The Horsemaster's Daughter

by Susan Wiggs

  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, wit
h 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 sli
d 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?”