The Horsemaster's Daughter

“Sir Finnegan. He’s registered in the Dorset books that way. His damned pedigree doesn’t matter now, though. I’ll have to track him down and shoot him tomorrow. He’s mad, and he’s a menace.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“I saw him kill, saw him cripple a good man’s hand.”

“But you brought him here,” she pointed out. “You must have had some hope that he could be saved.”

“I let my cousin’s boy persuade me that your father was some sort of wizard with horses. Shouldn’t have listened to him, though.” He took a gulp of tea. “How big is this island, anyway?”

“Half a day’s walk, end to end.”

“I’ll go looking for the horse in the morning,” he said. “The infernal creature ran off as if the ground were on fire. Might take me a while to hunt him down.”

“A creature’s only lost if you don’t know the right way to find him,” Eliza stated.

He blinked as if her explanation startled him. “That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

“Let me show you something.” Pushing back from the table, she raised the flame of the lantern and set it on a high shelf where she kept her books, a collection of lithographs and a packet of old farming journals. Taking down one much-thumbed tome, she set it on the old wooden crab trap she used as a table. Flipping open the heavy book, she paged through the text until she found what she was looking for. “’The horse is aware of you,’” she read aloud, “’though he doth appear indifferent, and will with a show of like indifference desire to attach to you.’ That’s from On Horsemanship.”

“Xenophon’s text.”

She felt a cautious smile touch her lips. “You’ve read it?”

“In the original Greek.” Haughty and boastful as a drawing-room scholar, he stood up, running his finger along the spines of her books. “I’ve also read Fitzherbert and John Solomon Rarey and the letters of Gambado.” He angled his head to inspect more titles. “You’re well-read for a—” He caught himself. “You’re well-read.”

“For a pauper,” she said, filling in for him.

“It’s unusual for any woman to quote from Xenophon.”

“The texts on horsemanship were brought by my father from England.”

“Where did these other books come from?” Calhoun asked.

“Father salvaged a few pieces of the King James Bible and one Shakespearean play from a shipwreck. There were many more, but the water spoiled them.” She had been very small the day he’d brought the surviving volume up from the shore. She had a vivid memory of her father stringing a line across the yard and hanging the book with its pages splayed open. She’d begged him to teach her to read that day, and he had given her a smile so filled with pride and affection that the memory was imprinted forever on her heart.

That very night, he had begun reading The Tempest to her. The tale of a father and daughter stranded on an island after a shipwreck had become, in her mind, a gilded mirror of their lives. Her father was Prospero, the wizard, bending wind and weather to his will. She, of course, was Miranda, the beautiful young woman awaiting her true love.

We are such stuff as dreams are made of, Prospero said in the play. And she had embraced the truth of it with her whole heart. But believing in dreams did not prepare her for the discomfiting reality of encountering a man like Hunter Calhoun.

“This other one is my newest,” she said, showing him. “Jane Eyre was a special gift my father brought me from the mainland last year. I’ve read it four times already.”

“I never thought much of lady novelists.”

She sniffed. “Then you probably haven’t thought much at all.”

“And how many times have you read the Shakespeare?” Calhoun asked.

“I’ve lost count. The Tempest has been my main companion for years.” She hesitated, then decided there was no harm in admitting her fanciful view of the play. “I used to imagine my father and I were Prospero and Miranda, stranded on their island.” She flushed. “I used to wait on the shore after a storm had passed, to see if a prince might wash up on the beach, like Ferdinand in the story.”

He leaned back, hooked his thumb into the waist of his pants and sneered at her. “Honey, believe me, I’m no prince.”

“I’d never mistake you for one.” She put The Tempest and Jane Eyre back on the shelf. “All I know of the world is what I’ve read in these books.”

“How do you know they’re showing you the world as it is?” he asked.

She ducked her head, conscious of his physical proximity and oddly pleased by his interested questions. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“’Course it matters. It’s not enough to understand something in the abstract. Life is meant to be lived, not read about.”

She pressed her hand against the row of books, stopping when she reached The Tempest. “Is it better to read of Antonio’s bitter envy and jealousy, or to feel it myself? What about Caliban’s rage and madness? He was a perfectly miserable monster, you know.”

His mouth quirked—almost a smile. “I know.” He took down the fat calf-bound volume of Jane Eyre and flipped through the crinkly pages. “Do you never wonder what Mr. Rochester felt, being reunited with Jane after all those years?”

She gave a little laugh. “You said you didn’t think much of lady novelists.”

“Not the bad ones, anyway.” He replaced the volume and stood back, surveying the collection. “So you have been raised by a horsemaster and his books.”

“I have.”

“You never missed having friends? Neighbors? Folks to call on you?”

“My friends and family are the birds and wild ponies and animals that have no fear of me.” Her cheeks grew hotter still. She felt so gauche and awkward in the presence of this plantation gentleman. “You must think I’m strange.”

He gave her a look that made her shiver. “I do, Miss Eliza Flyte. Indeed I do.”

He made her want to run and hide. Yet at the same time, she felt compelled to stand there, caressed by his scrutiny.

The strange heat she had been feeling all evening spread through her and intensified. She had the most peculiar premonition that he was going to touch her…and that she was going to let him.

A distant equine whinny pierced the air.

Eliza felt the fine hairs on her arms lift. The lonely, mournful wail of the stallion severed the invisible bond that had been slowly and seductively forming between her and Calhoun. She stepped sharply away from him. “You can bed down in that hammock on the porch,” she said tersely. “And it’s only fair to warn you—I sleep with a loaded Henry rifle at my side.”

Five

When Hunter awoke the next morning, the sun was high and the crazy woman was nowhere in sight. He lay in a sailor’s hammock strung across one end of a rickety porch, feeling the warm sting of the sun on his arms and smelling the fetid sweetness of the marsh at low tide.

He’d slept surprisingly well, considering the rough accommodations. She had lit a small fire in an iron brazier on the porch, laying lemon balm leaves across the coals, and the smoke kept the mosquitoes away. The night sounds—a cacophony of frogs and crickets and rollers scudding in from the Atlantic—created an odd symphony he found remarkably soothing. He usually needed a lot more whiskey to get himself to sleep.

He could hear no movement in the house, so he got up and went inside. Opening a stoneware jug in the dry sink, he discovered fresh water and took a long drink. Then he went to check his clothes, finding them stiff with salt, but dry. He dressed, his mind waking up to the fact that a peculiar woman had turned his horse loose on this deserted island, and that he had been powerless to stop her. Today he’d have to sail the scow home empty.

He tried to blame Noah, but none of this was the boy’s fault. Noah could not have known the horsemaster was dead and that his daughter had lost her wits.

Worse, he would have to face Blue. He’d have to explain to his son that he had not been able to save the stallion.

Muttering under his breath, he found his hip flask and wrenched off the cap. Empty.

“Shit,” he said, then drank more water and stepped outside. If she wasn’t anywhere in sight, he wasn’t going to waste his time looking for her.