by Susan Wiggs
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 himse
lf 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.
Maybe she was not so crazy after all.
Seven
Eliza came to the horse pen at the end of the day. Hunter had just finished putting up the sagging sunshades and replenishing the water in the barrels. He noted with satisfaction that her eyebrows shot up when she saw that he had finished clearing both the round pen and the larger arena.
“You surprise me,” she said.
“By getting so much work done?” He shouldered a garden rake and let himself out through the gate.
“And not even whining about it.” When she took the rake from him, she caught a glimpse of his hand. The bandage around his thumb had long since come undone. “You’ve got blisters,” she said.
They spoke no more as they stood side by side at the fence, looking at Finn. The stallion grazed in his pen, his muscular form outlined by the colors of the sunset.
“You’ll have to use the dandy brush on him tomorrow,” Eliza said. “Get all that caked mud off him.”
“He’ll take my hand off.”
“Only if you scare him.”
Hunter felt too tired to argue. He wished he had a nice jug of whiskey and a cigar. Instead, he asked the question that had been nagging at him all day. “Can the stallion be trained to race again?”
“You’ll know more after you’ve worked with him a while.”
“After I’ve worked with him?”
“Of course. He’s your horse.”
“And can he be trusted to stand stud without murdering his lover?”
She blushed. “Maybe that depends on the lover.”
“How soon can he be ready to race?” He asked it too quickly, revealing himself.
She gave him an exasperated smile. “Rich planters and their horse races.”
“You disapprove?”
She thought about it for a moment, pressing her finger to her lower lip. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
“Of what? Rich planters or horse races?”
“Planters. And the horse races too, if the trainers are cruel. But mainly planters.”
“What do you know of them?”
“Not much,” she admitted, spreading her hands. “A few used to come with the drovers sometimes to get horses from my father. They always seemed haughty to me, ordering everyone around and picking snuff out of dainty little boxes. They used to talk endlessly of the Old Dominion.”
“The university. It’s a place of higher learning.”
“Well, I don’t know what they learned there. None of them ever said a thing worth listening to. Father didn’t think much of them, either.” She paused. “He said planters keep dozens of slaves.”
“What do you know of slavery?”
“My father told me enough. And even if he hadn’t, is there anyone with a brain in his head who can honestly believe slavery is a good thing?”
“Planters.” He laughed.
She censured him with a dark-eyed glare. “You find this funny?”
“What’s funny is your assumption that I’m a planter.”
“Aren’t you?” She frowned skeptically, setting her hands on her hips and tilting her head to one side.
“Why would you think so?”
“First of all, you said so yourself. ‘Hunter Calhoun, of Albion Plan-tay-shunn,”’ she intoned, doing a dead-on parody of his deep voice and accent. She ticked off the reasons on her fingers. “You have the drawl of an Old Dominion man. Your clothes are made of fine stuff, and by a tailor’s needle. I imagine you’re used to having your every desire gratified. Everything about you reeks of the plantation.”
He laughed again, harder. “Brava, Miz Flyte. A fine piece of deduction. But you’re wrong.”
“Then why do you talk like a planter?”
“My father was a tobacco planter. But all that changed after he died and left Albion to me.”
As they talked, she led him around on the evening chores. With no modesty whatsoever, she tucked up the hem of her skirt, waded into the oyster bed and drew up a string of fresh oysters, tossing them in a bucket. He couldn’t help but notice the shapely turn of her calves as she bent to rinse the oysters.
“Well?” She held a shucking knife out to him. “If you’re not a planter, what are you doing with a plantation?”
She pretended not to be curious about him, but clearly she was. He concentrated on what he was doing, and the words came easily. “I became the man my father expected me to be—a son of the Old Dominion. I had a love affair with a laundress at the age of sixteen, and my father would not have objected, because men of his class see nothing wrong with bedding the servants. But I did the unthinkable.”
“What’s that?” she asked, narrow-eyed with suspicion.
He had never met anyone who listened the way Eliza did, with her whole self, as if the words being spoken contained the secrets of the world. He wond
ered if that sort of thoughtful attentiveness was something she’d learned from watching her father’s herd.
“I fell in love with the girl.” He nearly winced, remembering how naive and stupid he had been. “My father did what any good Southern father would do. He sold her to the slave trader.” He sliced savagely at an oyster shell, severing the muscle. “I used to think about setting out to find the girl, but, well, tradition and obedience were bred into the bone in my family, and after attending the university—surely I don’t have to tell you which one—I came home and married my neighbor’s daughter, Lacey Beaumont.”
A sharp shell stabbed into the pad of his bruised thumb. His hands had suffered such abuse in the past few days that he almost didn’t feel it. He pinched the thumb against his forefinger until the blood stopped, then resumed working.
“And did you make the mistake of falling in love with her too?” Eliza asked, her gaze falling to the wedding ring he still wore.
He thought about her question and realized he didn’t know the answer, so he said, “Lacey was pretty as a magnolia blossom—”
“Was?” Eliza asked sharply.
“She died two years ago.” Suddenly he felt exposed, foolish, so he scowled, closing himself off. “And that’s all I’ve got to say about the subject.”
Eliza let down the hem of her skirt and picked up the bucket. She stopped to wash at the cistern, then went into the house and started fixing supper.
Hunter paced back and forth on the weather-beaten porch. Ordinarily, he didn’t like having a woman pester him with questions about his life, his thoughts, his past. Women had a way of prying that sat ill with him. Eliza was different, though. Her questions…they didn’t feel like prying. And when she walked away from him, he caught himself wanting to follow.
Just like Finn, he thought ironically, going into the house.
She barely looked at him as she scraped butter and sliced onion into the big stew pot on the stove.
Without thinking, he opened his whiskey flask, then remembered it was empty and put it away. “Damn,” he muttered. “What I wouldn’t give for a drink.”