Рита Браун - Hotspur

“I don’t know if Edward has as much as you do, honey, but he’s not passive. He ran the Bancroft empire until a few years ago when he retired.”

“Coffee.”

“What, dear?”

“Their money started in coffee, of all the damn things. I’d never put my money in anything where Mother Nature was my partner. But I guess it was a different time. Early nineteenth century. That ancestor of his had to be pretty damned smart.”

“Now they just seem damned, don’t they?”

“The Bancrofts? No. Marty, don’t let this Nola thing affect you. The Bancrofts made whatever adjustment they had to twenty years ago. Sybil married a decent enough fellow, they have two grandchildren, and sure, you never forget a child, but I don’t think you can say they’re damned.” He pulled into the new garage attached to the original main house, an addition Crawford had commissioned.

The new wing was tastefully done and didn’t resemble a garage. If anything, it was the tiniest bit overdone.

The garage doors rolled down behind the red Mercedes.

The first building on this site was a log cabin built in 1730 by Tobias Beasley’s grandson. Over the years it had been replaced with a handsome brick structure boasting a huge center hall and four-over-four windows. Each generation that made money added to the main house. This meant about every thirty or forty years a ballroom would be built or more bedrooms with sleeping porches. Whatever excited the owners’ fancy was added, which gave Beasley Hall true character.

Crawford opened the door into the mudroom and ushered his wife through.

“Thank you, dear.”

“Nightcap?”

“How about a small brandy with a rind of orange on the rim.”

He laughed at her but made her the drink and brought it upstairs to their huge bedroom, decorated by Cole-fax and Fowler. Crawford could have hired Parish Hadley out of New York, but no, he had to go to London. The woman who put the English country house look on the map, Nancy Lancaster, whose mother, Lizzie, had been born a Langhorne of Virginia, was influenced by Mirador, the Langhorne seat in Albemarle County. Crawford liked telling people he and Marty were simply bringing her talent back home. Nancy Lancaster, born in 1897, had been dead since 1994, but her decorating firm soldiered on.

The simple truth was that Crawford was a dreadful snob.

They slipped into their scarlet cashmere bathrobes from Woods and Falon, another English firm, and nestled into an overstuffed sofa suffocating with chintz-covered pillows.

Marty enjoyed unwinding on this sofa before retiring to bed. When she and Howard had separated and Crawford’s lawyers had played the old starve-the-wife routine, she’d had ample time to consider the financial impact of divorce on middle-aged women. She realized she could not make a graceful transition into the ranks of the nouveau pauvre.

“When is the first day of cubbing this year?” Crawford put his arm around her.

“September seventh, I think.”

“Time to leg up the horses.”

“Time to leg up ourselves.”

“Oh, honey, you look fantastic. In fact, you look better than when I married you.”

“Liar.”

“It’s true.”

“You can thank the business—and yourself.”

One of her demands for returning to Crawford, who had been unfaithful to her, was that he buy her the landscaping firm where she had been working to make ends meet. She’d fallen in love with the business. When the owner, Fontaine Buruss, died an untimely death in the hunt field, Crawford made a handsome settlement upon Fontaine’s widow. Marty had never been happier now that she was running her own business. She had a real purpose of her own.

He kissed her. “Funny how things work out.”

“You look pretty fantastic yourself.” She winked at him.

He’d lost his paunch, changed his diet, and worked with a personal trainer. He’d also endured liposuction, but he wasn’t advertising that fact.

The rain slashed at the windowpanes, and Crawford’s heart beat right along with it. When Marty winked it meant she wanted sex.

Crawford, like most people with business drive, also had a high sex drive. He adored making love on a rainy night, too.

He reached up and rubbed her neck. “Did I tell you how crazy I am about you?”

What he didn’t tell her was that he had not given up his long-standing goal of becoming joint-master of the Jefferson Hunt and that that very day he had put his plan in motion. By God, he would be joint-master whether Jane Arnold wanted him or not.

CHAPTER 5

Large, overhead industrial fans set high in the ceiling swirled, their flat blades pushing the air downward, and window fans also sucked in air from the outside and sent it over the sleeping hounds. This arrangement kept flies out of the kennels as well.

It was late afternoon, the day after Nola had been discovered. The rains had been followed by the oppressive heat typical of the South.

The Jefferson Hunt Club Kennels, built in the 1950s, were simple and graceful. The building’s exterior was brick, much too expensive to use now thanks to higher taxes and higher labor costs. The large square structure housed the office, the feed rooms, and an examination room where a hound could be isolated for worming or the administration of medicines. At the back of this was a 150-foot-square courtyard of poured concrete sloping down to a central drain. The roofline from the main building gracefully extended over one side of this courtyard by about eight feet. Lovely arches much like those underneath the walkways at Monticello supported the overhang.

Open archways bounded the courtyard, again like the ones at Monticello. The dog hounds lived on the right side and the gyps on the left. Each gender had its own runs and kennel houses with raised beds and little porches. The puppies lived at the rear with their own courtyard and special house. A small, separate sick bay nestled under trees far to the right.

The design—simple, functional—was pleasing to the eye. Doorways into the sleeping quarters were covered with tin to discourage chewing. The center sections of the doors to the runs were cut out and covered with a swinging heavy rubber flat, like a large mud flap on a truck, so the hounds could come and go as they wished. Eventually someone would get the bright idea to chew the flap, but a large square of rubber was easier to replace than an entire door.

All sleeping quarters were washed down every morning and evening. Painted cinder-block walls discouraged insect infestation. The floors sloped to central drains.

Many hounds slept in their raised beds, the wash of refreshing air keeping them cool. Others were dreaming in the huge runs, a quarter of an acre each, filled with large deciduous and fir trees. Some hounds felt the only proper response to blistering weather was to dig a crater in the earth, curling up in it. Fans whirling over kennel beds was sissy stuff.

Two such tough characters, Diana and Cora, faced each other from their shallow earthen holes, now muddy, which pleased them.

“Hate summer,” Cora grumbled.

“It’s not so bad,” the beautiful tricolor replied, her head resting on the edge of her crater.

“You’re still young. Heat gets harder to handle as you get older,” Cora said. She had recently turned six.

Six, while not old, gave Cora maturity. She was the strike hound, the hound who pushes forward. She sensed she was slowing just the tiniest bit and knew Dragon, Diana’s littermate, would jostle for her position.

Cora hated Dragon as much as she loved his sister. Quite a few hounds loathed the talented, arrogant Dragon.

Being the strike hound didn’t mean that Cora always found the scent first. But she worked a bit ahead of the rest—not much, perhaps only five yards in front, but she was first and she wanted to keep it that way.