Trial by Desire

“Are you planning to play the fool for me?” And in her face, turned up to his, he saw every last threat writ large. He saw the sadness he’d left in her, and felt his own desperate desire to tamp it down. And he saw something more: something stronger and harder than the woman he’d left behind.

He had come back to England, planning to treat his wife with gentlemanly care. He would prove once and for all that he was deserving of their trust, that he was not some stupid, foolish boy, careening off on some impossible quest.

Kate made him want to take on the impossible.

When she smiled, the warmth of her expression traveled right through his spine like a heated shiver. It lodged somewhere in the vicinity of his breastbone, a hook planted in his ribs, pulling him forward.

For one desperate second, he wanted to be laid bare before her. He wanted her to see everything: his struggle for stability, the hard-fought battle he’d won. He wanted to find out why she sat as if she were not a part of this group.

And that was real foolishness. Because he’d worked too long to gain control over himself, and he wasn’t about to relinquish it at the first opportunity to a pretty smile. Not even one that belonged to his wife.

“No,” he said finally. “You’re quite right. I’m done playing the fool. Not even for you, Kate. Not even for you.”

THE SMELL OF HAY and manure wafted to Ned as soon as he stepped inside the stables. The aisle running down the stalls was clean and dry, though, and he walked carefully down the layer of fresh straw. The mare he had pulled from the mews in London for the journey here put her dark nose out over the stall, and Ned reached into his pocket for a small circle of orange carrot. He offered it, palm up; the horse snuffled it up.

“If you’re looking for that new devil of a horse, he’s not in here.”

Ned turned at the sound of this ancient voice. “You’re talking about Champion, then?”

Richard Plum scrubbed a callused hand against an old and wrinkled cheek. It was the only commentary Ned expected the old stable-master would make on the name he’d chosen. Ned could almost hear the man’s voice echo from his childhood. Animals don’t need fancy names. They don’t know what they mean. Names are nothing but lies for us two-legged types.

“I’ve seen a great many horses,” the man offered.

Ned waited. Plum spent so much time around animals—from the horses in the stables to Berkswift’s small kennel of dogs—that he sometimes forgot that ordinary human conversation had an ebb and flow to it, a certain natural order of statement and response. Plum seemed to think all conversations had only one side, which he provided. But if left unprompted, he usually recollected himself and continued.

“This one, he’s not the worst I’ve seen. Not the best, neither. Conformation leaves a lot to be desired, and even after we’ve put some flesh on his bones, he’ll likely always be weak-chested. But his temperament … He’s as wary as if the devil himself were pissing in his grain. I don’t trust him near my mares.”

Technically, they were Ned’s mares, but Ned wasn’t about to correct the man. He’d hoped this morning’s equine tantrum had been nothing more than an aftereffect of Champion’s earlier mistreatment.

“That sounds bad.”

“Hmm.” Mr. Plum seemed to think that bare monosyllable constituted sufficient answer, because he put his hands in his pockets and looked at Ned. “An animal needs to know some kindness in its first years of life, Mr. Carhart. If your, ah, your horse—” Ned noticed that Plum carefully eschewed the name of Champion “—has never known good from people, that’s the end of it. It can’t be fixed, not with a day of work. Or a week. Or a year. And if that’s the case, there’s nothing to be done for it.”

“When you say ‘nothing,’” Ned ventured gently, “you don’t literally mean nothing can be done. Do you?”

“Of course not.” Plum shook his head. “Always something to be done, eh? In this case, you load the pistol and pull the trigger. It’s a mercy, doing away with a one such as that. What an animal doesn’t learn when young, it can’t find in maturity.”

Ned turned away, his hands clenching. His stomach felt queasy. He hadn’t saved Champion only to have him put down out of some sense of wrong-headed mercy. An image flashed through his head: a pistol, tooled in silver, the sun glinting off it from every direction.

No.

He’d not wish that end on anyone, not even a scraggly, weak-chested horse.

“How far gone is he?”

Mr. Plum shrugged. “No way to know, unless someone gives it a try. Have to make the decision out of rational thought, sir. Me? I doubt the animal’s worth the effort.”

He paused again, another one of those too-long halts. Ned began to drum his fingers against the leg of his trousers, an impatient ditty born out of an excess of energy. Another bad sign.

“Very little use in him, sir.”

“Use.” Ned pressed his palms together. “No need for an animal to be useful, is there?”

Plum met his gaze. “Use is what animals are for, Mr. Carhart. Useless animals have no place.”

Ned knew what it was like to feel useless. He had been the expendable grandchild, the non-heir. He’d been the fool, the idiot, the one who could be counted on to muck up anything worth doing. His grandfather had expected nothing of Ned, and Ned, young idiot that he had been, had delivered spectacularly.

But he had learned. He had changed himself, and it had not been too late.

“Where have you put him?”

“Old sheep corral. It’s empty, this time of autumn, what with the sheep all brought to the lower fields.”

“He’ll come around.”

“Hmm.” It was a versatile syllable, that. Plum might have delivered an essay on his disbelief with that single sound. “In all those heart-felt do-gooding stories, some child rescues an animal and it then proceeds to take the cup at the Ascot. And the knock-kneed beast does so, just because it’s fed a decent measure of corn and lavished with kind words. But be realistic, Mr. Carhart. This is a barrel-chested animal that’s down on its strength. Even if you do somehow calm the thing enough to toss a harness on it, and convince it to pull in tandem with another animal, it’ll be skittish all its life.”

“Skittish,” Ned said, “I can live with.”

Plum stared at him a moment, before giving his head a dismissive shake. “Hope so, then. There’s still hay out in that field,” he finally said. “We’d been planning to bring it in soon, before the rains come. I’ll pull a pair of men from the home farm this afternoon and see to it.”

“Don’t bother,” Ned volunteered. “I’ll do it.”

This was met with a longer pause.

“You’ll do it,” Plum finally repeated, looking off at a speck of dirt on the ground. He said the words as if Ned had just announced that not only did he plan to save a useless horse, he had five heads.

And no wonder. Gentlemen offered to pitch hay approximately as often as they sported five heads. And a marquess’s heir was no common day-laborer to dirty himself with a pitchfork. But then, Ned wasn’t precisely a common marquess’s heir, either. He needed to do something to bleed off the excess energy he felt. It was beginning to come out in fidgets; if he didn’t do something about it, it would never dissipate.

Instead, it would go careening off at the first opportune moment. Or, more like, the first inopportune one, as he’d learned by experience.

“This is a joke?” Plum asked, bewildered. “You always were one for jokes, when you were a child.”

Oh, the inopportune moments of his childhood.

“I’m perfectly serious. I’ll manage it.”

Over the past few years he’d learned he could contain the restiveness, his simple inability to just stop. All he had to do was channel that excess energy into physical tasks. The more mundane, the more repetitive, the greater the strain on his muscles, the better it worked.

Plum simply shook his head, no doubt washing his hands of his master’s madness. “Cart’s already in the field,” he said.

Ned found the cart in question half an hour later. Champion watched him, his eyes lowered, yards away at the fence. Pitching hay into a cart was excellent work—back-straining and tiring. Ned could feel his muscles protest with every lift of the fork. His back ached in pain—the good sort of pain. He worked through it.

One hayrick. Two. The sun moved a good slice in the sky, until Ned was past the point of tiredness, past the point of shoulder pain, until his muscles burned and he wanted nothing more than to set down the pitchfork and leave the work to the men Plum would undoubtedly send.

But he didn’t. Because not only did this bleed off all that extra intensity, this was good practice. While there were days like today, when he felt vigorous and invincible, there also came times when he wanted nothing more than to simply come to a halt.

Those were the poles of his life: too much energy, almost uncontainable, followed by too little. When the next pole came riding ’round, he’d be ready for it again.