The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  “I see.” Brian’s eyes swung back across the field to the southwest corner, where the green thorn hedge blocked the noise of the road, and the russet walls of Rose Cottage showed plainly through the frieze of trees edging the drive. “And what’s our Mr. Sutton-Clarke up to, over there?”

  Fabia tossed the short fall of hair from her face. “Doing a survey, what else?”

  I hadn’t even noticed, to be honest, that Adrian wasn’t with us. I’d been too absorbed in watching David, admiring the unholy force with which he rammed the steel probe home.

  It was easy to see why the act of probing held little appeal for Adrian. His interest lay in the larger picture of what lay beneath the landscape, not in the soil itself. And he’d never liked getting his hands dirty. For a man who’d spent so many hours on archaeological sites, patiently mapping and measuring, he had a surprising lack of patience with the actual work of excavation. Give him good clean technology every time.

  Indeed, when I wandered down to join him a few minutes later, I found him preparing the section of field for another pass with the ground-penetrating radar unit, happily laying out neat lines of nonmagnetic tape for guidance, and humming to himself.

  “Guilty conscience?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “You’ve already done this bit of the field, remember? Produced a smashing image.”

  “Sarcasm,” he informed me, “doesn’t suit you. And if you must know, Peter asked me to repeat the survey. It seems he’s misplaced the initial results, and he wants to have a record for his files.”

  “And how did he come to misplace them?” I asked, suspiciously.

  “I had nothing to do with it.” He raised a hand in Boy Scout fashion, as proof of his sincerity. “I’m rather pleased the damn thing’s gone, mind you, but I had nothing to do with it.”

  After scrutinizing his face a moment I decided he was telling the truth. More likely, I thought, Peter had pitched the fake survey results on the fire himself, thus solving a prickly problem. Having “lost” the results, and being unable to obtain a duplicate printout from Adrian’s computer—I was sure Adrian would have thought of some suitable technical excuse for that—Peter would be wholly justified in asking for another survey of the southwest corner. Not only would that erase all traces of the false record, it also gave Adrian a chance to redeem himself professionally.

  As a solution it was, I thought, decidedly Peter’s style, and endearingly gallant.

  Adrian, who didn’t know that Quinnell knew, and therefore didn’t fully appreciate the subtleties of his mission, cast a vaguely impatient look at my knees. “Does that blasted animal have to follow you everywhere?”

  I looked down in mild surprise, and Kip looked back at me, one ear flopped softly forward. During the hours when Robbie was at school, the collie had taken to keeping me company, trailing at my heels so quietly that I frequently forgot he was even there. Wally had joked that the dog, like its young master, was faintly besotted with me. Personally, I put it down to the sausage.

  “It’s like you have six legs, these days,” said Adrian. He paused, his eyes flicking past my shoulder toward Rose Cottage. “Do me a favor, Verity love, and measure how far it is from where I’m standing to that bit of wall over there.”

  “What, with this?” I bent to pick up his yard measure with a sinking heart. “Where’s your little wheel thing? You know, the one you just push around?”

  “Oh, don’t be such a baby. You know how to use a yard measure, I’ve seen you do it.” He nodded firmly in the direction I was meant to go. “Just to the wall, please.”

  “I thought you had this corner all mapped out.”

  “Verity…”

  I measured. At the crumbling stretch of dry-stone wall, I stood up and called back, “Fifty-six feet, two inches.” He cupped a hand to his ear. “What?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” With Kip trotting at my heels, I patiently retraced my steps. Across the field, I could see David and Quinnell, heads bent in contemplation of the rough turf at their feet, while Wally stood to one side, frowning, and Brian leaned close over Fabia’s shoulder as though offering an expert opinion.

  Jeannie, I noticed, had disappeared. Gone back to the house, no doubt, as it was now less than an hour till lunch-time and she probably had some culinary masterpiece to pop into the oven. My stomach gave a small anticipatory rumble as I drew level with Adrian.

  “Fifty-six feet, two inches,” I repeated.

  “Thanks.” He jotted the number down, tossing a quick glance over his shoulder at the others. A few minutes later he repeated this motion, and grinned. “Well, well,” he said slowly, “I do believe the old man’s jealous.”

  “What, Peter? Who would he be jealous of?”

  Adrian’s eyes came back to mine, vaguely pitying. “God, you are thick, aren’t you? No, my love, not Quinnell. The other one. He’s looking daggers at me.”

  I turned in time to catch the blunt edge of David’s scowl before his head angled down again. Staunchly ignoring the tiny, unnamed thrill that coursed through me, I advised Adrian not to be an idiot. “It’s nothing personal. He’s been looking daggers at everyone since Jeannie’s husband arrived.”

  “Ah, yes. The inimitable Brian.” Adrian’s tone was dry. “And what did you think of him?”

  “I thought he seemed rather nice.”

  “You always did have rotten taste in men.”

  I shot him a sidelong glance. “Doesn’t say much for you, that, does it?”

  “Yes, well, I meant myself excepted. Although,” he mused, “you did throw me over, didn’t you, which only goes to prove my point. Was that a drop of rain, or did I imagine it?”

  “I didn’t feel anything.”

  “Good.” Another pause, while he stretched a length of tape between two surveyed points. “You’ve noticed, of course, that our Fabia shares your high opinion of Brian McMorran?”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Meaning just what you think I mean.” He slanted me a faintly superior look and jerked his head in the direction of the small group down the hill. “Look for yourself, if you don’t believe me. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist.” He broke off, squinting skyward. “Damn, that was a drop of rain. I knew it.”

  Beyond his shoulder, Fabia threw back her head and laughed, her artfully tousled mop of hair whipped backwards by the wind to brush against Brian McMorran’s jaw. He, too, was laughing, leaning closer, not touching her, but…

  “She’s very pretty,” I commented, slowly.

  “Yes, she is. If you like that type.” Adrian had developed an intense interest in his preparations, hurrying his pace along to beat the darkening clouds, but though his voice sounded offhand, I wasn’t in the least fooled.

  “What type would that be?” I teased him. “The sexy-as-hell blonde type? All legs and eyes and perfect teeth?”

  He grinned. “That would be the one, yes.”

  “Ah.”

  “Mind you, I’ve gone head over heels on at least one occasion for the dark-haired, smart-talking type as well,” he said lightly.

  I knew him far too well to fall for the intimacy of that smile, those dark eyes leveled warmly on my own. He was rather like one of those snakes, I mused—those giant snakes that tried to mesmerize you, held you captive, unresisting, with the force of their gaze alone. I looked away with ease, and held my hand palm upwards to catch the light but unmistakable scattering of raindrops.

  “Blast!” Adrian fastened off the final guiding line of tape as the rain began in earnest, a steady soaking shower that made spikes of my eyelashes and tasted sweet on my tongue.

  “Come on,” he said, turning to make a dash for it. But I lingered one more minute in the cool and cleansing rain, eyes closed, my face tipped upwards like a child’s, wondering why the
thought of David Fortune’s frowning face, jealous or otherwise, made me so damnably happy.

  Chapter 15

  Jeannie promptly banished me upstairs, to take a bath. “You’ll catch your death, with that wet hair,” she told me firmly, “and you’ve half an hour till lunch.”

  There never seemed much point, I thought, in arguing with Jeannie. And it wasn’t altogether unpleasant to strip off my soaked clothing and sink into the hot bath, scented with exotic hints of sandalwood and spice, courtesy of Peter’s own expensive bath salts. Even the Romans, I was sure, could not have known luxury like this.

  Although, to be fair, one had to admit that the Romans had been experts on the gentle art of bathing.

  I’d visited the graceful arched chambers at Bath, with their great echoing colonnaded aisles and the water as pale as an aquamarine, water that had once closed round the shoulders of some tired Roman woman of my own age, who’d sought comfort in the heated pools from all the aches and chills that plagued her young but weary bones.

  I closed my eyes, as she might have done, slipping down until the water touched my chin. The steam curled up deliciously against my face, as my hair sagged limply down from its loose pile atop my head.

  I wondered if the Roman woman in her bath had dreamt of men, as I did. If she’d thought on some old lover, some smooth merchant with a charming smile, or conjured up the wistful image of some strong and stoic legionary, dark-haired with eyes of blue, and a body that no mortal had a right to.

  My sigh rippled the surface of the bathwater. I opened my eyes. Give it up, I told myself good-naturedly.

  The woman who peered back at me from the foggy depths of the mirror, when I finally emerged from my bath, looked nothing like a Roman. The face was too scrubbed, and the hair too straggly. That was my one complaint with long hair, I reflected. I’d undone my plait and towelled dry the dripping strands as best I could, but a quick check of my watch told me I didn’t have time to do a proper job. Leaving my hair loose and hanging damply down my back, I shivered into a dry pair of jeans and a clean shirt before scooting downstairs to join the others.

  Peter Quinnell, I had learned, liked to take his meals on schedule.

  Breakfasts were a bit of an exception. We all of us woke at different times, and our morning routines made any sort of synchronization difficult. Adrian and David usually breakfasted at their hotel, before they came to work, while Peter, Fabia and I ate sometimes together and sometimes by turns in the bright narrow kitchen, with Jeannie standing over us, stirring her ever-present pot of porridge on the stove. Sometimes Wally was there as well, or Robbie… it all depended on the earliness of the hour.

  But lunch was a different matter. Lunch at Rosehill House was a strictly observed ritual that, while not exactly formal, still carried a faint echo of the grand old days of the country house, when people dressed for dinner and the servants ate below stairs. The impression was made all the stronger by the fact that Jeannie, when she wasn’t serving food or clearing plates, kept to her kitchen and left us alone. And the dining room itself seemed to demand a certain degree of gentility, of respect for the rules of etiquette.

  It was a most impressive room, tucked discreetly away in the rear corner of the ground floor, just beyond the kitchen and directly behind the “posh” sitting room. The walls were panelled in palest oak, the window gleamed wide and uncurtained, a gas fire hissed in the elegant fireplace on the end wall, and beneath the long polished table, which could easily have seated twelve, a thickly cushioned carpet of rich Cambridge blue ran the length of the room, from skirting-board to hearth.

  “It was originally a bedroom,” Peter had told me earlier that week, when I’d remarked on the beauty of the room, “but a lady who owned Rosehill in the late eighteenth century had the bad fortune to be murdered in here by her butler. He cut her throat, I’m told. So they changed this to a dining room. For, after all,” he’d said, buttering a slice of bread with admirable nonchalance, “no one would want to sleep in a room where there’d been a murder.”

  When Adrian had pointed out that some might not exactly relish the thought of eating in a murder room, either, Peter had dismissed the notion with a casual wave of his hand, maintaining that it wasn’t at all the same thing. That was one of the marvelous things about Peter, I thought. He had a way of saying something, in that beautifully theatrical voice of his, that made the illogical sound entirely reasonable. It was a gift. Already this week he’d used that gift to win three lunch time debates with Adrian.

  But today, no one seemed inclined to begin a debate. Because it was Friday, with David not up in Edinburgh giving lectures, we were five, seated boy, girl, boy, girl, in a half circle around one end of the long table. Peter sat at the head, with his back to the fireplace and Fabia and I to his left and right, respectively. Adrian, being left-handed, had been assigned the seat beside Fabia, which not only gave his left arm a free range of motion, but also allowed him to keep an eye on me.

  Adrian was an only child; he didn’t like to share.

  If David, at my shoulder, leaned too close or made me smile, it was a safe bet Adrian would smoothly intervene, like a child jealously guarding a discarded plaything. As he was past reforming, I generally ignored him, counting mentally backwards from one hundred while I turned my eyes to the window opposite and its peaceful view of garden, field, and sky. Today I found myself admiring that view more than usual, not just because of Adrian but because I simply didn’t know where else to look.

  Jeannie had outdone herself, as usual, with plates of ham, and carrots done in mustard sauce, and parsnips and potatoes roasted golden, sweet, and crisp. But not even Jeannie’s cooking could dispel the curious tension that had settled round the lunch table, a tension so palpable that one inhaled it like a cloud of ash with every breath and coughed it out again in awkward, small, throat-clearing sounds that served as substitutes for conversation. Clearly, the change in atmosphere had something to do with Brian McMorran’s coming home, although no one so much as mentioned his name. And the man himself was nowhere to be seen. I guessed he would be eating in the kitchen with his wife, and when I next looked out the dining-room window I knew I’d guessed correctly. Wally Tyler normally lingered long over the kitchen teapot at lunchtime, but today his cap was pacing grumpily back and forth on the far side of the garden wall, spouting sharp rapid puffs of cigarette smoke that twisted in the rain-dampened air.

  The rain shower had been a brief one—a “plump,” as David called it—and already the sun was beginning to scatter the clouds. The group of us scattered as well, while our teacups were still warm. Peter walked into town to collect the post; David and Wally went back to the ditch, and Adrian, having lured Fabia into assisting with his survey, strolled whistling down to the southwest corner, radar unit in tow.

  I suppose I could have lent a hand to any one of them, but since I wasn’t really needed anywhere at the moment I chose instead to spend an hour throwing sticks for Kip, behind the Principia.

  Here, at least, I could feel truly useful. And Kip was a brilliant fetcher of sticks. Not like my parents’ dog, who clamped his teeth round whatever you threw to him and staunchly refused to bring it back. Kip not only brought the stick back, he actually dropped it at my feet and waited with a wide grin until I threw it again, then he wheeled like a dancer and bounded off happily to hunt the stick down in the tangle of swaying weeds and wild flowers.

  He was bringing it back for what seemed the thousandth time when he suddenly stopped, planted his feet, and sniffed the warming air. After a second sniff he gently laid the stick down on the grass and looked expectantly toward the drive, his plumed tail waving as he gave a soft, impatient whine. I’d seen him go through this routine a dozen times since I’d been at Rosehill—he did it whenever a car he knew came up the drive, or when one of us came back from an outing. Only this time the drive was empty, and it was much too early for Robbie to
be home from school.

  He whined again, and I shook my head. “You’re out of luck, love,” I informed him. “False alarm.”

  The collie only wagged his tail harder, insistently, and raised his head to give a happy little woof of welcome. Picking up his stick again, he bounced past me and began to trot away along the ridge, performing an odd little dance that seemed to demand he turn full circle every several steps, followed by a joyful leap with stick in mouth until his head reached a specified level in the empty air. The same level every time, I noticed, hugging myself to ward off the crawling chill of recognition…

  The same level at which a grown man’s hand might hang, as he walked beside the dancing dog.

  I’d seen him do the same thing when he walked at Wally’s side, or David’s, or my own. Kip loved to have his head patted. Of course, this time, there was nobody walking beside him. Nobody, I told myself firmly. Certainly not a ghost.

  But when the collie turned and started back again, still bouncing and wagging, I didn’t feel nearly so brave. I turned, too, half in panic, and bolted round the corner of the Principia, to get clear of the Sentinel’s path.

  ***

  “Darling, when I said I’d gone head over heels for you, I didn’t mean it quite this literally.” Adrian winced as he picked himself up and brushed grass off his leg. “Aren’t you supposed to yell ‘fore’ or ‘heads up’ or something, before you come barrelling blind round a corner?”

  “Sorry.” I dusted the dirt from his sleeve, solicitously. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll have my lawyers get in touch.”

  “Idiot. Have you finished with your survey?”

  “Mmm.” His eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he flexed his right arm, testing the action of his elbow. “If you promise not to make any sudden movements, I might even let you help me plot the readings on my computer. Or are you busy?”