The Horsemaster's Daughter

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Part Two

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Part Four

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Part Five

Chapter Thirty-One

Epilogue

Afterword

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks as always to the steadfast Joyce,

Christina, Betty and Barb; to my wonderful editors

Dianne Moggy, Amy Moore-Benson and

Martha Keenan; and to the supercharged librarian

Pat Mason, who leaves no stone (or sand dollar)

unturned in the quest for story facts. Any mistakes

are my own, but for the inclusion of such perfect

details as mating ospreys and suicidal piping plovers,

I am indebted to Pat.

Part One

The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

—William Shakespeare,

The Tempest, III, ii

One

Mockjack Bay, Virginia

April 1854

Hunter Calhoun started drinking early that day. Yet the sweet fire of the clear, sharp whiskey failed to bring on the oblivion he thirsted for. Lord above, he needed that blurred, blissful state. Needed to feel nothing for a while. Because what he felt was a lot worse than nothing.

Gazing out a window at the sluggish, glass-still waters of the bay, he noticed that the buoy was sinking and a few more planks had rotted off the dock. The plantation had no proper harbor but a decent anchorage—not that it mattered now.

“That poor Hunter Calhoun,” folks called him when they thought he was too drunk to notice. They always spoke of him with a mixture of pity and relief—pity, that the misfortune had happened to him, and relief, that it had not happened to them. In general, women thought it romantic and tragic that he’d lost his wife in such a spectacular fashion; the men were slightly disdainful and superior—they’d never let that sort of disaster befall their womenfolk.

Calhoun glared down into his whiskey glass, willing the amber liquid to numb him before he talked himself out of what he knew he must do. He experienced a strange, whimsical fantasy: the whiskey was a pool he could dive into, headfirst. If the ocean was whiskey and I was a duck, I’d swim to the bottom and never come up.

A sound of disgust from the adjoining room alerted him that he’d sung the lines of the old ditty aloud.