The Regency Romances

by Laura Kinsale

  The stallion stood with his eyes rolling wildly. She went to his head to murmur reassurance. The animal’s attack had subsided, but beneath the surface there was still a fatal weakness. If retired to pasture, he might survive. Another race would destroy him.

  With an effort, she blocked out the mixed antagonism and amazement that flowed from the crowd and turned a defiant look on the unreadable face of Iveragh, “He hit me first, m’lor’.”

  The earl looked at her with his strange blue eyes. Roddy held the gaze and then faltered, dropping her lashes as a faint smile curved his lips.

  “Fight dirty, do you?”

  The words were soft, barely audible above the buzz of the spectators.

  “He hit me.” Roddy was on the defensive. “And he don’t care a whit ’bout ta beast.”

  “Heart trouble.” Lord Derby gave her a hard look. “Are you certain?”

  Roddy glanced at Iveragh, seeing nothing she could fathom in the earl’s dark face. The magnificent racing stallion was worth a king’s ransom as a performer and a stud, but as a retired and broken racehorse he was useless.

  “Yes, m’lor’,” she said hesitantly, addressing Derby, and half expecting the earl himself to punch her for ruining his sale.

  Derby turned to the man beside him. “We’ll talk again. Perhaps after the next heat.” He touched his hat brim. “Your servant, sir.” He strolled away into the crowd that parted to let him pass.

  Roddy was left to face the wrath of the Devil Earl alone.

  She took a deep breath and turned back to the stallion, offering her hand to his silky black muzzle. The crowd still pressed around them, fallen into a waiting silence that unnerved her even more, for she knew what they were expecting. What they thought she deserved.

  Cold-blooded murder.

  Which didn’t seem to be an unlikely event, Roddy thought morbidly, considering the reputation of Iveragh.

  “So.” His voice made her flinch with its chilly flatness. “Since you seem to have permanently disabled my groom, boy, perhaps you’ll take over for him.”

  She looked up in confusion, but the earl was already turning away. The crowd muttered. She glanced around at all those sullen male faces and found herself with no better choice than to take the stallion’s head and follow at a measured pace.

  Her cheek ached, a stinging numbness that she feared would go black and blue. To take her mind off it she kept alert to the horse’s condition. The spectators drifted along behind, still hopeful of a scene, but the earl only led Roddy and her charge up the treeless hill toward the long row of thatch-roofed sheds where the horses were temporarily stabled. She expected undergrooms to run out to their aid, but no one came. The earl gestured toward an empty loose box, and with a sweep of his glacial blue eyes warned off the crowd that had followed.

  “Untack him. His blanket’s there,” he said tonelessly.

  Roddy ducked her head. To take off the stallion’s saddle and bridle meant only one thing. He was scratching the horse from the next heat.

  A walkover. The stallion’s courageous win in the first heat was worth nothing, and now there would be a forfeit fee to pay, too, instead of the rich purse the horse should have won. She reached to obey the earl’s order, replacing the bridle with a halter and dragging off the heavily weighted saddle. It was all unthinking routine; years of training in her father’s stable: now that the stallion’s heart was steadier, she had to walk him to cool him out, stopping first to wet a sponge and squeeze a dribble of water into his nose and mouth. He stretched his lathered neck and stuck out his tongue, slurping at the thin stream.

  By the time she had walked him once up the length of the shed and back, the earl was gone. From here, the crowd at the track was only a rumble on the wind, the words of the crier indistinguishable as he called the next heat. Her gift brought her nothing but a confused wave of agitation.

  The tones of the distant voice changed. A shout of dismay went up from the mob.

  They had announced the stallion’s scratch.

  She pursed her lips and kept the horse walking. He had believed her, that saturnine stranger. He had taken her at her word. It was gratifying, and scary, and something else—something oddly warm.

  Trust, she thought, with a trace of wonder. Blind faith.

  The earl did not return to the stable. A trickle of on-lookers began to arrive, curious to see why the stallion had been pulled. Roddy ignored their questions. She led the horse into his box, drew water and tossed hay with mute precision. Then she posted herself at the door, assuming an expression of silent haughtiness, a stony glare that she was certain was worthy of the earl himself.

  It was Mark who came for her. Long after all the races were over and the spectators had dispersed, the familiar essence touched her mind: her second-oldest brother, red hair and redder temper, storming along the shed row toward her with murder in his thoughts. She cringed a little under the string of curses which ran through his mind when he saw her. The link between thought and words was so instantaneous that her family always spoke to her aloud, and Mark demanded in a furious voice, “What the holy devil are you doing here? Papa’s out of his wits.” He grabbed her arm and began to tow her along without ceremony, ignoring Roddy’s voluble protests.

  No one paid them any mind: a young gentleman with a ragtag, squealing stableboy by the ear. She went with Mark, half walking, half dragged, down the grassy hill to the gay row of grandstands and pavilions that lined the now-deserted track. She managed to get away from him long enough to straighten herself a little before she was marched forcibly into the crimson-and-gold tent where her father waited. Roddy began a quick apology, but her father silenced her with one stern look, a look that made her insides squeeze all sick and remorseful and scared as he dismissed Mark and yanked a curtain of silk across the door.

  “Young lady,” he hissed, the carefully arranged rolls of white hair at his temples quivering, “what d’you think you’re about, running all over the heath like some hoyden? I thought we had an agreement.”

  “Yes, Papa,” she said faintly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry,” he snapped. “Sorry. If your mother knew—” He broke off, and frowned at her. “What happened to your face?”

  Roddy drew in a quavery breath at his thunderous expression. She thought of several cushioning lies, but she knew her brothers would have told the truth, and so she could do nothing less. “Someone hit me.”

  “Hit you!” It was a blast of shock and fury. “Good God, who had the impudence—Iveragh, that son of Satan, was it he?” Her father made a precipitate move toward the door. “By the devil, I’ll kill him!”

  “Certainly it wasn’t, Papa,” Roddy cried, waving her hands in a feverish tamping flutter, because they wanted to grab hold of him and pull him back and she knew that wasn’t politic just now. “It was his groom. And I didn’t come off so badly after all…. I won the scrap.”

  “‘Won the scrap,’” her father echoed, letting the folds of silk that formed a door drop back into place. He covered his eyes. “Sweet Heaven have mercy, my daughter won a mill with Iveragh’s groom. If your mother knew—”

  “I’m sorry, Papa.” Roddy hung her head in misery. “I truly am.”

  He squared his shoulders under the thick pads of his frock coat, fidgeting with one blunt finger at the high collar points. “It’s my fault. I should never have allowed you to come, much less let you dress yourself in this—this stable garb. Where in God’s name was your sense, to go off with a scoundrel like Iveragh? Surely you could recognize what kind of man—” He stopped, reddening.

  Roddy bit her lip. “I know his reputation, Papa,” she said, and then blushed herself at her father’s disapproving frown. “You know I understand these things better than a—a normal girl would.”

  “Capital,” he said gruffly. “At nineteen, you’re an expert on rakes and roués. If your mother hears of this—”

  “You know she won’t,” Roddy said, and then added darkly, “If someone
tells her, ’twill be a great deal too bad after all I’ve kept under the lid for Mark and the rest.”

  Her father cleared his throat in discomfort at that shaft. “Roddy. You’re a female. Your brothers’ conduct can hardly be held up as an example for your own.”

  The accumulated stresses of the day caught up with her at that, swelled and rolled and exploded. “Well—” she shouted, “what example shall I go by? Aunt Nell’s? Shall I lock myself away where I never meet a living soul and try to forget this accursed talent I was born with?” She sucked in a breath and clenched her hands together, paced to the silk partition and turned back savagely on her heel. “Or perhaps Great-aunt Jane would be a better pattern. She only killed herself. Who could blame her? She loved her husband, and he couldn’t bear to have her near him. I don’t blame him, either,” Roddy added bitterly. “What man could abide to have his mind an open book for his wife to read? To have her know every weakness, every fear, every secret that’s too dark even for confession? What marriage could stand the burden of this damned…gift?”

  “Roddy,” her father said in an aching voice.

  It made her throat hurt. The tears threatened, blurred, spilled over.

  “Oh, Papa,” she cried, turning to throw herself into his familiar arms. “This awful talent—sometimes I don’t think…I can’t stand…Oh, God, I don’t want it! I don’t want to live alone forever.”

  He clasped her tightly, not speaking, his anger forgotten as he let her feel all the force of his affection and support through the gift she despised. She wanted to stay there in his embrace forever, shielded from the confusion of anger and pain that bore in on her from the world outside. She could see the lies, feel the cruelty and greed so clearly, but she could never understand them. She felt as helpless as the dumb animals who lived under the whim of human will, unable to comprehend the tides of passion that swept around her. The methods of blocking she had so painstakingly taught herself were imperfect, easily broken down by extremes of emotion, leaving her vulnerable at just those times when she needed protection the most.

  “Little Roddy,” her father murmured. “Don’t cry, darling. You won’t be all alone. Your mother and I—you know you’ll have us always, as long as we live.” He stroked her trembling shoulder and touched her cheek. “You won’t be like Nell; already you’ve come so much farther. It would have killed her to be within a mile of this place today, and you’ve managed beautifully.”

  Roddy shook her head with a vehemence that bumped his chin. “I haven’t! I haven’t done well at all. That match race—the first heat was more than I could stand. Even up at the stables with Lord Iveragh’s stallion, it almost overset me when they began to cheer the finish of a race.” She buried her face against his wide lapels. “I can’t endure it, Papa. All the people—you were right. I should never, ever have come. I’ll have to spend all my life stuck away in the country—” She drew a shaky, half-sobbing breath. “I’ll never go to London, or dance at an assembly, or even be able to drive in the park. I’ll never have my own family, little children to look after or watch grow up. It’s s-so unfair. Why did it have to be m-me?”

  Her father had no answer, and his helplessness and guilt only sank her deeper in despair. The Delamore gift passed to females from the male side of the family, and Roddy’s father, like his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him, had trusted to the fortune of siring sons one too many times. Her four brothers would most probably do the same, each hoping that the family penchant for boys would hold true. It was one of the cruel ironies of the gift that those who knew what it was to suffer it were not the ones who could pass it on. Her doomed great-aunt Jane had borne three daughters, and none of them had possessed the talent that Roddy had inherited through her father.

  But she did not blame him. How could she? The alternative was never to have been born at all, and life was not so bitter as that. Not yet, anyway. But the memory of Great-aunt Jane was always there as an omen of what might happen if Roddy were so foolish as to try to live a normal life.

  Normal. Now, there was a word to cherish. Like love. Like the things she would never have, not for herself alone. Her parents loved her, and her brothers. But that was family. That was a child, and she was almost a woman now.

  That wasn’t Geoffrey.

  Oh, Geoffrey, she thought. The tears swelled back into her throat. My friend. My friend. Who doesn’t want me.

  After a minute, she stood back a little, wiping at her blurry eyes. “I’m sorry, Papa. I shan’t cry anymore. It’s just been such a trial today, and I’m so very tired.”

  He squeezed her hands. “Go and change, then, and I’ll have Mark find some dinner for you. You’d rather stay here than come to the inn?”

  “Yes,” she said quickly. “I couldn’t face an inn—not tonight. It must be a sad crush.”

  He nodded. “Mark will stay with you. I’ve an appointment to dine with Bunbury at the Jockey Club—he dearly wants that colt of ours by Waxy. Can I do anything else for you now?”

  Roddy shook her head. As he brushed aside the silken door, her father paused. “I’m sorry to have given you such a scold, darling. But when Mark found that you’d somehow gone off with Iveragh—” He made a clucking sound of distress. “Do stay clear of his like, Roddy. If your mother knew—”

  “Oh, Papa,” Roddy said, driven to a watery giggle by his obsession with her mother’s disapproval. “Go on. Mama won’t know what you don’t tell her.”

  He smiled sheepishly and gave her a quick kiss. Then he was gone.

  Roddy sat down on a cushioned stool and contemplated the well-worn jackboots that were an integral part of her disguise as a stableboy. Her homebound mother thought she was staying safely confined in the pavilion’s ladylike quarters, but her father, more practical, had been easily swayed by the usefulness of Roddy’s talent with his string of racehorses, allowing her on pain of utmost secrecy to dress so that she could go easily among the horse sheds.

  It was not completely practicality. It represented something else, too: one of his small gestures, his little favors. He felt guilty, and so he gave her these secret treats. Gave her everything she wanted when she asked.

  She’d been five years old when she’d first understood her difference. Before that it had simply been the way the world was, the way her parents were taller than she and her brothers had louder voices. It was a talent, her father had told her, something special, and she’d nodded, not understanding. She mustn’t talk about it, her father had said; she mustn’t be unfair. Don’t carry tales. No one likes a tattle.

  But the truth had come from her mother. It had happened one day in Mama’s bedroom, while Mama sat alone at her dresser and fussed at her hair with shaking fingers. Mama was afraid, and excited, and Roddy had peeped in anxiously. She’d stood just inside the door, watching her mother, who tried to smile in false welcome, which was a scary thing that had never happened to Roddy before. Some people thought one thing and said another. Never Mama.

  Never Mama.

  Roddy had walked forward, into that aversion, because she was frightened and wanted her mother to like her as her mother always did. Roddy hadn’t understood, she’d only wanted this thing that made her mother excited and happy and miserable all at once to go away. She’d laid one hand on Mama’s knee and said, “Please don’t, Mama. Don’t go to that man in the spinney.”

  “What?” her mother had said, with a jerk around and a scared, awful roll of the eyes.

  And slapped her daughter.

  Roddy could feel it still: an unhealed wound, the shape and length of her mother’s fingers. The symbol of what Roddy was. A freak. An aberration. The thing they all feared in their deepest nightmares.

  The fear was gone in an instant, covered with love and remorse, and Mama had gathered Roddy in her arms and cried and cried and begged for forgiveness. “Don’t tell your father,” Mama had moaned. “I won’t go; I won’t go; I didn’t mean to hurt you. I never would have gone, darling, I promise
. Don’t tell your father, please—oh, God—please don’t tell your father.”

  Roddy had not told. And her mother had not gone. Never again had there been another man in her mother’s life but her husband. Because of Roddy.

  Angel of Reckoning.

  Chapter 2

  Two hours later, easily shed of Mark’s halfhearted chaperonage, Roddy found Lord Iveragh’s stallion where she had left him, looking lonely with his head hung over the door of the box. He greeted her with a soft whuffling, and Roddy gave him the handful of grass she had picked on the way. She peered into the box on tiptoe. His bedding was newly clean. That, at least. Sometime in her absence his groom had been back to care for him. She had begun to wonder, waiting all those afternoon hours alone.

  The stallion nudged her, hungry after his effort of the day. Roddy smiled, and gave him a pat and a promise. She thought she might catch Old Jack, the Delamores’ head groom, and have him cook a hot bran mash before he went to bed.

  It was late when she returned, Old Jack having been long asleep and hard to rouse. She’d prepared the heavy bucket of steaming mash herself. After that it had been a long walk in the moonlight with only the sound of her own light song to keep her company:

  Here is a pledge unto all true lovers,

  A pledge to my love where ’er he may be.

  This very night I’ll be with my darling

  For many the long mile he is from me.

  Along the bare, rolling ridges of the heath she sang, where dry grass and horse-scent lay heavy on the breeze.