by Susan Wiggs
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 Alb
ion. 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.