness of a girl gently raised. And in truth, it usually didn’t matter.
But when she brushed the tangle of black hair out of her eyes and looked across the field at Hunter Calhoun, it mattered.
“I was just thinking about you,” she confessed.
He propped an elbow on the rail and crossed one ankle over the other. “You were?”
“This area needs clearing.”
One side of his mouth slid upward. She couldn’t tell if it was a grin or a sneer. “And why would that make you think of me?” he asked.
A sneer, she decided. “Because it’s where your horse is going to be kept.”
“I told you yesterday, I want no part of this idiotic scheme. I plan to leave—”
“You’re not going to get away with just leaving him.” Her thoughts, of which he could have no inkling, made her testy. If he wondered why, she’d just let him wonder. “I didn’t ask you to bring him here, but now that you have, you’re going to see this through.”
He spread his hands in mock surrender. “It is through. Don’t you see that? The horse is vicious, and he’s scared of a flock of damn birds. Sure, you did a little parlor trick with him down on the beach, but you’ll never turn that animal into a racehorse.”
She glared at him. “Get a shovel.”
“I just said—”
“I heard what you said. Get a shovel, Calhoun. If I’m wrong, you can—” She broke off, undecided.
“I can what?”
“You can shoot me, not the horse.”
He laughed, but to her relief, he picked up a rusty shovel and hefted it over his shoulder. “You don’t mean that.”
“There’s one way to find out.”
“Damn, but you are a stubborn woman. What the hell gives you the idea you can turn this horse around?”
“I watched my father do it for years, and he taught me to do it on my own.”
“And just what is it you think you can do for that animal?”
“Figure out why he’s afraid, then show him he doesn’t need to be afraid anymore.” She eyed him critically. “It would help if you’d quit spooking him every time he twitches an ear.”
“If it’s so simple,” he asked, “why don’t all horsemen train by this method?”
“I don’t know any other horsemen,” she admitted. “My father showed me the ways of horses by taking me to see the wild ponies, season after season, year after year. If you watch close enough, you start seeing patterns in the way they act. As soon as you understand the patterns, you understand what they’re saying.”
“You claim to know a lot about horses, Eliza Flyte. Sounds like you gave it a fair amount of study.”
“It was my life.”
“Was?”
“Before my father passed.”
“What is your life now?”
The question pressed at her in a painful spot. She braced herself against the hurt. No matter what, she must not let Calhoun’s skepticism undermine her confidence. The horse had to learn to trust her, and if she wasn’t certain of her skills, he’d sense that. “You ask hard questions, Mr. Calhoun,” she said. Then she froze, and despite the rising heat of the day felt a chilly tingle of awareness.
“What is it?” he asked. “You’re going all weird on me again—”
“Hush.” She carefully laid aside her rake. From the corner of her eye, she spied the stallion on the beach path some distance away. “There you are, my love,” she whispered. “I knew you’d come.”
“What?” Calhoun scratched his head in confusion.
Eliza stifled a laugh at his ignorance, but she didn’t have time to explain things to him right now.
Hunter held out for as long as he could, but at last worry got the better of him. Taking the shovel in hand to use as a weapon, he followed Eliza’s footprints in the sand. No matter what she said, her scheme to pen the horse and train him was as insane as the woman herself. He had no idea why she thought she could tame a maddened, doomed horse that the best experts in the county couldn’t get near.
A sharp, burning tension stabbed between his shoulders as he quickened his pace. He kept imagining her broken, bleeding, maimed by the horse. Before he knew it, he was running, and he didn’t stop until he saw her.
As she had the day before, Eliza Flyte walked barefoot down the beach. And, just like yesterday, the stallion followed her. He was skittish at first, but after a while he started moving in close. She repeated the ritualistic moves—the turning, the shooing away, the staring down.
Hunter was intrigued, especially in light of what she had said about knowing what a horse was thinking by watching what he did with his body. Perhaps it was only his imagination, he thought, arguing with himself, but the horse followed her more quickly and readily than he had the day before. He stayed longer too, when she turned to touch him around the head and ears.
The docile creature, following the girl like a big trained dog, hardly resembled the murderous stallion. The horse that had exploded from the belly of the ship with fire in his eye. The horse they all said was ruined for good.
Hunter caught himself holding his breath, hoping foolishly that the girl just might be right, that Finn could be tamed, trained to race again. The notion shattered when the horse reared and ran off. This time the trigger was nothing more than the wind rippling across a tide pool, causing a brake of reeds to bend and whip. The stallion panicked as if a bomb had gone off under him. Eliza stood alone on the sand, staring off into the distance.
A parlor trick, Hunter reminded himself, trying not to feel too sorry for Eliza Flyte. Maybe she had put something in those apples she’d set out for the horse. Hunter wanted to believe, but he couldn’t. He’d seen too much violence in the animal. Letting her toy with him this way only postponed the inevitable.
“I can’t stay here any longer,” he informed her that evening. He stood on the porch; she was in the back, finishing with the cow. A cacophony of chirping frogs filled the gathering dark. “Did you hear what I said?” he asked, raising his voice.
“I heard you.”
“I have to go back to Albion,” he said. “I have responsibilities—”
“You do,” she agreed, coming around the side of the house with a bucket of milk. She walked so silently on bare feet, it amazed him. The women he knew made a great racket when they moved, what with their crinolines and hoop skirts brushing against everything in sight. And the women he knew talked. A lot. Most of the time Eliza Flyte was almost eerily quiet.
“Responsibilities at home,” he said. He had a strange urge to tell her more, to explain about his children, but he wouldn’t let himself. She disliked and distrusted him enough as it was. And he didn’t know what the hell to think of her.
“And to that horse you brought across a whole ocean,” she reminded him. “He didn’t ask for that, you know.”
“I never intended to stay this long. I swear,” he said in annoyance. “I can’t seem to get through to you, can I?” The craving for a drink of whiskey prickled him, making him pace in agitation and rake a splayed hand through his hair. “The damn horse is ruined. You’ve managed to get close to him a time or two, but that’s a far cry from turning him into something a person could actually ride.”
She set down the milk bucket. “We’ve barely begun. That horse is likely to be on the offense a good while. His wounds need to heal. He has to regain his strength and confidence. He has to learn to trust again, and that takes time.”
“Give it up, Eliza—”
“You brought him here because you thought there was something worth saving,” she said passionately.
“That was before I realized it’s hopeless.”
“I never said it wouldn’t be a struggle.”
“I don’t have time to stand by while you lose a struggle.”
“Fine.” She picked up the bucket and climbed the steps, pushing the kitchen door open with her hip. “Then watch me win.”
“Right.”
Yet he found himself constantly intrigued by everything about her. He felt torn, but only for a moment. Nancy and Willa looked after the children, and the Beaumonts’ schoolmaster at neighboring Bonterre saw to their lessons. Blue and Belinda wouldn’t miss their father if he stayed away for days or even weeks. The truth of the thought revived his thirst for whiskey. His own children hardly knew him. It scared them when he drank, and he often woke up vowing he wouldn’t touch another drop, but the thirst always got the better of him. Maybe it was best for them if he was gone for a while.
“I’ll strike a bargain with you,” he said to Eliza through the half-open door. “You get a halter on that horse without getting yourself killed, and I’ll stay for as long as it takes.”
The stallion greeted Eliza with savage fury. On the long stretch of beach that had become their battleground, he stood with his mouth open and his teeth bared. He flicked his ears and tail and tossed his head.
She fixed a stare on him and forbade herself to feel disheartened by the horse’s violence and distrust. Patience, she kept telling herself hour after hour. Patience.
The horse shrieked out a whinny and reared up. The sound of its shrill voice touched her spine with ice. She treated him with disdain, turning and walking away as if she did not care whether or not he followed. Perhaps it was the storm last night and the lingering thunder of a higher-than-usual surf, but the stallion behaved with fury today. He snorted, then plunged at her, and it took all her self-control to stand idly on the sand rather than run for cover.
She flicked the rope out. The horse flattened his ears to his head, distended his nostrils, rolled his eyes. Eliza stood firm. The stallion pawed the sand, kicking up a storm beneath his hooves. Yet even as he threatened her, even as the fear crowded in between them, she felt his indomitable spirit and knew one day she would reach him.
But not today, she thought exhaustedly after hours of trying to keep and hold his attention and trust. His whinny was more piercing than ever, and when thunder rolled and he shot away like a stone from a sling, she stood bereft, defeated, fighting the doubts that plagued her.
Taming the stallion became the most important thing in Eliza’s life. She tried not to examine her reasons for this, but they were pitifully clear, probably to Hunter Calhoun as well as in her own mind. It was not just Calhoun’s challenge, and her need to win the bargain they had struck, to make him stay and see this through. Nor was it any sort of softhearted nature on her part. No, her primary reason for dedicating herself to the violent, wounded horse was to bring herself closer to her father.
For some time now, she had been losing him by inches. Her father, whom she had adored with all that she was, kept slipping farther and farther away from her, and she didn’t know how to get him back. One day she would realize she had forgotten what his voice sounded like when he said “good morning” to her. Then she would realize she had forgotten what his hands looked like. And the expression on his face when he told her a story, and the song he used to sing when he chopped wood for the stove. Each time a precious memory eluded her, she felt his death all over again.
Yet when she worked with the horse, she felt Henry Flyte surround her, as if his hand guided her hand, his voice whispered in her ear and his spirit soared with her own.
So when the horse broke from her, pawed the ground with crazed savagery and ran until he foamed at the mouth, she wouldn’t let herself get discouraged. The stallion was a gift in disguise, brought by a stranger. The gift from her father was more subtle, but she felt it flow through her each time she locked stares with the horse.
Hunter wondered how much longer he should pretend he believed in her. He had stopped worrying that the stallion would murder her outright. So long as he wasn’t confined or restrained, Finn didn’t seem to go on the attack. As hard as Eliza worked with him, however, she seemed no closer to penning him than she had that first day.
Yet she went on tirelessly, certain he would become hers to command. Hunter decided to give her just a little more time, a day or two perhaps, then return to Albion. To pass the time, he did some work around the place, repairing the pen where she swore they would train the horse once she haltered him. The mindless labor of hammering away at a damaged rail was oddly soothing—until he accidentally hammered his thumb.
Words he didn’t even realize he knew poured from him in a stream of obscenity. He clapped his maimed hand between his thighs and felt the agony radiate to every nerve ending.
Eliza chose that precise moment to see what he was doing. Caliban—as ugly a dog as Hunter had ever seen—leaped and cavorted along the sandy path beside her.
“Hit yourself?” she asked simply.
Her attitude infuriated him. “I hammered my thumb. I think it’s broken. That should make you happy.”
“No, because if it’s broken or gets infected, you won’t be able to work. Come with me.”
He started to say that he didn’t plan to stay and work here any longer, but she had already turned from him. She led the way to the big cistern near the house and extracted a bucketful of fresh water. The big dog sat back on his haunches, the intensity of his attention seeming almost human.
“Ow,” Hunter said when she plunged his hand into the bucket. “Damn, that stings.”
“I know. It’ll be even worse with the lye soap.”
“Hey—damn it to hell, Eliza.”
Caliban growled a warning. Clearly he didn’t like Hunter’s threatening tone to his mistress.
She showed no sympathy whatsoever as she applied a grayish, irregular cake of soap to the cut thumb, then worked the joint to prove to him it wasn’t broken. Ignoring the curses that streamed out from between his clenched teeth, she fetched a tin of wormwood liniment and rubbed it into the wound. He noticed her staring at the wedding band he had never bothered to discard, but she said nothing. The ointment soothed his fiery, raw flesh, and as she wrapped his thumb in a strip of clean cloth, he grew quiet.
She regarded him through eyelashes that were remarkably long and thick. “You’ve stopped swearing. I suppose this means you’re feeling better.”
“Might mean I’m about to pass out from your tender care,” he said mockingly. The truth was, he caught himself enjoying the sensation of her small hand rubbing the herbal liniment on him. Though impersonal, her touch was gentle and caring, undemanding.
She glared at him. “It wasn’t my fault you pounded your thumb.”
“I wouldn’t have been pounding if you hadn’t insisted on fixing up your pen.”
“I wouldn’t need the pen fixed if you hadn’t brought me that horse.”
“I—” He yanked his hand away from hers. “All right. So it’s all my fault.” Despite his amusement at sparring with her, he grew serious. “Eliza, we have to end this.”
“End what?”
“The pretending. That horse isn’t going to get any better.”
Something flickered in her eyes—fear, rage, distrust—something that reminded him eerily of the stallion.
“You’re wrong,” she said in a low, angry voice. She stepped back, wiping her hands on her apron. “Come with me. Maybe you’ll understand better when I show you.”
Motioning for the dog to stay back, she led Hunter on a hike northward, perhaps two miles along a narrow, sandy track that wound along the edge of the loblolly pine forest and skirted the dunes. After they crossed a low, marshy area, Hunter noticed hoofprints and droppings on the path and in some of the thickets they passed.
“Stay very quiet,” Eliza said, leading him around a curve in the path. “They’re not terribly shy, but they are wild.”
“The ponies, you mean.”
She nodded. “Let’s climb that dune there. Be very quiet.”
He found himself lying, belly down, next to her on the slope of a dune. The spiky reeds framed a view of a broad saltwater marsh crammed with tender green shoots of cordgrass. A herd of about eighteen large ponies grazed in the distance while starlings and sparrows perched on their backs and pecked insects from their hides.
Hunter had seen herds before. But the sight of the island horses, wild and free, moved him. It was a scene he knew he’d hold in his heart for all his days—the placid animals with their heads bent to their grazing, the salt-misted air soft around them, the white-winged gulls wheeling overhead. He glanced over at Eliza and saw that a similar wonder had suffused her face. That was her charm, he realized. Her sense of wonder, her different way of looking at things. He suddenly wished he could see the world through her eyes.
“Where did they come from?” he asked.
“My father brought a herd down, one animal at a time, from Assateague.”
“I wonder how they got there.”
“Pirates, some say. Others think they’re descended from horses turned out to graze by settlers on the mainland. My father believed they’re descended from a shipwrecked load of Spanish ponies. They were being sent to Panama to work in the mines, and every last one of them had been purposely blinded.” She made a face. “So they wouldn’t panic when they were lowered into the mines. Those that survived the wreck swam ashore and turned wild.”
They listened for a while to the deep rhythm of the sea and the wind through the pine forest behind them. He felt surprisingly comfortable, lying in the dunes beside Eliza Flyte. It was something he wished he could do with his children—simply lie still in the sand, in the late afternoon, and watch a herd of horses. He hadn’t done anything of the sort with his children, not in a very long time. Maybe not ever.
“Now watch,” Eliza whispered. “That big shaggy gray is the stallion, and you’ll be able to recognize the mares by the way they behave. See that yearling there, the little bay? He’ll ask the mare for a grooming.”
She turned out to be right. The younger horse approached the mare obliquely, head down, mouth open. The mare rebuffed him, laying back her ears. He persisted even when she reared up and threatened to bite, and after a time she accepted him, nibbling at his head, mane and neck. The exchange was remarkably similar to the interplay Hunter had seen on the beach between Eliza and the stallion.
“Funny how he keeps after her even when she’s ignoring him. I reckon I’ve met a few Virginia belles who must’ve gone to the same finishing school as that mare.”
She propped her chin in her hand. “What are they like—Virginia belles?”
He thought for a moment, remembering the endless dancing lessons he had endured as a boy, the stiff and awkward society balls and the tedious conversation that had droned on and on when the belles went on their annual husband hunt. “Like that mare,” he said simply. “Bossy, fussy about grooming, and fascinating to youngsters and males.”
She blew out an exasperated breath, scattering grains of sand. “That doesn’t tell me anything.”
He fell silent and watched the herd for a while. Then he reached out and skimmed his finger along Eliza Flyte’s cheek in a slow, sensual caress. It felt even smoother than it looked.
She smacked his hand away and whispered, “What are you doing?”
“If I keep after you,” he said in a teasing voice, “will you eventually give in?”
“I’ll eventually box your ears.” Yet despite the threat, merriment danced in her eyes, and—wonder of wonders—she was blushing.
They watched the herd until the sun lay low across the island, plunging toward the bay in the west. Eliza stood and brushed herself off. Some of the ponies looked up, but settled back to their grazing or resting when she and Hunter started along the path. About halfway to the house, she turned into a thicket bordered by holly and red cedar.
There in the middle of the clearing stood a weathered gray stump. Carved on the trunk was the name Henry Flyte, d. 1853, and, encased in sealed glass, a painstakingly copied verse Hunter recognized from The Tempest:
“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
The image of Eliza Flyte, giving her father a solitary burial and marking the grave with the weird and beautiful verse, tore at his heart. The peaceful wonder of the afternoon had gone. “You should leave this place,” he said. “Make a new life somewhere else.”
She made her way back to the path. “You shouldn’t feel sorry for me. I have riches beyond compare, here on this island.”
“And you’re content to live here for all of your days.”
Just for a moment, a secretive look flashed in her eyes. “I—yes,” she said hastily. “Why would I want anything else?”
“Because you’re human,” he said, speaking sharply. He wasn’t certain why she made him angry, but she did. “You don’t belong with a herd of horses. You belong with other people.”
“People like you?” She sent him an insolent, sidelong glance.
“Why not?” he demanded.
“I might just choke on all that Virginia charm,” she retorted, flipping her plaited hair with a toss of her head.
She made him want to stay long after common sense told him it was time to leave. Hunter watched the struggle between Eliza and the stallion with a mixture of admiration and hopelessness. There was something to be said for being stubborn enough not to give up, but how long should he let her keep denying the truth? The difficult battle of wills might go on for weeks, months, maybe even longer.
Enough was enough, he decided two days later. It was time to end the charade. He found Eliza and Finn easily enough. All he had to do was follow the stallion’s piercing, bloodcurdling scream.
They were on the long south beach, the one shadowed by the tallest dunes. Hunter was not surprised to see the horse up on his hind legs, his open mouth working furiously. Below him, Eliza looked helpless, yet curiously unafraid.
The stallion’s front hooves raked the air. Then he came crashing down mere yards from the woman. Up he went again, and down. Hunter imagined he could feel the ground shaking. A tight, nervous fear clutched his chest, but he told himself he’d only infuriate them both if he interfered. Though Eliza had made no progress with the horse, she had convinced Hunter that Finn would not hurt her.
The tantrum continued for a few more moments. Hunter waited on the dune until it subsided. Then the stallion planted his front hooves in the sand, and the woman reached out and touched him. The silent, familiar ritual gave the false impression that the horse was hers to command. But when she looped her soft rope over his head, he exploded again. He shook his head like a wet dog and started foaming at the mouth.
Eliza waited patiently, then started the ritual all over again. The crazed eyes of the stallion tracked her every move. The horse’s nostrils quivered and his muscles twitched. Yet after a while, Hunter realized the horse was standing his ground rather than going away. The next time Eliza put the rope around his neck, he pulled his head back but kept his feet firmly planted.
This was different, Hunter realized, lowering himself to the sand and forgetting his purpose. Something was changing, even as he watched. The stallion clearly didn’t like the rope, but the woman had somehow convinced him to bear it.
She went to his side, touched him gently along his neck and cheek. The horse stood frozen, alert but not alarmed. Eliza put the halter where the rope had been. She loosely placed it around his neck. Finn trembled, then broke away in a sweeping, athletic feint.
Hunter’s hopes plummeted. Enough, he thought, getting up.
But then the horse stopped and turned back toward Eliza. As if she had bade him, he walked to her and stood placidly while she touched him all over, head and neck and sides and flanks. His chestnut hide quivered beneath her small, questing hand, and he kept his bright stare fixed somewhere out beyond the waves. But he let her slide the halter over his muzzle and ears.
Then she tugged on the rope. The horse snorted and snapped his back, kicking up sand. Eliza let go and waited for him to calm down. He made a rumbling sound in his throat and dropped his head. She picked up the rope and positioned herself in front of him.
The horse gave a deep sigh, dipping his head in relief and surrender. The air between horse and girl seemed to tingle with electricity, yet the tension had a different quality now. Like a wave of wind through the marsh grass, an ineffable softening came over Finn’s body; he was visibly giving himself over to Eliza. This time when she started to walk, the stallion gave a nod of his noble head and followed. Hunter stood aside to let them pass. He knew he would never forget the sight of the black-haired girl leading the huge stallion along the path to the burned-out barn and paddock.
By magic, Finn had been transformed from savage to docile.
No. Not by magic. The girl had done it. The stallion’s madness had been cooled by the horsemaster’s daughter.
Eliza’s back and shoulders ached, but she felt warm all over with pleasure in the work she had done. Leading the stallion to the round pen, she felt a rare and welcome lifting of the spirit. It was a good feeling, clean and pure, that rose and spread through her. She had found a way to understand this horse, had managed in some small part to penetrate the scrambled rage inside the confused animal’s head.
Like all of his breed, he was not made to be alone. He was a social animal, born to live in a herd. Instinct had driven him to seek out her company. She had simply opened the door, and he had stepped through.
She entered the pen, noting that the stallion’s withers tensed when they passed the wooden slats. The voyage across the sea had involved a pen, and that structure was part of Sir Finnegan’s fright and confusion.
She had no recollection of the one time she had voyaged across the sea. According to her father, she had been only weeks old, and nursed by a Danish woman en route to Maryland. Her father spoke little of the past. Secrets lurked there, she knew, and if Henry Flyte had kept them in his heart, he had had his reasons. She just wished he had told her about her mother before he died.
In the middle of the pen, the stallion flicked his ears in nervousness. Though he stood still, he swung his head from side to side occasionally. He had come a long way from the fearful animal on the scow, though.
“Well done, Miz Flyte,” said a low masculine voice. Hunter Calhoun stood outside the pen, watching her and the stallion.
She felt his approval like the warmth of the sun, and it meant so much to her. She’d had no idea that she was so hungry for this…connection. For months she had lived alone in the wilderness, content with her animals and books, never thinking she needed anything more. Yet the way Calhoun made her feel, with his words and the soft look in his eyes, made her realize how desperately lonely she had become.
She wondered if he could tell she was blushing. “Still intent on shooting him?” she asked in a teasing voice.
He walked into the round pen, latching the gate behind him. But instead of going directly to the horse, he walked over to Eliza. She was unprepared for what he did next. He reached out with great strong arms and grabbed her by the shoulders. His fierce embrace held not warmth, but intensity and desperation.
“I didn’t want to shoot that horse,” he whispered into her hair. “I surely didn’t.”
Frozen by amazement, Eliza simply stood there in his embrace. The stallion ignored them both, tugging indolently at a tuft of grass. Eliza’s eyes drifted half shut, and just for a moment she thought of nothing at all. She merely let her senses turn on, much as a wild animal’s do, taking in the essence of this creature holding her so tightly. The finely woven linen of his shirt felt cool and smooth against her cheek. The fabric smelled lightly salty from the sea air. His hair, long enough to brush his collar, held the clear golden color of the sun. And his skin was scented with a strangely evocative combination of sweat and salt.
His hand moved. Slowly, feeling its way, it skimmed upward over her back so that his fingers found the nape of her neck and pressed there. She felt almost compelled to tip back her head, baring her throat, completely vulnerable to him. Soft heat swirled through her, and she felt such a terrible wanting that it frightened her. Summoning all her self-control, she resisted the warm pulse of her body’s needs and shoved him away.
“I told you I could help this horse,” she said.
He took a step back. “I didn’t believe you could break him, until I saw it with my own eyes.”
She drew herself up, disliking his choice of words. “My father called it ‘gentling.’ Breaking a horse is a savage, dangerous practice.” She watched Finn with a welling of pure affection. “It was a matter of gaining Finn’s trust. He has no idea what patience and dignity and respect are, but he needs them just the same. A horse doesn’t lie, Mr. Calhoun. Not ever.”
“Humans lie all the time.” He leaned back against the fence. Across the circle, the big chestnut horse browsed in a clump of clover. “Finn could have gone anywhere on this island,” he said at length. “And the only place he wanted to be was with you.”
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s not black magic,” she said testily. She gestured toward a lean-to at the end of the paddock. “There’s a scythe in that toolshed over there. You can get started on the bigger pen. It’s best to have you working nearby so he can learn who his owner is. You need to clear that field, and later see about fixing that lower fence rail. It’s almost rotted through.”
He fixed her with a narrow-eyed stare, his earlier gratitude gone. “I don’t take orders.”
“I didn’t think you would. You probably aren’t even used to doing work.”
The blisters on Hunter’s hands rose before noon, and burst before one. The sun burned through the clouds and beat like a hammer of fire on his bare head as he worked. He was no stranger to this sort of labor. He had wanted to tell her that. But she wouldn’t have believed him, for she considered him a lazy planter who amused himself by racing horses. Or a bungler who maimed himself with a hammer. Best to show her who he truly was. She seemed the sort of woman who believed her eyes more readily than her ears.
From the corner of his eye, he watched the stallion in the adjoining pen. The animal stood calmly in the shade. She had put soft leather hobbles around his forelegs, and he tolerated them as he had the halter.
Hunter tried not to wonder where Eliza had gone and what she was doing. But it was all he could think about. She had amazed him. In a world that held very few surprises, she had surprised him. Her bond with the horse seemed so natural. Hunter had watched with his own eyes as the barrier separating human from horse had melted away. He had seen, between girl and stallion, a touch so intimate that it was like the touch between two lovers.
Why did her manner with the horse make her so attractive to him? Hunter pondered the question as he worked, heaving scythed plants up and over the rail, his movements as methodical and regulated as a tobacco worker’s. It left his mind free to think about Eliza Flyte.
With no sense of vanity or even gratitude, Hunter knew he had loved some of the most extraordinary belles in Virginia, so a barefoot island girl should not stand out in the pantheon. Yet in her own way, Eliza Flyte was extraordinary too. She was not pretty, but clear-eyed and dark-haired in a way that commanded attention. She wasn’t charming. Raised by a mysterious man in the middle of nowhere, she lacked the refinements of a well-brought-up lady. She dressed poorly and spoke oddly, and yet she was the most compelling woman he had ever met. There was something about her that he recognized. Suddenly, a part of him emerged that he had never been able to bring out before. Her freshness felt brand new, made him feel brand new.
In the years after returning home from the University of Virginia, Hunter had been treated to a variety of women. As the elder son of the master of Albion, he had regularly reviewed a bright parade of eligible ladies all vying for his favor. Some of them were willing to do more than flirt. Some of them were prettier than a girl had a right to be—particularly Lacey Beaumont.
Fair-haired and merry-eyed, she had captured his heart and held it for longer than he should have let her. Long enough for him to convince himself that the match—arranged years before by their parents—was founded on love and trust, and that their vows actually meant something.
Disaster was the crucible that melted their marriage. Lacey had taught him the painful lesson that even the brightest love could not transform the world. Perhaps a deeper love would have held them together through the years of struggle after Albion had failed. Perhaps not. Hunter would never know. What he had begun to suspect, as time marched on and his heart grew icy and hard, was that true love was an illusion. A hoax made up by poets and dreamers.
Out here, on this wind-torn island where breakers crashed and willets wheeled, he seemed far from all the intrigue and entanglements of the past. He found that he liked being out here, on the edge of everything, where earth and sea and sky met and the lines blurred. The hugeness of the sea put his own world into perspective. Perhaps that was the appeal of the island. Perhaps that was why Eliza Flyte stayed here, her back squarely turned on the world.
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