“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 2

He was somewhere past thirty. Long face, dark, unshaven along the jaw in a way that suggested he had not been to bed at a reasonable hour in some time. His coat had been very good about four years ago.

He stopped beside her and looked down at the men standing round the bay.

“You went round?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

Selena did not have reasons. She had only ever had observations, and nobody had ever asked for them before.

“The drain has gone in,” she said. “It runs from the corner of the covert to the ditch. You can see it in the grass from here — if you know you are looking at grass, and not at a field.”

The man on the black horse turned his head and looked at the line of greener grass, and went on looking at it longer than she expected.

“How long has it been down?”

“Since about last March.”

“And you did not tell anyone.”

“I am not asked,” said Selena.

He looked at her then. It was not the look she was used to — the one people gave a woman in a mended habit on a knacker’s mare. It was flatter than that, and more interested. It went first to her hands on the reins, and stayed there longer than a man’s eyes have any business staying on a stranger’s hands.

Selena moved them. She did not decide to. They simply went down the rein an inch, and she was extremely annoyed about it.

He noticed that too. Which was worse.

“Yes,” he said. “She has done it before. Only without ninety people watching.”

“Miss Ballentine says no lady rides like that.”

“Miss Ballentine is correct,” said Selena.

Something happened at the corner of the man’s mouth. It was over almost at once.

“Ambrose Langmir,” he said.

Selena had been raised in a stable yard and not in a schoolroom. It took her about three seconds to arrive at Master of the Buckhounds. Another to arrive at what a master of the buckhounds was. And one more to arrive at the fact that she had just told the Duke of Langmir how to look at a field.

“Your grace.”

“You have a name.”

“Selena Thorne.”

“Thorne,” he said, slowly. “Fen Hollow?”

“My father.”

The Duke of Langmir looked down the pasture again, at the bay and the men, and the greener line of grass running away to the ditch.

Ninety riders, and two masters, and a professional huntsman, had gone over it all winter without once seeing it.

“Miss Thorne,” he said. “I am going to send you something in about a fortnight. You may burn it if you like. But I would rather you did not.”

Then he turned the black horse and went back down the headland.

Selena sat on her eleven-shilling mare in the cold and watched him go. Halfway down he stopped and looked back up at her, and did not pretend he had done it for any other reason.

She was still cross about it at four o’clock in the scullery, with her hands in a bucket.

She had expected a note. She had spent a fortnight deciding to burn it — a duke who sends notes to a girl in a mended habit has one thing in mind, and it is not grass.

What arrived on the ninth of February was three sheets of paper.

A pedigree for a bay mare called Meridian, foaled 1808. A bill of sale for six hundred guineas. A certificate of soundness, dated the second of April 1812, signed by one W. Kumb, Farrier, of Lambourn.

There was no letter.

On the back of the pedigree in pencil, in a hard slanting hand, somebody had written:

Tell me what is wrong with this.

And underneath, smaller:

The horse came to me through Sir Hector Ballentine.

Selena read that line three times.

Then she found the back page of her book and read what her father had said in the yard at Fen Hollow, and sat down on the floor rather suddenly.