The Horsemaster's Daughter

by Susan Wiggs

  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. Ind
eed 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.