“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 3

Never sell to Ballentine. Not because he cheats you. Because he does not have to.

She had been sixteen and had not understood it, and had written it in the back of the book anyway, because she wrote everything down.

Now, in the room over the scullery, the ledger open on the boards with eleven years of ink in it, she understood.

Selena sat on the floor with the three sheets of paper on her knees and read the pedigree first. It was perfectly ordinary. There was nothing on that sheet a man buying a hunter in 1812 would have looked at twice.

Then she read it again.

Then she got the book out from under the board.

An hour later her aunt opened the door. Mrs. Cordelia Thorne looked at the papers, and the oilcloth, and the ledger open across the boards, and her arranged face came apart for about a second and a half.

“What is that?”

“A pedigree.”

“Who sent it?”

Selena had been raised by a man who never lied about a horse, and she had found it a difficult inheritance.

“The Duke of Langmir,” she said.

Her aunt sat down in the little chair by the window, which she had never once done in seven years.

“You will return it. This afternoon. With a civil note in my hand, and not in yours.”

“Why?”

“Because a duke does not write to a girl in your position about horses.”

Cordelia’s voice had gone quiet and fast.

“Because on Thursday, four separate people told me what my husband’s niece did at Cadmore Cross. By Sunday it will be twelve. Susan is to be presented in April. Do you understand what you have cost this house? Do you understand what a duke’s attention does to a girl who has nothing? It does not raise her. It marks her.”

“He asked me about a drain.”

“Nobody in England will believe that.”

“That is not my difficulty,” said Selena.

Her aunt stood up.

“You will go to my cousin at Ripen. She wants a companion. It is settled. You will go at Lady Day, and you will stay. You will not write to Susan or Harriet. In three years, everybody will have forgotten there was ever a Thorne girl who rode at a gate.”

Selena closed the ledger.

She had known the Ripen threat was coming for about four years. She had gone over it perhaps two hundred times, lying in the cold over the scullery. Every single time she had arrived at the same answer, which was that she had no answer. A woman with eleven shillings and a mare cannot argue with a roof.

But something had changed on the ninth of February, and she had not fully noticed it until this moment.

“Send me to Ripen,” she said. “Then Susan goes to London in April as the cousin of the girl the Duke of Langmir wrote to — the family got rid of.”

Her aunt stopped in the doorway.

“You will not.”

“I will not have to say a word. They will not ask me. They will ask you, Cordelia.”

Selena got up off the floor.

“You have spent seven years telling me I am a problem you carry. And you have never once done the other half of the sum. I am also the only interesting thing that has ever happened to this house. You cannot spend me and be rid of me at the same time.”

Cordelia Thorne stood in the doorway of the room over the scullery and looked at her husband’s niece as though somebody had moved the furniture in the dark.

“You are a very cold girl.”

“I am a very accurate one. It is not the same thing, and I am tired of being told that it is.”

The door closed.

Selena sat back down on the floor with the ledger and the three sheets of paper. By four o’clock she had found the first of the three things that were wrong with them.

It had made her feel sick.

The carriage came on the twelfth. Selena went in her mended habit, because she had one other gown and it was worse.

The carriage did not go to the house. It went round to the stable yard, which was the largest Selena had ever stood in. Forty-one boxes on three sides of a square, swept and quiet, smelling of clean straw and linseed and horse.

The Duke of Langmir was standing in the middle of it in his shirt sleeves, with a colt on a lead rein.

“You did not burn it,” he said.

“No.”

“Good.”

He handed the colt to a boy.

“Come and look at something.”

He took her to the last box but one. Selena looked over the door at a bay mare standing quietly with her head down.

“Meridian,” she said.

“Meridian. May I go in?”

He opened the door for her.

Selena went in and put her hand on the mare’s shoulder and stood a moment, the way you do, until the animal has decided about you.

Then she ran her palm slowly up the back of the hind leg. She stayed there a long time, under the hair, in a band about three inches wide. The skin was thickened and ridged, in a row of short parallel lines. The hair grew in white along every one.

She had known what she would find.

She had not known what it would feel like under her hand.

“She was fired,” Selena said.

“I know. My man found it in the June of 1812, three months after I bought her.”

The Duke’s voice had no expression in it at all.

“Fired hocks are not a crime, Miss Thorne. Half the hunters in England have been fired. It was done before I had her, and it was not declared, which is a shabby piece of business. I was six-and-twenty, and I let it go.”

“You bought her sound.”

“I bought her with a certificate.”

He nodded at the papers in her hand.

“That one?”

Selena came out of the box and shut the door.

“I have to ask you something impertinent.”

“Go on.”

“Why do you still have her? She is at least sixteen, has not been ridden in years, and you keep forty other horses that earn their keep.”

The Duke of Langmir put his hands in his pockets.

“In the August of 1812, I rode her in a private match over four miles at Ilsley. She broke down at the eleventh fence and she fell. A boy called Tom Reeve was two lengths behind me and could not get out of it.”

He said it in the voice a man uses to read out an inventory.

“He died on the Tuesday. He was seventeen years old. He was my second groom, and I had had him since he was eleven.”

The yard was very quiet.

“Everybody told me it was bad luck. I have kept that mare six years because I could not decide whether it was — and I could not sell her without deciding.”

He looked at her.

“Now tell me what is wrong with the papers.”

Selena held up the certificate.

“W. Kumb, Farrier, of Lambourn, dated the second of April 1812.”

She looked at him.

“William Kumb shod my father’s horses at Fen Hollow for nineteen years. He died in the May of 1811. I was at his burying. I was sixteen, and I held his wife’s dog.”

The Duke did not move.

“Eleven months,” said Selena. “The man who signed that certificate had been in the ground eleven months when he signed it.”

Behind them a horse kicked a bucket over, and a boy swore at it.

“Come into the house,” the Duke said.