Susan Wiggs - The Horsemaster's Daughter

She gave him tea from her black basalt tea service. He picked up a shiny cup, holding it to the light. “Where the devil did you get this?”

“Father salvaged it from a wreck years ago.”

He studied the mark on the underside of the pot. “This was designed by Josiah Wedgwood.”

“Who’s he?”

“A famous potter in England from the last century. This is probably priceless.”

“I always thought it was just a teapot.” She ducked her head and took a bite of her food.

“I guess you don’t get many visitors,” he said.

“I don’t,” she said simply.

“Gets lonely here, then.”

His comment put her on edge again, reminding her that she was alone with a man she did not know. She chewed slowly, unwilling to admit how true his words were. When her father was alive, they’d had visitors from time to time. Folks came from far and wide, bringing their ill-trained but high-spirited horses for him to tame, and most of them left proclaiming him a miracle worker. Once a year, her father offered up a pony or two culled from the island herd. People in need of workhorses prized the ponies her father trained.

Most of the wild ponies were brutally beaten into submission by ignorant farmhands. But Henry Flyte, who had once gentled the finest racehorses in England, treated the island ponies with the same patience and care he had used with the Derby winners.

After his death, no one came. Everyone assumed that Henry Flyte had taken his magical touch to the grave with him.

Eliza alone knew there was no magic in what her father did. There was simply knowledge and gentleness and patience. He had raised her with the same principles, schooling her in the evenings and by day, teaching her the ways of horses and wild things. Her earliest memory was of lying by his side on a sand dune, their chins tickled by dusty miller leaves while they watched a herd of ponies.

“See that dappled mare?” he’d whispered. “She’s in charge of the herd. Watch how she runs off that yearling stallion.” The younger pony had approached with an inviting expression, mouth opened to expose the lower teeth, ears cocked forward. The mare had rebuffed the advance with a flat-eared dismissal.

Eliza had been fascinated by the display. The horses performed an elaborate, ritualistic dance. Each movement seemed to be carefully planned. Each step flowed into the next. The mare lowered her head, menacing the interloper even while capturing his attention. Each time she drove him off, he came back, contrite, ready to obey.

“That’s all we need to do,” Henry Flyte had explained. “Make him want to be part of our herd.”

She stabbed a bite of potato with her fork. “Aye,” she said to Hunter Calhoun. “Aye, it’s lonely here.”

“Then why do you stay?”

“I can leave anytime I want,” she said defensively.

He scraped the last of the potatoes and onions from the pan. “And where would you go if you left?”

She hesitated, thinking that it would somehow diminish her dream if she confessed it to a stranger. The dream was hers and her father’s. She refused to tarnish it by confessing it to this haughty off-islander.

She set down her fork. Turning the subject, she said, “What is the name of your horse?”

“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.