“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 5

Georgiana stood in the sun with her face going slowly still. She was looking at the bay in the ring and at the old man in the brown coat beside it. She was not looking at Selena at all.

The Duke of Langmir had not spoken since the third lot.

He spoke now, and not to Ballentine. He turned to a thin gentleman in black who had been standing four feet away for the whole of it.

“Mr. Halloway. The establishment will not be buying through Sir Hector this season. Nothing at Windsor, and nothing at Ascot.”

“Your grace.” Halloway’s face did not move. “May I give a reason?”

“No.”

It took eleven seconds. It cost nothing, and it could not be answered. Every man at that rail understood at once. The Master of the Buckhounds had cut the most fashionable agent in England out of the royal establishment, and had declined to say why.

They would invent a why. They would invent nine.

Ballentine stood in the sunshine at Hyde Park Corner with his hand still half out.

“Langmir,” he said. “What is this?”

“Good afternoon, Hector,” said the Duke.

She did not speak to him until they were in the carriage and out past Knightsbridge.

“You did not tell me you were going to do that.”

“I decided in the ring.”

“You decided in the ring.”

Her hands were flat on her knees and her voice was extremely level.

“There were two hundred men at that rail. This morning I was a duchess with an odd hobby. By Sunday, every one of them will have decided you did it because your wife told you to.”

“They may decide what they like.”

“I am the one who has to stand at the rail.”

She turned and looked at him.

“You have taken the only thing I have — which is that I am right in public and can be checked — and you have made it look like influence in private. From tomorrow I am not a judge of horses. I am a woman who whispers.”

Ambrose Langmir opened his mouth and shut it again.

“I did not think of that,” he said.

“No. You are quick and certain, and you go straight at things, which is a fine way to be in a hunting field. It is a poor way to be with somebody who has nothing but her name for it.”

He did not apologize, and she would not have believed him if he had.

But he did not do it again.

Eleven days later, Halloway asked him about the Ascot string in front of four men. He said, without any hesitation:

“Ask her grace. She has seen them, and I have not.”

It was the first time in Selena’s life that anybody had passed a question to her in public and then stopped talking.

They rode out to Ascot together on the first of April, to look at a horse. It was fourteen miles, and it was the first time they had been anywhere alone that was not a stable yard or a room with paper in it.

She had Ren. He had the black.

They did not talk a great deal on the way out, and she found she did not mind that either.

The horse was not worth the journey. They turned for home at four with the light going.

At Winkfield the weather came down off the west in a solid gray wall. Three miles further on, Ren cast a shoe in the mud and went short on it at once. Selena was off her before the mare had taken four steps.

“She has done the foot,” she said. “I am not riding her another mile on that. I will lead her, and you may go on.”

“It is nine miles.”

“I have walked nine miles.”

“Not in the dark, in April, with the rain coming sideways.”

Ambrose had already dismounted. He looped Ren’s rein through his arm, turned the black round, and stood at its shoulder.

“Get up on mine. On mine — in front of me. Because behind me, you will be soaked in twenty minutes.”

He said it exactly as he said everything, flat and unarguable. Then he looked at her, and something in his face went slightly wary.

“Unless you would rather not.”

Selena stood in the rain in the lane at Winkfield and did a piece of arithmetic she had never had occasion to do before.

“No,” she said. “I would rather.”

He put her up, then looped Ren’s lead rein twice around the pommel of his own saddle before swinging up behind her, so that the mare walked loose alongside them on a slack rein at the horse’s shoulder. It answered well enough at a walk, which was the only pace any of them had left in them by then.

It was nine miles, and it took two hours and a quarter. For the whole of it, Selena sat across the front of the saddle with her shoulder against his chest and his right arm passing her the rein.

Neither of them said anything for the first four miles.

She had been touched perhaps eleven times in seven years. A hand on her elbow steering her out of a church. Pike bracing her when a horse ran back. Her aunt’s grip, for the benefit of a congregation. Every one of them had been somebody moving her.

This was not that.

She was simply against him, warm through two wet coats, his heart going in her ear at the walk. Every so often he changed the rein, and his arm came round a little, and then went back.

Somewhere past Cranborne, she said:

“You are not going to say anything about this.”

“No good. I am going to think about it a great deal,” said the Duke of Langmir. “But I am not going to say anything about it.”

Selena looked straight ahead into the rain with her ears burning, and did not answer for another two miles.

It was the longest she had gone in her adult life without producing an accurate reply to something.

They came into the yard at Langmir at nine. He got down first and reached up. She came off the black into his hands. He set her on the cobbles, let go, and stepped back — and did all of it in about three seconds.

“Your horse wants a foot seen to,” he said.

“Yes. I shall send for the farrier in the morning.”

“Yes,” said Selena.

She stood in the wet yard and watched him walk his horse away. Then she went in, and got out of her habit, and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark.

She sat there rather longer than a woman does who is only cold.