by Susan Wiggs
He should have drunk more whiskey.
Grimly, he once again set the butt of the rifle against his shoulder and waited for the horse to settle. But the blood of champions flowed in this stallion’s veins and he had enormous reserves of stamina, despite the grueling sea voyage from Ireland.
After a time, the horse dropped his front feet to the ground. He hung his head, sides bellowing in and out, the banked fires of malevolence still burning in his eyes.
Hunter took aim. A single shot between the eyes and it would all be over.
He took in one long breath, then let half of it out. His forefinger tightened, squeezing slowly and steadily on the trigger. In the notch of the rifle’s site, the stallion stood hanging his head. Puffs of dust scudded outward as the horse exhaled through his distended nostrils.
“Mr. Hunter, sir!” yelled a voice across the lawn. “Wait!”
Hunter’s concentration shattered. The stallion swung his head toward the noise and his front feet pawed the ground. Gritting his teeth in frustration, Hunter lowered the gun.
“What the hell is it, Noah?”
The mulatto boy was out of breath from running, and his eager face ran with sweat. His breeches were soaked from the knees down. He’d probably just left the launch at the plantation dock.
Noah’s one passion in life was horses, not tobacco nor even, thus far, girls. Though only sixteen, he was regarded as a local expert at breeding and racing, and his small stature made him a talented and sought-after jockey. He had been nearly as excited as Hunter over the arrival of Finn, the Irish Thoroughbred.
“You mustn’t put him down, sir. I know of a way to save him.” Noah’s face was pale and taut with earnestness.
Exasperated, Hunter climbed off the fence. “Noah, it’s not possible, you know that. I’ve had the best trainers in Virginia down to have a look at him.”
“But I heard tell of someone—”
“Son, there’s no hope. Every one of the experts I consulted assured me the horse is ruined.” He gestured at the shadowy dark beast in the pen. “His mind is gone. He probably injured himself during a storm at sea, so he could be ruined for racing anyway. No one can get close enough to examine him. I’m sorry,” Hunter said. “I hate like hell that I have to do this.”
“Then don’t—”
“Damn it, you think I want to, boy? If this horse had a broken leg, you wouldn’t want him to suffer. You’d want me to put him down, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” Noah stared at the ground, his bare foot stabbing at the grass. “But listen—I been trying to tell you something.”
“All right,” Hunter said, setting the rifle aside, muzzle down. Each time he looked at Noah, he felt a piercing tenderness, for the boy was his kinsman. The son of Hunter’s young cousin and an African laundress, Noah had grown up at Albion. He was an everyday reminder of the sweetness of first love—and of the bitter aftermath of forbidden passion. “Of course I’ll listen, but my mind is made up.”
“I was in Eastwick, at the drovers’ club there, and I heard tell of a man at the eastern shore who can gentle any horse.”
“I believe I heard from his advance man,” Hunter said cynically, angry that someone would play upon the youth’s hopes. “Would he be the one with the magical healing powder? Or maybe he’s the one who wanted to sell me a book of incantations.”
“No, this is for real. Honest and true!”
Hunter hesitated. Were it anyone save Noah he would dismiss the idea out of hand. But this was Noah, the boy he had educated when no school would have him, a horseman who had proved time and again that he had the head and heart for the business of racing horses.
Hunter took a long, hard look at the stallion. Once his dream, now his nightmare. Then he shouldered the rifle and walked with Noah away from the paddock. The ripening sun brought out the sweetness of lilacs and hyacinths in the air.
“His name is Henry Flyte, and he was horsemaster to Lord Derby in England. Grandson of the Lord Derby,” he added, referring to the famous Englishman who had inaugurated the first running of the Derby Stakes at Epsom more than half a century before. “Henry Flyte trained Aleazar.”
Hunter came to attention. The story of Aleazar was known throughout racing. The three-year-old had been bred out of the Royal Studs, but was declared unridable by the best trainers and jockeys in England. Then, seemingly out of the blue, Lord Derby had raced him at Epsom. The stallion had broken every record in memory, and Derby gave full credit to a trainer whose unusual methods had worked wonders on the horse. There followed some tragedy and upheaval, but it all happened when Hunter was a boy and he remembered no details.
“And the claim is,” Hunter said, “this wonder of a trainer lives in Virginia now.”
“It’s what the drovers are saying.” Noah shifted from foot to foot, clearly agitated. “Been here for years. They say he keeps to himself. He lives on an island across the marsh from Eastwick.”
The low islands were lawless, dangerous places where shipwrecks happened, and not always by accident. The favored haunts of pirates and fugitives, the long, shifting islands had become the stuff of legend, featured in spooky bedtime stories and tall tavern tales.
Noah took a rolled pamphlet from his hip pocket and shoved it at Hunter. “His name’s listed here in the Farmers’ Register.” He stabbed his finger at an article called “The Horsemaster of Flyte Island.” “Claims he tames wild ponies for riding and farmwork.”
“Why would such a gifted trainer leave Lord Derby’s Thoroughbreds for a herd of wild ponies?”
“I don’t know,” said Noah.
Hunter flipped through the yellowing pages. “This Register is two years old. How do you know the horsemaster is still there?”
“How do you know he’s not?” Noah’s solemn, handsome face was drawn taut with intensity and pleading. “He can save this stallion,” Noah added. “I know it, I do!”
“Son, a miracle wouldn’t save this stallion.” Hunter turned back toward the paddock, angry that he was letting himself be swayed by this earnest, hopeful youth. Earnestness and hope were alien notions to Hunter—for good reason.
“Don’t matter whether you put him down today or wait until tomorrow,” Noah persisted, an edge of anger in his voice. “We got to go see the horsemaster.”
“He’d have a chance to kill again.” Hunter lengthened his strides, thinking of the broodmare, dead because of the crazed stallion’s punishing hooves and wolf-like mouth. He thought of the hired groom slumped against the well house, cradling a crushed hand but thanking God he’d been spared his life. “And what makes you think this horsemaster would come to Albion for the sake of this Thoroughbred?”
Noah hesitated. “They say he won’t travel.”
Hunter let loose with a bark of laughter. “Even better. You’re saying I have to go to him?”
Noah danced ahead in his agitation. “It could be done, sir. I’ve thought and thought on it. You and I can drive the horse into the squeeze and I’ll get him blindfolded and muzzled. Then we’ll get the drover’s scow, the one with the pen. It’s shallow draft. It can dock right here at Albion so we can use the penning chutes, and at high tide it can be poled over to the horsemaster’s island.”
The drover’s scow plied between the low-browed peninsula that reached like a long, stroking finger down the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay and the mainland. Herds of horses, sheep and cattle grew fat on the rich salt grasses of the peninsula and islands, and each season drovers came eastward to pen them and bring them back across the water to market. But the drovers worked with tame livestock, not demonically possessed horses.
“It can work, sir,” Noah said, his voice rising with desperation. “I know it can.”
“Step aside, son,” Hunter said in exasperation. “This is hard enough without you calling up all sorts of false hopes.”
“Shoot him and you’ll have a dead horse for certain. I ain’t digging no grave for him,” Noah said defiantly. “Take him to
the horsemaster and you’ll get your champion back. Sir.”
Hunter eyed the horse with its nervously twitching skin, all caked with mud and filth. The agent in Ireland had praised this stallion’s coat and conformation, the depth of his chest and the breathtaking sight of him running at top speed. The horse had, the agent claimed, that elusive quality known as “heart.”
“There’s nothing but madness in this beast,” Hunter said.
“Can you be sure of that?” Noah looked not at him but at the horse. Every muscle in the youth’s compact, slender body was tense, as if he wanted to leap into the paddock and tame the beast himself. “Can you be sure entirely? Look at that beauty.”
“I can be damned sure this horse killed an expensive mare and he’d do the same to you or me if we let him. He’s ruined, Noah. I don’t want that to be so, but it is.”
Noah’s head came up sharply as he confronted Hunter. “I never did ask you for much. You been good to me, I ain’t denying that, and I count myself lucky. But now I got something to ask. Do this for me, sir. Sure as I’m your cousin’s born son, give this horse a chance.”
Not prone to displays of emotion, Noah swung away and snuffled, wiping his face on his voluminous sleeve. He faced the horse in the paddock.
Hunter’s hand closed around the rifle stock. The oiled barrel had grown warm with the coming of the day.
And then he too looked at the stallion.
Two
Eliza Flyte’s favorite time of day was evening, when the light of the setting sun fused the sea and sky into a single wash of color. The flood tide turned the salt marshes into a green, floating kingdom with the shorebirds gliding silently by to roost for the night. A breeze rippled through the beach grass and sea oats, and frogs and crickets started up, marking the end of another day.
At such moments, when the beauty of nature burst with such force across the island, she felt she had all the riches of the world. She liked the unspoiled wilderness and the safety of being completely alone.
She stood at the shore of the island, shading her eyes against the coppery glare of sun on sea, and watched the flight of the wild swans that had taken up residence in the reeds along the freshwater estuary that seeped into the Atlantic. Every bird in the sky, it seemed, chose to roost in these parts. She knew why they came, for this was a place apart from everything else, separated by time and tide and the mists that fogged it in so that it appeared to be drifting, unanchored to the rest of the world.
It was a safe haven for creatures whose only defenses were flight and camouflage.
The cry of the departing swans always sounded inexplicably sad. Eliza imagined the piercing obligato to be some terrible wordless lament for a lost mate, and the sound never failed to make her shiver.
She was about to turn away from the shore, to step over the tangle of trumpet vines and the dunes clad in beach heather, when another movement caught her eye. She noticed a flicker, low on the diffuse waterline, and she paused, squinting, holding herself tense, ready to flee.
Something was there, in the distance, coming from the lee shore. At first she thought it was a whale. She had seen one once, a finback strayed in from the briny deep to beach itself and die with a horrible exhausted shudder on the strand. For weeks afterward she had avoided the stinking blue-tinged carcass, and when a wild autumn storm skirred in and sucked the carnage back out to sea, she had wept with relief.
But she realized as it drew near that this new apparition was no whale. It was the drover’s scow.
She recognized the low profile of the wooden craft from the old days, when her father would bring horses from the annual penning on Chincoteague Island. But no drover had visited Flyte Island recently. There was nothing here for him, nothing at all, and there hadn’t been in a very long time.
A man worked on the deck of the scow, his brawny form silhouetted against the sky. Alarm spread through Eliza in a swift, silent wildfire, radiating out along limbs and spine and scalp, seemingly to the very tips of her hair. She responded with the same instinct as the wild ponies that ranged across the island. Her nostrils filled with the scent of danger, a thrill of panic quivered across her skin, and she fled.
She sprinted up the beach, vaulting over the wrack line choked with refuse from the sea. Her bare feet were soundless on the dunes, and she covered a hundred yards before reason took hold and she slowed her pace. In a grove of whispering cedar trees, she stopped running. Still breathing hard, she scrambled up the curved scarp of a dune that had been bitten away by the tides. The vantage point gave her a clear view of the shore.
What would a drover want here? Did he think to graze his sheep or goats on the island? It was well-known that the grazing was poor, and could only support a handful of animals. What wild ponies there were would not welcome an intrusion. Aggressive and territorial, the herd would close ranks against any outsider.
The ponies would be up on the high ground for the night, huddled together for protection. Sometimes when Eliza watched them, she felt a tug of yearning, for the animals lived in a herd, their society regulated by the turning of the seasons and the sense of social order that seemed ingrained in the mares.
By watching the herd, Eliza had learned long ago that some animals were meant to live in groups. Living alone was unnatural, and the single, unconnected individual never survived for long. Perhaps people, like horses, were meant to live together too. But despite her loneliness, Eliza had never found any humans she wanted to live with.
She edged back out to the lip of the dune where it dropped off sharply to form a cliff. Her gaze tracked a meander of the marsh current. The tide had risen so that only the tips of the cordgrass showed, marking a passage deep enough for a flat-bottom vessel. The barge, rigged with two canvas sails, lurched awkwardly up the beach, propelled by a gust of wind and helped along by the drover’s long pole. Then the craft beached itself upon a shoal of fine sand and crushed shell.
She wondered how in heaven’s name he intended to correct such a haphazard landing. The pole came up, touching the top of the mast, and with a windy sigh the sails collapsed onto the deck, covering the tall-sided narrow pen in the middle.
Eliza stood perfectly still in the sweeping shadows of evening and watched while her heart sent her another message of danger. It took all of her will not to flee deeper into hiding.
A lone figure stood aboard the shallow-draft scow. The golden fire of sunset outlined his form in a strange flaming nimbus. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing fitted trousers and a blousy shirt with sleeves so generously cut that they blew in the breeze. She could make out his silhouette, a sharp-edged shadow against the coppery sky, but was unable to discern his features. He seemed unnaturally big, a threat, as he cast down the two bowlines and stepped into the thigh-deep surf to secure the lines to an ancient, worn stump of heartwood.
Eliza mustered her courage on a breath of marsh-scented air, then descended the dune in a tumble of crumbling sand. She strode out to the beach, unconsciously tightening the rope that held her smock cinched around her waist.
The boatman struggled with the sails, pulling them to one side of the pen. He unhitched a long wooden plank, creating a walkway to shore. His movements were sharp and angry.
A frightened whinny came from the pen.
The sound raked over her senses, calling to her like the song of a siren. Her every instinct screamed warnings but that sound, above all others, cut through her timidity and brought her out of the shadows. She forced herself to go nearer the intruder. He straightened, rubbing at the small of his back. The movement alarmed her, and she fell still, waiting. She could hear him muttering under his breath. He had a low, mellow voice that seemed curiously at odds with the barely restrained violence of his movements as he hauled on the canvas.
From the tall-sided pen she could hear a thump, then another. And finally a low, eerie growl, unmistakably equine.
She hurried the rest of the way to the beach and stepped barefoot through the wrack line,
where changing varieties of flotsam were heaved up by the tide. The tattered hem of her dress swirled in the surf.
“Are you lost?” she asked, raising her voice over the roar of the sea.
His shoulders jerked up in surprise. He turned to glare at her. She could tell he was glaring even though the sun behind him obscured his features. Shading her eyes and squinting, she was able to catch a glimpse of his face, and for a moment she felt disoriented, adrift, confused, because it was such a striking, cleanly made face. In her entire life she had met few people, but she knew that here was a man who happened to be gifted with an excess of beauty. He looked like Prince Ferdinand in her illustrated Tempest.
For some reason that disturbed her more than anything else she’d seen so far. With a face as idealized as any artist’s fancy, he made a romantic sight; despite the circumstances, he possessed the sort of unsmiling demeanor of a man of great dignity and stature. He regarded her with a haughty aloofness, as if he lived in a kingdom not of this world.
But when he spoke, she knew he was very much of this world. “Is this Flyte Island?” he demanded, rude as any two-legged profane creature known as a man.
“It is,” she said.
“Then I’m not lost.” He yanked on the bowlines, testing them. “Who the hell are you?”
She cast a worried eye at the pen on the scow. “Who’s asking?”
His shoulders, remarkably expressive for such a nondescript part of the anatomy, lifted stiffly in annoyance. He turned to her once again, a shock of fair hair plastered with sweat to his brow.
“My name is Hunter Calhoun, of Albion Plantation on Mockjack Bay.” He paused, watching her face as if the name was supposed to mean something to her.
“Hunter. That’s a sort of horse, isn’t it?”
“It happens to be my name. I am master of Albion.” His eyes—they were a strange, crystalline blue—narrowed as his gaze swept over her. At a thud from the barge, his brow sank into a scowl. “I’ve come to see the horsemaster, Henry Flyte.”
