“No Lady Rides Like That,” They Laughed—Then She Found a Dead Man’s Signature on the Duke’s Horse Papers. He Chose Her for the Royal Hunt, Where She Could Finally Expose Who Was Behind a Young Groom’s Death.

PART 1

The yard did not care who she was when she was in it.

That was the thing about horses. They did not ask after her father’s debts, or the eleven thousand pounds, or whether she had any business being alive at all. They knew her hands, and that was all they had ever needed. Ren knew her hands. Ren knew they would be out by five in the morning, in the dark, with the frost white on the rails and the groom’s bad hip making him walk like a man carrying a weight he had long since stopped complaining about.

The gray had a split in the front foot.

Selena had seen it two weeks ago, a hairline crack running down the outside of the hoof in the one place it would take a season to matter. She had watched it travel. She had counted the weeks. Six weeks, and the horse would be lame on it, and nobody would know why, because nobody was looking at the hoof. They were looking at the coat.

“He wants a different shoe,” she said.

Old Pike straightened up slow, the way he did now, one hand on his hip.

“Mr. Thorne says shoe them all the same and be done.”

“Mr. Thorne has never picked up a foot in his life.”

Pike grunted. It was not agreement. It was the closest thing to agreement anybody at Underh Hill had ever offered her, and she had learned to take it that way.

She was back in the house by seven, hands scrubbed till the knuckles were raw, and still smelling faintly of hoof and tar. Her aunt noticed. Her aunt always noticed.

“You have been in the yard.”

“I have been in the yard.”

Mrs. Cordelia Thorne set down her cup. She was a handsome woman of fifty with a soft voice and a habit of arranging her face before she spoke, like a woman smoothing a bedspread over something she did not want seen.

“Selena, my dear,” she said. My dear, the way other women said unfortunately.

“Susan and Harriet are nineteen and seventeen. In three months they will be in London. Every soul in that town will know they have a cousin who mucks out.”

“Then they will also know the horses at Underh Hill are sound.”

“Nobody cares whether the horses are sound.”

“That,” said Selena, “is exactly the difficulty.”

It went on like that. It always had.

Her aunt was not cruel in any way that could be described to a magistrate. She never struck anybody. She never raised her voice. She simply repeated, over seven years, that Selena was a problem the family had agreed to carry, and that the least Selena could do was be quiet about it.

Selena had learned to let the words go past her like weather.

What she had not learned to let go of was the book.

It lived under a loose board beneath her bed, wrapped in oilcloth. A quarto ledger, half filled when she got it, because it had been her father’s, and he had died before he could fill it.

She had begun writing in it at thirteen.

Every horse she had ever seen was in there. Not the famous ones — any fool could look up a famous one. Her book had the plain ones, the sale-yard ones, the ones that changed hands in the rain at Reading and Newbury and Ilsley Down. Name, color, height. The age they said, and the age it was. Old scars, and where they sat. And the two little whorls of hair on the neck, drawn in ink exactly where they grew.

The whorls on a horse are laid down before it is born. They never move.

A man can change a horse’s name.

He cannot change the hair on its neck.

Eleven years of it. Four hundred and some entries. She had never shown it to a living soul, because she had worked out at about sixteen what it was, and what it was had made her afraid.

Sell a horse at Reading in the spring. Give it a new name. Sell it again at Newbury in the autumn to a man who has never seen it before. Nobody in England could tell the difference.

Except Selena Thorne could.

And had, four hundred times, in ink, with dates.

Her father had bred horses at Fen Hollow for twenty-two years, two hundred acres of chalk and short grass, four miles north of where she now slept over a scullery. He died owing eleven thousand pounds. Fen Hollow went in the November of eighteen eleven — the land, the horses, her mother’s furniture, and the Fen Hollow stud book, which went in a lot of miscellaneous papers.

A gentleman from London bought the whole stud in one bid and did not trouble to attend.

Selena stood at the rail in the rain and watched a man she did not know lead out her father’s mares.

She wanted three things: a yard, one good mare, and her own name written somewhere in a stud book as the person who bred something.

She did not expect to get them. But she kept the book.

The meet was at Cadmore Cross on a Thursday in January, and Selena was there because her uncle would not go without a groom and Pike’s hip was bad. She rode Ren.

Ren was fifteen hands and a bit, brown, plain as a boot, with a head like a coffin and one white foot. Selena had bought her for eleven shillings because she was thin and lame, and the lame one had been paid for already. The lameness had been a stone bruise. The thinness had been worms. Two years on, the mare could go all day and had never once fallen down.

There were about ninety riders out. Selena kept to the back where a groom belonged, and watched.

She watched the way she always watched. Not the coats. Not the faces.

The horses.

Third from the left had a bad back and would empty its rider at the first drop. The chestnut with the plaited mane was going short in front, and nobody had noticed. And near the head of the field sat a young woman in a habit the color of claret, on a gray mare that was very nearly the best horse Selena had seen in seven years.

That was Miss Georgiana Ballentine. Two and twenty. Rode better than any woman in the county, and knew it.

They found at ten and went away north over the plow. For two miles it was a scramble. Then the country opened and the field strung out, and Selena discovered that Ren had opinions.

They came to Lovell Brook with the water up. Sixty riders turned left for the ford. Georgiana Ballentine went at the brook itself and cleared it beautifully, to a small ripple of appreciation from the men who had turned left.

Selena went at the gate.

It was a five-barred gate hung true and shut fast, four foot six. She had ridden past it every week for seven years, and had known for six of them that Ren would jump it.

She got her skirt out of the way. Which meant she got her right leg over. Which meant that for about eleven seconds, Selena Thorne rode a stride in front of ninety people.

Ren cleared it with four inches to spare and landed running.

The laughter started before she was straight.

“Good God,” somebody said. “It is Thorne’s niece.”

And across thirty yards of wet grass, in a voice trained to carry across a drawing room:

“No lady rides like that.”

Selena heard it. She looked straight ahead between Ren’s ears and rode on. Her face did nothing at all.

Doing nothing was a skill she had been practicing at Underh Hill for seven years.

They ran another mile and a half and came to Kellet’s rails. A plain post-and-rail off a headland into pasture. Nothing at all. The field came at it in a bunch. Selena brought Ren back to a trot and went along the headland to the gap at the far end.

Behind her, a man on a big bay put in a short one and jumped.

He landed in the pasture, and the ground came up under his horse’s legs like a lid. The bay went down and did not get up.

There had been a stone drain under that pasture since before Selena was born, and it had fallen in about the previous March. She knew because the grass came through greener in a line four foot wide all the way to the ditch. Grass tells you what is under it, if you have been made to look at grass since you were six.

She did not go and look. She did not need to look.

She was a groom’s problem, not a gentleman’s.

She was still sitting there when a man on a big black horse came up the headland at a walk.

Next Chapter

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