Sam was, of course, extremely short-handed and, if Alita had not worked as hard if not harder than any stable boy, it would have been impossible for them to keep as many horses as they had at the moment.
The Duchess took it for granted that there would always be carriage horses to carry her anywhere she wished to go in the County.
The animals were also taken to London for the Season to convey her and Hermione to Ranelagh and Hurlingham and to stand for hours waiting for them at night when they were attending some grand ball.
The Duke had found that riding increased the pain he suffered from rheumatism and he had therefore left the hunting to Hermione and Alita.
Alita was well aware that she would not have been allowed to hunt even with an unfashionable pack if she had not been breaking in the horses that the Duke sold at a large profit as soon as she had brought them to the peak of perfection.
She had a perfect seat on a horse, light hands and remarkable expertise in training difficult animals.
It was a talent that the Duchess looked on as regrettable in a young woman.
But the Duke, who realised Alita’s worth, turned a deaf ear to his wife’s suggestion that she could be better employed sewing and running errands for her in The Castle.
“His Grace will be coming here within an hour, Sam, to discuss the prices we should ask. He wanted to talk it over with Mr. Bates!”
Sam chuckled.
“Ain’t no use ’Is Grace askin’ ’im!”
“That is what I told him,” Alita replied.
They both knew that Mr. Bates, the Agent, who had been at The Castle for over thirty years had long since given up interfering with anything to do with the stables.
He knew that Alita could better him in any argument about horses and, as he was growing old and tired, he was only too grateful that one burden at any rate had been lifted from his shoulders.
“I suppose that Double Star will be the American’s first choice,” Alita said as if she was talking to herself.
“Or Red Trump,” Sam interjected.
“They are neither of them as good jumpers as King Hal,” Alita remarked, “but for all we know he may be a gap-seeker!”
They both laughed, despising with the arrogance of experienced equestrians those who waited for a gate to be opened or looked for a gap in a fence.
When the Duke arrived in the stables, it was to find Alita brushing down a horse and whistling as she did so in exactly the same manner as Sam was doing.
He frowned for a moment as he watched her, knowing that it was not the behaviour that was to be expected from a young lady.
Then he told himself that, as his wife had often said, Alita did not really come into that category.
It was, of course, through no fault of her own. At the same time nothing could be done about it and, as long as she was useful to him, it was really of no consequence how she behaved.
He must have stood watching her for a few seconds before Alita, who had been concentrating fiercely on what she was doing, looked up and saw him.
“Hello, Uncle Lionel!” she exclaimed. “I want you to look at Double Star. I think with a bit of luck we might get nearly five hundred guineas for him!”
“Make it a thousand!” the Duke responded.
“A thousand?”
The Duke smiled.
“Mr. Wilbur can afford it.”
“Yes, of course,” Alita agreed. “At the same time – ”
She stopped what she was saying and grinned at her uncle.
“Are you suggesting, Uncle Lionel, that we should sting him for everything we can get?”
‘“Those are not exactly the words I would have used,” the Duke said reprovingly. “I cannot think what your aunt would say if she heard you talking in such a manner. But briefly, the answer is ‘yes’.”
Alita gave a little laugh.
When she and her uncle were alone together, he forgot to be stiff and pompous and they talked without restriction, as if they were contemporaries.
“Very well, Uncle Lionel,” she said. “I will do my best.”
A quick frown came between the Duke’s eyes.
“You suggest that you should negotiate with Wilbur yourself?”
Alita made a little gesture that was very eloquent, despite the fact that the brush was still in her hand.
“Who else?” she asked. “You know that old Sam would ramble on and never get to the point and Mr. Bates would be far too honest to ask anything but the ‘going price’.”
“Very well,” the Duke agreed, “you shall talk to him.”
“It will all be strictly business,” Alita promised, “and, of course, he will not be aware that I am your niece.”
“You are my brother’s child,” the Duke said heavily, “and nothing can alter that. There will be no question of this man being inquisitive about you, but, much as I regret it, you had better call yourself by another name.”
Alita realised that she had touched some pride in her uncle which she had suspected but had not actually known existed.
“Thank you, Uncle Lionel,” she said softly. “I will be ‘Miss Blair’, as I have been on other occasions.”
Then in a different tone of voice she went on,
“Have a look at the others. It is a long time since you have seen them all together. I feel certain that you will notice an improvement in their condition.”
As the Duke walked from stall to stall, he knew that Alita was right and there was a distinct improvement.
He was honest enough to admit that to have raged at her for spending so much money, and sometimes to have categorically refused to spend more had been a mistake.
She had always argued that, as they had the stables and as they also had the progeny from the original bloodstock on which the last Duke had spent a fortune, it was a mistake to waste it.
Now he was seeing that she had been right and the results justified the expenditure even though he had often doubted it.
As they walked on, the Duke noted that, although the stables were spotlessly clean and the horses comfortable, the cloths they wore were tattered and worn and the walls needed a fresh coat of whitewash.
As if she knew what he was thinking, Alita said,
“I have been meaning to do some decorating, but I just have not had the time.”
The Duke put his hand on her shoulder.
“You have done more than anyone else could have done in the circumstances, my dear, and I am grateful. If you manage to bring off some good sales, I will see that you have a new gown as a reward.”
“And when would I wear it?” Alita enquired.
There was a sudden silence and then the Duke’s pressure on her shoulder increased and he turned away with a sigh.
‘Why am I so foolish?’ Alita silently asked herself when he had gone back to the house. ‘He was trying to be kind. I should have accepted the gown and worn it to show the horses!’
She smiled at the thought, but there was a bitterness in the twist of her lips and in the expression in her eyes.
A moment later she was laughing and joking with Sam and then giving instructions to the three half-witted stable boys who were all the help they could afford.
*
Clint Wilbur, riding over his newly acquired Parkland, appreciating the age of the great oaks and the beauty of the deer that scurried away at his approach, had a sudden idea.
He knew that tonight he was to dine with the Duke of Langstone, whose estate marched with his own.
The Duke had spoken of his horses and Clint Wilbur had decided that it might be a good idea to have a look at them before they discussed the possibility of any purchase, perhaps after dinner.
Clint Wilbur was well aware that there were always people in the world who tried to extract money from him by one means or another.
He was surprised to find that the English lived up to their reputation as shopkeepers and were willing to conduct a sale at any moment of the day or night!
It was as if the mere thought of his millions made them reach out their hands towards his pockets.
He found that whether he was in the St. James’s Street Clubs to which he had been introduced by some of the most influential people in the land or in the ballrooms of the great hostesses, there was always at his elbow a seller of some commodity.
Because he was extremely intelligent and very shrewd, he disliked being thought of as a ‘sucker’! He therefore had no intention of being one and took great care to prevent such an unlikely occurrence.
But he had seen the glint in the Duke’s eye when he had talked about his horses and he was quite certain that, after the port had passed round the table a considerable number of times after dinner, the subject would come up.
‘I will have a quick look at them,’ Clint Wilbur thought to himself, ‘and, if they are no good, I will make it quite clear that I already have all the horses I require and am not in the market for any more.’
It was not difficult for him to know in which direction The Castle lay, because, being built on high ground and with the Tower with the Duke’s flag surmounting it, it could be seen from many different parts of the Marshfield Estate.
Clint Wilbur now rode towards it, taking his route as the crow flies, and soon after he had crossed from his own property into the Duke’s he came to what he saw at a glance was no less than a Racecourse.
It had in fact been laid out by the late Duke and Alita had spent a great deal of time, with the help of some village yokels, in reconstructing the jumps.
The Racecourse was quite a large one as the old Duke never did anything by halves.
Just as he poured out money in an inexhaustible stream on anything that concerned his horses, the Racecourse had been planned by experts in the most expensive manner.
Clint Wilbur drew his horse to a standstill and looked at it appreciatively, wondering if he might impose on his neighbour’s generosity and try some of the fences himself.
Then, as he thought of it, he saw that there was already someone doing that very thing.
As the horse and rider were at the far end of the course, he did not realise until they approached much nearer that there was a woman in the saddle.
She was taking the very high jumps in a manner that Clint Wilbur knew was an exceptional feat of riding.
As she drew nearer, he saw that she was encouraging her horse and taking him over the fences with an expertise that was remarkable and talking to him as she did so.
The jump a little to the right of where Clint Wilbur stood was a very high one with a ditch on the other side of it.
Just as they reached it, the horse, and he saw that it was a young one, refused.
There was nothing rough in the way he was treated. The woman riding him bent forward to pat his neck, spoke to him encouragingly, then turned him round and took him at the jump again.
This time she seemed almost to lift him over it by sheer willpower and, when he cleared it without touching a twig of the fence, she patted him and Clint Wilbur heard her say,
“That was splendid! Clever boy! Now shall we go back and do it again?”
Before she could turn round, Clint Wilbur urged his own horse forward.
He saw that, as the woman became aware of him, there was a startled expression on her face.
She was wearing an old tattered jockey cap pulled low over her forehead and the white shirt under her riding habit was undone at the neck.
“Good morning!” Clint Wilbur began. “May I say how much I admire the manner in which you are riding that horse?”
“Thank you,” Alita answered.
She thought as soon as she saw him that this must be their new neighbour. Besides, she had never seen anybody who looked quite like him.
It was obvious as soon as he spoke that he had a faint accent.
It was surprisingly faint and yet it was there and she thought that he was very different from how she had imagined he would be like.
Somehow she had always thought that Americans were small men, but the man facing her was well over six feet tall, handsome, well-proportioned and she guessed athletic.
His eyes were blue and his bronzed sunburnt face made them appear more vivid than they actually were.
But what intrigued her was the fact that he sat on his horse in the manner that she knew proclaimed him as a rider of undoubted ability and someone who had obviously spent a great deal of his life in the saddle.
As if he was amused by her scrutiny, Clint Wilbur asked,
“I would like your permission to join you and see if I can take these fences as well as you have done.”
Alita looked not at him but at the horse he was riding.
“May I suggest that you try them first on one of our horses, which have been over them a number of times? There are three of them waiting down there.”
She pointed to the other end of the Racecourse and, as if he accepted the suggestion without unnecessary words, they moved side-by-side towards the horses that Alita had brought out.
“I presume you know who I am?” Clint Wilbur asked after they had ridden a little way in silence.
“I suspect,” Alita replied, “that you are the new owner of Marshfield House.”
“Clint Wilbur at your service ma’am!” he replied. “And you?”
“My name is Alita – Blair.”
“You work for the Duke?”
“Yes, I train his horses.”
“He told me that he had some he would like to sell.”
“I think you will find that our horses are outstanding,” Alita replied.
“And they are all for sale!”
There was a dry note in his voice that made her laugh.
“Have you had a great number offered to you already?”
“Enough to fill The Mayflower a thousand times over!”
She laughed again.
“Well, before you make any decision, have a look at the Langstone stables. I promise you that it will be worthwhile.”
“I am prepared to take your word for that. You are an exceptional rider, Miss Blair.”
“Thank you,” she said. “And, though it may sound very forward, I would like to return the compliment.”
There was no doubt, she thought, that he was a rider whom it would be a privilege to provide with a proper mount.
There was something easy about the way he sat on a horse as if he belonged to it and she was sure that like herself he felt happier and more at home in the saddle than anywhere else.
“Well?” he said after a moment. “Why do you not ask the question that is in your mind?”
She looked at him in surprise.
“What do you imagine that is?”
“You are wondering which part of America I come from, so let me tell you, it’s Texas.”
“Of course!” she exclaimed. “I might have guessed it! I have always been told that they have better riders and finer horses, in Texas than anywhere else in the United States.”
“I see that they have taught you something in England besides class distinctions and etiquette,” he said.
“They taught us how to breed good horseflesh!” Alita retorted. “And that is something you will, I know, appreciate.”
They had reached the horses by now and the stable boys who were holding them stared at Clint Wilbur in undisguised curiosity.
“This is Double Star,” Alita said, dismounting with a swift movement and patting the neck of the horse as she spoke, “but I would like you to go round the course first on King Hal. He is the best jumper of the three.”
Clint Wilbur swung himself into the saddle and rode off.
Alita watched him go and knew by the way he was handling King Hal that the horse would show itself off to its best advantage.
She watched him take every jump faultlessly and, when he came back to her, there was a smile on his lips and she thought that his eyes seemed even bluer than they had before.
“What do you think of him?” she asked
.
“I want to try the others first,” he answered, “before I waste all my adjectives on this one.”
She laughed as he mounted Red Trump and rode away.
*
Driving in State to The Castle for dinner, Clint Wilbur thought that at least this evening would not be so formal or boring as he had found a large number of dinner parties in England to be.
He and the Duke would certainly have an agreeable topic in common and that was naturally his horses.
They were indeed outstanding and Clint Wilbur intended to buy them, but only at a sensible price. He congratulated himself on having been clever enough to try them out before spending the evening with their owner.
This last week he had been taken by a member of the Jockey Club to see his stud at Epsom.
He had made it quite clear to Clint Wilbur that he expected to sell his horses to him for sums that even the merest greenhorn would have known to be exorbitant.
Clint Wilbur had in fact been ready to dig in his toes and refuse to buy what was being pressed upon him long before he reached the stable at Epsom.
The horses actually proved to be a disappointment.
He would not have bought one of them in any circumstances and he was well aware as they drove back to London that he had not only annoyed the man who had given him an expensive luncheon but had also incurred an enemy.
This was the sort of experience that he found distasteful. At the same time he had learnt many years ago that he was a target for every crook, sharpster and charlatan who wished to get their hands on his money.
He had bought Marshfield House not only because he liked it and knew the hunting in this part of England was exceptionally good but also because it was a bargain.
Compared to the other estates he had been offered, he thought, he was getting his money’s worth and it gave him a sense of satisfaction to know that in that instance at any rate he had not been outsmarted.
Money had been so much a part of Clint Wilbur’s life ever since he was old enough to know it was there that he accepted it casually but with certain reservations.
He knew it gave him power and also that because he was so rich he often saw people in a different light from how they actually were.
The Race For Love Page 2
