“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 6

She went down to the yard at eleven o’clock at night on the second of April, with a lantern and the book under her arm.

The old bay got up out of her straw with a grunt and came over to see whether there was anything in it for her.

Selena opened the book on her knees. The entry was on the fourth page of 1810, her own hand at fifteen, smaller then, the letters still schoolroom-round.

Bay, about 15.2. No white. Named Roseberry. Two whorls, upper high and set forward, lower low and turned back. Lump inside near fore. Withdrawn from ring, unsound behind. Man said she would come right under it.

She had drawn the two whorls, a hand’s-breadth apart, exactly where they sat.

Selena picked up the lantern and held it along the mare’s neck. The hair had gone gray at the roots with age. Hair does not move.

The upper whorl was high and set forward, and the lower one was low and turned back, a hand’s breadth beneath it.

She put the lantern down. She knelt in the straw and ran her hand up the back of the hind leg.

Three inches of ridged skin and white hair, where a hot iron had been laid in lines across a joint that was already ruined.

Two years between Reading and Ilsley. A new name. A new pedigree. A farrier eleven months dead. And six hundred guineas.

“You have been down here an hour.”

The Duke was at the door with no coat on.

“I have,” said Selena. “Come in and shut the door and give me your hand. And do not say anything for a minute. I am going to be accurate, and I would like to do it only once.”

He came in.

She took his wrist, which she had never done, and put his hand flat against the back of the mare’s hock, and held it there.

“Do you feel it?”

“I have felt it for six years.”

“Then feel it properly. Those are lines. Somebody laid an iron across that leg in a pattern, and hair grows in white where it burns.”

Her voice was very steady, and it was costing her.

“The mare in my book is called Roseberry. Withdrawn from the ring at Reading in May of 1810. Unsound behind. I saw her, and I wrote her down. Same whorls, two years old, and the leg was already gone. I was fifteen, and I thought no more about her, because horses are withdrawn every week.”

Ambrose Langmir’s hand had not moved.

“She was fired in the autumn of 1810,” Selena said. “Renamed. Sold to you in the April of 1812, with a pedigree that gives her a different dam, and a certificate signed by a dead man. You did not buy a sound horse and ruin her.

“You bought a horse that was already ruined. And somebody sold you the two years in between.”

The stable was very quiet. The mare turned her head and lipped at the Duke’s sleeve, the way an old horse does when it has decided you are furniture.

“I rode her at a four-mile match,” he said. “She would have gone at four miles or at forty yards. The leg was going to fail on the day it failed.”

Selena let go of his wrist.

“You have spent six years asking whether it was your hands. It was not your hands, your grace. There was nothing wrong with your hands. You were sold a lame horse by a man who knew a boy of seventeen went down behind you.

“That boy was not killed by bad luck. He was purchased.”

The Duke of Langmir sat down on the corn bin.

He did not weep, and he did not cover his face. He put his elbows on his knees and looked at the straw. After a while, his breathing went out of shape.

Selena stood in the box with her hand on the old mare’s neck and let him alone.

She did not tell him it was not his fault. She had had seven years of people at Underh Hill explaining that a thing was not anybody’s fault. Every one of them had said it in order to stop talking about it.

After a long time he said:

“Tom Reeve had a mother at Kintbury. Is she living?”

“I do not know.”

“I sent money for four years, and then I stopped, because I could not make myself write the letter.”

He rubbed his face with both hands.

“I could not write a letter to a woman in Kintbury. So I bought a mare a very good box, and called it grief.”

“That is the most honest thing anybody has said to me in seven years,” said Selena.

She sat down on the corn bin. She did not take his hand. She sat close enough that her shoulder was against his arm.

The lantern burned down, and neither of them said anything else for a considerable while.

It was, she thought afterwards, the first time in her adult life she had sat still with another person. The first time she had not been calculating how long she would be permitted to stay.

He read the book on the fourth of April.

She gave it to him at the table in her own room, then stood at the window with her back to him. She found she could not watch.

It took him three hours. He did not ask a single question until he had finished. Then he closed it and sat with both hands flat on the cover.

“Four hundred and eleven horses,” he said.

“Four hundred and thirteen. There are two on the inside of the back board.”

“How many are wrong?”

“Sixty-one that I am certain of. Perhaps ninety.”

He was quiet.

“Lord Ancaster’s chestnut,” said Selena. “Two of the Beechley horses. Four in the royal string. The mare Colonel Viner’s daughter rides at Melton, which is going to break down and hurt her. Miss Georgiana Ballentine has been riding since October. It is the best gray I ever saw, and it is not five years old, whatever her father told her.”

Ambrose Langmir looked down at the ledger for a long moment. Then he pushed it away across the table.

“No,” he said. “I beg your pardon. I am not using it.”

Selena stood very still by the window.

“You have waited six years.”

“I have.”

He got up.

“Do you know what will happen the day that book is read out? Not to Hector — to you.”

He was not angry. He was working through it out loud, the way he did with a horse.

“Every man in that room has bought a horse he did not look at hard enough. From the moment you open the cover, not one of them will ever be easy with you again. No stud will send you a mare. No sale will let you at the rail.

“You will sit in that yard for forty years, and nobody will ever put a horse in front of you. And that is the only thing you have ever wanted.”

“That is my calculation to make.”

“It was going to be mine, because I asked you to make the book and did not think what it would cost until this afternoon.”

He put his hand flat on the cover.

“And it is worse than you have asked. Four of those horses are in the royal string, and I passed them. I am master of the buckhounds, and I passed them. Open that book at Windsor, and the establishment does not thank you. It asks how the master came to be married to the only person in England who could have told him — and why the two of you waited until April.

“I lose the office. You lose the yard, because the yard is mine. And every soul in that room will say the same thing about you for the rest of your life: that she married him to get at Hector Ballentine.

“That is not true.”

“It does not have to be true. It has to be sayable.”

He came back from the window.

“So I am telling you what I have decided. You keep your yard. You keep your name. Hector Ballentine is five-and-fifty, and he will die of something. I have found I can wait for that.”