“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 4

He took her to a room off the gun room and sat her down. He did not offer her tea, which she was grateful for.

“I am going to put a proposition to you,” he said. “I shall put it badly. I have not got any of the other kind.”

“Please.”

“In the last week of April, the royal hunt goes out from Windsor. The field is mine to make up. Forty-one of the horses that will carry it were bought in the last years on Sir Hector Ballentine’s advice.”

He paused.

“I want every one of them looked at. Not by a vet. Vets look at what is in front of them. I want somebody who can tell me whether the horse in front of them is the horse the paper says it is.

“There is no such person.”

“There is one,” he said. “She is standing in my gun room, in a habit that has been turned twice, and she cannot be employed. I cannot put a woman on the books of the royal establishment. I cannot have her in my stables for eleven weeks with no more standing than a groom.”

He looked at her steadily.

“So I am asking you to marry me.”

Selena discovered that she had gripped the arms of the chair.

“That is a great deal of trouble to go to for forty-one horses.”

“It is a great deal of trouble to go to for Tom Reeve,” said the Duke of Langmir. “The horses are a convenience.”

“Then hire a man and tell him what to look at.”

“I have hired four.”

He said it fast, and with an edge on it, and she understood that patience was not among his virtues.

“Four men in six years, and every one told me what I already knew.”

He put his hand on the chimney piece.

“And there is the other thing, which I had not meant to say, so I shall say it badly as well.”

He turned round.

“On Thursday I watched ninety people laugh at you. Not for being wrong — for being right in the wrong clothes. If I ride away and leave you at Underh Hill, that goes on for thirty years. In about four of them you will stop saying the thing out loud, because saying it costs you, and nobody pays.”

Selena sat very still.

She had spent seven years being told what she was. A problem. A burden. A girl who mucks out. Nobody at Underh Hill had ever once described what she did as a thing that could be lost.

“What do I get?”

“My name, which stops your aunt sending you to Ripen. A yard — not access to a yard, a yard which you give an order in.”

He said it like a man reading terms. Which he was.

“And whatever you find, you find under your own name. If it comes to a court, you stand up and say it yourself. And you get somebody who tells me what is wrong with the paper.”

Selena looked at the fire.

She had been offered two things in her life. Her uncle had offered her a roof. Ripen had been offered as a punishment. Both were arrangements in which she was the article being moved.

“I do not love you,” she said.

“I want that said aloud, in this room, so that neither of us has to be careful about it later.”

“Good,” said Ambrose Langmir. “Neither do I. It would only get in the way, and we have eleven weeks.”

They were married on the twenty-sixth of February at Langmir church, with six people present. Selena wore gray. Her aunt wrote a letter of the most exquisite warmth, and Selena put it in the fire without opening it, and felt nothing at all.

By the first week of March she had looked at nineteen of the forty-one. She worked slowly and on foot, and mostly in the early morning, because she wanted them cold out of the box.

The book now lay on a table in a room of her own. Beside it lay a second book, new, in which she copied out only what the papers said, so that the two could be laid side by side.

By the nineteenth of March, there were four horses in the royal string she could not account for.

She also had, by then, a fairly complete picture of what London had decided about her marriage. Langmir had married the Thorne girl for her eye. He wanted a judge of horses, could not employ one, so had bought one and given her a title as wages. Very shrewd. Rather cold. Did anybody know whether she dined with him?

Selena could hold that up and turn it over like a certificate.

The difficulty was that she could not find the error in it.

He had said it himself, in plain words: somebody who tells me what is wrong with the paper.

She had been proud of herself, at the time, for being unsentimental. She had not foreseen that she would mind.

On the twenty-first, the Duke and Duchess of Langmir went to the spring sale at Tattersall’s. The yard at Hyde Park Corner was full, two hundred men and eleven women. Selena stood at the rail in a good plain habit that fitted her, which was still an odd sensation, and read the horses as they came through.

Sir Hector Ballentine found them at the third lot.

He was a big, warm, red-faced man of about five-and-fifty, with an excellent tailor and a laugh you could hear across a paddock.

“Langmir, and her grace!”

He bowed over Selena’s hand with tremendous good humor.

“Old Thorne’s daughter! Your father — a rare judge. A rare judge, and a shocking man of business. He owed me two thousand when he died, you know. I never saw a penny, and I never asked.”

He beamed at the three gentlemen behind him.

“Fen Hollow was a sad business.”

There it was, quite neatly done. Her father a debtor, her family a charity, Ballentine the generous man — all in eleven seconds, obliging, with a smile.

“You bought Fen Hollow,” Selena said, “in one bid, and you did not attend. I stood at the rail in the rain and watched your Mr. Pavier do it.”

Ballentine’s laugh came out about a half-second late.

The bay in the ring came round again.

“Trot him,” said Selena.

She had not raised her voice. The auctioneer heard her because everybody had stopped talking. The boy at the horse’s head looked up at the rostrum. The rostrum, after a moment, nodded.

They trotted him away and back on the flags.

“Again,” said Selena. “On the turn. To the left.”

They turned him to the left.

“He is going short on the near fore, and he will not be sound in six weeks. There is a bony growth low down on the inside of that leg, in the one place they cause trouble. He is a very good horse. Somebody will have him cheap in the autumn and be delighted.”

A hard old man in a brown coat went down into the ring. He picked up the bay’s near fore and ran his thumb slowly down the inside of it. He straightened and looked at Selena Langmir with frank astonishment.

“She is right,” he said.

The bidding stopped, four hundred behind where it had been going.

“A novelty, I grant you.”

The warmth had gone out of Ballentine.

“But I would not make a habit of it. In this yard, a woman calling faults from the rail will be thought to be doing it for somebody. Men will ask who.”

“Then they may ask me,” said Selena.

Behind Ballentine, Georgiana Ballentine had come up.

“Papa,” she said. “Is she right?”

It was not loud. It did not need to be. Eleven people heard a bloodstock agent’s own daughter ask that question in the yard at Hyde Park Corner.

Sir Hector Ballentine did not answer it.