The Horsemaster's Daughter

by Susan Wiggs

  Miss Eliza picked out five pieces shaped like birds in flight. “The doves were inside the sand dollar,” she said, “and Blue let them out. He set them free.” One by one, she lay the tiny pieces on the palm of her hand. “Would you like me to keep them safe for you, Blue?”

  He nodded and watched her drop the bits of shell into her apron pocket, treating his discovery as if it were the most important thing in the world.

  Blue made up his mind. He would show Miss Eliza his other secret. The big one. The one he was never to say a word about.

  Twenty-Three

  Eliza stood outside the door to Hunter’s study. A low rumble of male voices, punctuated by an occasional burst of laughter, drifted from behind the closed double doors. Cousin Charles had proved to be a merry addition to the household, bringing laughter to the empty halls of Albion. She liked him quite a lot, though he seemed a bit young and frivolous, occasionally even furtive in his manner. He had a slender build, refined features and good manners. She knew he admired the way she looked, and she wanted to be moved by that; she tried to be. If she could manage to feel the same sharp sting of attraction for some man other than Hunter Calhoun, she could convince herself she wasn’t falling in love.

  But alas, as handsome and charming as Charles was, and as gratified as she was by his admiration, it wasn’t the same. Like Jane Eyre, she was doomed to yearn for a man who had no place in his life for her, a man she could not have.

  Impatient with her thoughts, she rapped sharply at the door.

  “Come in,” called Hunter.

  He and Charles sat on opposite sides of the desk from each other, with racing logs and breeders’ books spread out in a mess across the surface. Charles puffed on a cheroot and Hunter swirled whiskey in a cup. She could see with a glance that he was not drunk. She hated the fact that she knew him well enough to tell the difference.

  “Miss Eliza,” said Charles, “I do declare, you get prettier every day.”

  She grinned. “I don’t, but your compliments do.” She turned to Hunter. “The children are in bed and want you to say good-night.”

  He rose from his seat. When she had first started this nightly practice, he had balked, claiming that telling them good-night after supper had always been sufficient. But she was determined to draw him into their lives, and bringing him upstairs to the nursery each night was part of the process.

  “Your voice should be the last thing they hear before they go to sleep,” she had said. “Your face should be the last thing they see.”

  “Bossy little thing, isn’t she?” Charles observed as Hunter went to the door.

  She suspected that, though Hunter would never admit it, he actually enjoyed seeing them bathed and snuggled up to their chins in their little beds, for he came readily enough. She hoped he wouldn’t change his mind tonight, when he saw what she had done.

  Hunter never knew what to expect when he walked into his children’s bedroom. Eliza showed them new things each day, from a starfish to a pheasant feather to a jar of fireflies to a sprouting sweet pea. She drew upon their natural sense of curiosity and wonder in a way that seemed to come easily to her. The lessons they learned from her were the simple, profound laws of nature—that everything was connected to everything else, every cause had an effect, every action had a reaction. He couldn’t remember whether or not Lacey had that sort of ease and intuition with them. It bothered him that he couldn’t remember.

  “Look what we did, Papa,” Belinda said. “Are you surprised?” She bounded to the foot of her bed.

  He felt as if all the air had been sucked out of him. There on the wall between the two small bedsteads hung a large sepia-toned portrait of himself and Lacey and the children.

  It was the only picture that had been made of them as a family. He remembered the day they had sat for the portrait. It was full summer, the lawn lush and the peach trees heavy with fruit. The photographer, a fussy nervous man from Baltimore, had exclaimed over the beauty of Lacey’s gown and hair, the effervescence of the children.

  The children wore white, their hair neatly brushed. Lacey and Belinda were seated—Lacey kept shifting uncomfortably on the photographer’s low stool—while he and Blue stood behind them. He and his wife regarded the camera box with smooth-faced dignity. Belinda and Blue weren’t smiling, yet their eyes danced in the lively way that children have even when they’ve been told to keep still.

  He remembered the birdsong that day. He remembered the smell of the wind off the bay and the way the summer air felt on his face. He remembered the fleeting prettiness of Lacey’s smile and the laughter of the children when the photographer announced that he had finished his work.

  Up to that point in his life, the world had been good to Hunter Calhoun. For a young man who had never done particularly well at his studies and had never been forced to do anything other than breathe, he had a good life, an easy life.

  Too easy. Perhaps that was the problem. Only days after the photograph was taken, his father had died, the will had been read and the creditors had come to call.

  Nothing in Hunter’s golden life had prepared him to face bankruptcy. He’d listened to the advice of the bankers, his father-in-law, his neighbors. And then he had done as he pleased, freeing the slaves, ceasing the tobacco operations and starting a horse farm.

  The rash enterprise had cost him Lacey and the souls of his children.

  “We hung it up special, right between our two beds,” Belinda was explaining, oblivious to his agonized thoughts. “That way, Mama’s close to Blue and she’s close to me.”

  Hunter couldn’t look at his daughter. If he did, he would see Lacey’s wide blue eyes and cupid’s-bow mouth. Instead, he glared at Eliza Flyte. “Take it down,” he said in a low, angry voice.

  “But, Papa—” Belinda began. She lapsed into silence when Eliza put her hand on her shoulder.

  “The children wanted a picture of their mother in this room.” Eliza motioned toward the door. “Blue, Belinda, go and see if Nancy will give you a glass of water before bed.”

  The children slipped out, clearly aware that there was to be a Discussion.

  “I said, take it down—or I will,” Hunter ordered.

  She moved between him and the picture on the wall. “Why?” she demanded.

  He couldn’t believe she didn’t understand. “Because it’s morbid, that’s why. It’s disheartening. Every time they come into this room, they’ll see her—”

  “They’ll see her whether her picture’s on the wall or not,” Eliza said softly.

  “It hurts them to look at her,” he blurted out.

  “You’re wrong. You won’t let them finish with their feelings for her. They have to grieve, and they have to heal. You’re not letting them do that.”

  “How the hell would you know?”

  “Because I’ve been watching you. I’ve spent practically every waking hour with the children, and it couldn’t be clearer. They’re afraid to stop pining for their mother because they think that’s the first step in losing her forever.”

  “Isn’t it?” he demanded, surprising himself with the question.

  Her eyes narrowed. “You seem to think so.” She sat down on one of the little nursery beds. “When my father died, I wept and raged for weeks,” she said.

  He studied the angle of her slender neck, the sweet curve of her cheekbone, and in spite of himself he wanted to touch her.

  “But mostly,” she admitted, “I was afraid. Not of being alone. Not of never seeing him again. I was afraid I’d forget. Terrified. One day I woke up, and I couldn’t remember the sound of his voice. Another time, I tried to think of what his hands looked like, and I couldn’t make a picture in my mind. I was losing him bit by bit. Do you know how frightening that was?”

  Hunter felt a fullness in his throat, and he couldn’t speak. Eliza was so honest, so open. Didn’t she know people weren’t supposed to talk about things like this?

  But his heart responded to what she was saying. He
knew exactly what it felt like to forget the shape of someone’s fingers or the sound of her laughter. Some days, he could picture Lacey sitting in her salon sipping tea from a china cup, and others, all he could see was a blistered and wheezing carcass on a bed, a bandaged hand grasping for his. He swallowed hard, but the thickness in his throat wouldn’t go away.

  “I felt,” Eliza said, “as if my father was being stripped away from me, layer by layer. Little details that didn’t seem important when he was alive were suddenly all I had left of him. The way he’d set his elbows on the arms of his chair before telling me a story. The look on his face when he whistled a birdcall. Those things kept fading away one by one. I took to sleeping in his nightshirt because I thought some part of him lingered there.”

  She drew in a deep, pain-racked breath. “Then one day, I tried his birdcall. There was a little wren in the trees on the west side of the island I wanted to coax over. I whistled, just like my father used to do. And the bird came to me. It alit right on the ground not five feet from me.”

  Her eyes were damp and distant, and Hunter wanted to look away from them, but he found himself spellbound by her honesty and her agony.

  “And you know what I discovered in that moment?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “He never left me. My father never left me. He can’t be taken from me, even if I have trouble picturing his face or remembering the sound of his voice.” She touched her chest gently with her open hand. “He’s here, and he’ll always be here, in a place that will never let him go.”

  Hunter felt humbled and astonished by the depth of her love for her father. Had he ever loved his father in that way?

  Jared Calhoun had been less a father than a figurehead, marching through life, not looking back to see who followed. He had been a formidable man, worthy of respect. But he had never taken his son to a marsh and taught him birdcalls.

  And what of Lacey? Did she live in his heart, or was she merely a fading memory? He suspected, to his horror, that she was the latter.

  That was why he slept badly at night. That was why he drank.

  Belinda and Blue came back into the room, bounding into their beds. “Can we keep the picture up, Papa? Can we?” Belinda asked. “Can we, Papa?”

  He felt them all looking at him. Waiting. He could think of only one way to clear the stinging thickness from his throat. He gave a curt nod, then left the room to find something to drink.

  When Eliza had first come to Albion, she had been overwhelmed by the number of books in the library. Hunter claimed there had been many more in the past, but auctioneers had sold many of the more costly volumes to pay off debts and back taxes. Even so, dozens of books lined the shelves of the long, narrow study. She got a bit dizzy each time she went there to find something to read.

  It was late, and her candle was guttering low in its brass holder as she perused the shelves. She had finished some books by Jane Austen—Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice—that had nearly made her swoon with fascination. She had enjoyed the dark, ironic works of Daniel Defoe, though Robinson Crusoe had made her ache with missing Flyte Island. She thought tonight she might read a nonfictional book—the essays of Rousseau or Emerson, perhaps.

  In a breath of wind from the doorway, the candle flame wavered against the wall of books. Startled, Eliza looked up.

  “Blue?” she said, climbing down from the step stool and hurrying across the room. “Blue, it’s very late. What are you doing awake?”

  The boy slipped furtively into the room. In his arms, he carried a large wooden box.

  “What is it, Blue?” she asked.

  He set the box next to the lamp on the battered oak library table. When the light wavered over it, she could see that it was of dark, polished rosewood with brass fittings.

  “May I open it?” she asked.

  Blue stepped back, holding out his hand, palm up.

  Slowly she lifted the lid. It was an enchanting piece, cleverly made. It had a slanting tooled-leather surface with the letters L.B.C. embossed in gold. Lacey Beaumont Calhoun? At the top was an array of ink jars and pen nibs. “It’s a lap desk,” she said. “Where did you get this, Blue?”

  He stuck his finger through a satin loop of ribbon at the edge of the tooled leather. The surface of the lap desk folded back, exposing the interior of the box.

  She raised the flame in the lamp. The stale smell of dried lavender and old wax struck her as she looked at the contents. “What is this, Blue?” she asked.

  No answer.

  She flipped through the stack of folded letters—the ink fading—that lay within. Her gaze swept over some of the writings, and what she saw chilled her blood. Dear God, how long had Blue been keeping this secret?

  “Have you read these?” she asked.

  He shook his head. No.

  “Do you want me to read them?”

  No response.

  “You’ve had these since your mother died, haven’t you?” Her heart broke at the burden he’d carried, but she made herself smile down at him. “How very brave you’ve been to keep these for so long. Shall I keep them for you now?”

  A clear, emphatic nod. Yes.

  She shut the lid on the box and said, “Then I shall, and you never have to worry about what’s inside here ever again.”

  He drew in a long breath, shuddering with relief as he did so. And then she saw it—a single tear sliding down his cheek. The sight shocked her, and for a moment she couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. Then she set aside the lamp and pulled Blue against her.

  “Shh, it’s all right,” she said, cupping his head to her chest. “Hush, my sweet boy. It’s all right now.”

  Twenty-Four

  Eliza stood in the middle of the sandy arena, locked in a stare-down with a stubborn mare. The horse was one of the yearlings to be offered at Albion’s annual sale. Excitement was mounting in the region, for the horses Hunter had sold last year had proved to be of the highest quality. Buyers from far and wide would be arriving for this year’s sale. Word had it that important buyers from England and Mexico would attend.

  Hunter and his cousin worked tirelessly, hoping for a huge success. She suspected that Hunter was driven by something deeper than commercial ambition. The sooner he rebuilt his fortune, the sooner he could attract a new wife and mother for his children, and the sooner Eliza could go to California for—

  For what? The question kept nagging at her. It had been one thing to sit by the fire each night and look at the lithographs of the west coast and dream. Actually making the journey was another matter entirely. But that was the choice she had made. It was the promise she had made to herself. Her father had always wanted to see California. She owed it to him to see for herself.

  The matter at hand, however, was this mare. She was a beautiful Thoroughbred, her breeding evident in a haughty, royal spirit. Her dappled lavender-gray coat shone brilliantly in the sun.

  But she was aggressive, and defensive with people and with other horses. In her current state, she’d never attract a buyer.

  “Come on,” Eliza said in a soft voice. A horse couldn’t understand the words, of course, but the inflections were part of the language Eliza had learned from her father. “Come on, you want to follow my lead.” Then, very deliberately, she shooed the animal away with a toss of her cotton rope.

  The mare sidled back, but she wasn’t a fearful horse, and she came on like a wave, stiff-legged, head down. With one powerful shove, she knocked Eliza backward into the sand.

  Eliza landed with a hard thud. She felt the air leave her lungs and sat there dazed, her knees drawn up. It was a good thing she had decided to wear breeches today, she thought. Otherwise, her pose on the ground would appear quite improper.

  To add insult to injury, the mare danced away, kicking up sand. It showered Eliza, sprinkling the brim of her hat and trickling down her back. She coughed and shook her head, then levered herself up. She fluffed out the fabric of her shirt, trying to get rid of the grains of sand.
<
br />   “Boy!” called a light female voice.

  The mare lifted her tail and loped off to the opposite end of the arena.

  “Boy!” the voice called again.

  It took Eliza a moment to realize someone was talking to her. She spied two young ladies seated high in a carriage with a formally dressed African driver. A liveried black servant stood behind them, holding a fringed umbrella over their heads.

  The Parks sisters of Norfolk, Eliza realized as she approached them.

  “Do you mean me?” she asked, laughing.

  “Why yes, boy. We wanted to know where we might find Mr. Calhoun.”

  Eliza spread her arms. Grains of sand dropped from her sleeves. Then she removed her hat. Her hair, which had been tucked up under it, came cascading down. “It’s me, Miss Tabby, Miss Cilla. Eliza Flyte. We met at the Beaumonts’ picnic.”

  She thought it amusing that they’d mistaken her for a boy. The sisters exchanged a shocked glance. Miss Tabby recovered first. “I’m certain I don’t remember.”

  “Sure you do,” Eliza said. “I’m looking after Hun—Mr. Calhoun’s children.”

  “And his horses too,” Miss Cilla murmured. “You’re a person of many talents.”

  Eliza laughed and pointed her toe, bending low with mock ballroom formality. Cousin Charles had taught her to dance in preparation for the huge party Hunter would host in honor of the exhibition race and yearling sale. “Thank you.”

  Tabby whispered something to Cilla. “We really shouldn’t chat too much longer. Hunter invited us for tea and lemonade this afternoon.”

  Eliza got a funny feeling in her stomach. Lately he had been actively courting women and introducing them to his children. In fact, Blue and Belinda were having their baths right now, getting cleaned up for the visit. The idea of parading them around like this Thoroughbred mare left a bad taste in her mouth.

  “Mr. Calhoun is probably waiting for you at the house.” She tried to keep her smile in place. “I hope you enjoy your visit.”