“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 7

Selena discovered she had put her hand on the back of the chair.

She had been wrong about him.

She had decided about Ambrose Langmir in about four seconds, on a wet headland at Cadmore Cross, and she had been comfortable with the decision ever since. A bored man. A duke amusing himself with a curiosity. Or a duke using a girl in a mended habit to needle the Ballentines. It was a thing rich men did to each other, and it had nothing to do with the girl.

She had held that opinion for eleven weeks.

She had priced him in four seconds, and never once gone back to check the working.

It was exactly the sin she had spent her whole life accusing other people of. Accepting the first cheap reading of a thing, because it let her stop looking.

“At the gate at Cadmore,” she said, “I thought you rode over to me because I was a novelty. I know you said as much with your face.

“I was wrong. And I am not accustomed to it, and I find I do not care for it at all.”

Her voice was not steady.

“But I am about to be right about something else, so you will have to bear with me.”

She came and picked the book up off the table.

“You do not get to spend my future for me, and you do not get to save it for me. Those are the same act, your grace — and I have had seven years of men doing it under my roof and calling it generosity.”

She held the ledger against her chest.

“Tom Reeve had a mother at Kintbury. You have a mare in a good box and six years of not sleeping, and a name you say out loud. There is a boy of seventeen in the ground at Kintbury who was sold for six hundred guineas.

“I am the only person alive who can prove it. And you are asking me to let that stand, so that somebody will let me look at horses.”

The Duke of Langmir did not argue with her.

That was the thing she had not prepared for, and it took the ground out from under her far more thoroughly than a fight would have done.

He stood and looked at her for a long moment. Then he came round the table and took the book out of her arms and squared it and gave it straight back.

“The hunt breakfast is on the twenty-ninth,” he said. “Hector will be there. He is always there.”

“Good.”

“You will have about four minutes before somebody stops you.”

“I will not need four,” said Selena.

The hunt breakfast was in the long room at the Windsor kennels — seventy people in scarlet and in black, eating cold beef, standing up. Sir Hector Ballentine was by the fire with a glass in his hand.

Selena had come in her habit, with the ledger under her arm, and had put it down on the end of the long table among the dishes. Ambrose stood by the door and did not come any further into the room for the whole of what followed.

At twenty minutes to ten, she picked the book up again.

“Sir Hector.”

The room did not go quiet at once. It took about four seconds, in pieces.

“Your grace.”

Ballentine came away from the fire, smiling.

“You have brought your famous book, gentlemen. We are to be entertained.”

“You sold the Duke of Langmir a bay mare in the April of 1812 — six hundred guineas — called Meridian, foaled 1808, by Coriolanus out of Lady Jane.”

Selena opened the ledger.

“I have four things, and then I have done.”

Now look here.

“The first is the certificate of soundness. It is signed W. Kumb, Farrier, of Lambourn, and dated the second of April 1812.”

She looked up.

“William Kumb shod at Fen Hollow for nineteen years, and he died in the May of 1811. There are a dozen men in Lambourn who carried him. His widow is alive and keeps the shop. He had been in the ground eleven months on the day he signed that paper.”

Somebody at the back put a plate down.

“A clerk’s error,” said Ballentine. “A date written wrong. It happens forty times a season.”

“Then the second is the pedigree.”

Selena turned a page.

“Coriolanus stood at Ilsley from 1804 — not in 1807. That February he went to Mr. Fitzwilliam at Northam, and he did not come back until October, and he covered no mare in England that year. It is in the stud book every man in this room has on his shelf.

“A foal of 1808, out of a Berkshire mare, cannot be by a horse that spent the spring in Ireland.”

She closed the book on her finger.

“That is not a clerk’s error, Sir Hector. That is a horse given a father, because it needed one.”

The room had gone entirely silent now. Ballentine’s color had come up.

“And the third,” said Selena, “is the mare.”

“The mare has been dead these six years.”

“The mare is standing in the third box in the small yard, forty yards from this door. She has been there since seven o’clock this morning.”

Nobody moved for a moment.

Then two men at the window turned and looked out — which was the moment it stopped being an argument.

Selena laid the ledger open on the long table among the dishes, at the fourth page of 1810.

Reading, the twenty-third of May, 1810. Bay, about 15.2. No white. Named Roseberry. Withdrawn from the ring, unsound behind. I was fifteen, and I wrote her down, because I wrote all of them down.

She turned the book round so that it faced the room.

“The hair on a horse’s neck is laid down before it is foaled. It does not move, and no two are alike. I drew hers eight years ago, in ink, with a date.

“Roseberry was unsound at two. She was fired that autumn, and carried a dead man’s signature and a father who was in Ireland, and was sold as a hunter for six hundred guineas to a man of six-and-twenty.”

Sir Hector Ballentine came off the fire.

He came fast. The warmth had gone out of him entirely, and he was suddenly a very large man in a room that had been standing about with plates.

“Gentlemen.”

His voice filled the place.

“You are being handled. Look at what is in front of you. A stable girl. A horse-coper’s daughter out of a bankrupt yard, mucking out at Underh Hill eleven weeks ago — and now standing at Windsor, telling the Master of the Buckhounds what he may buy.”

He turned on the room, not on her.

“Ask yourselves: who profits? Who has cut me out of the royal establishment, and would not give a reason? He would not give a reason because the reason is standing here in a habit — and she has been in his ear since February.”

There was a movement through the seventy people. Not agreement. But not nothing, either.

“A book,” said Ballentine. “A book kept by a girl. Ink on paper in her own hand. Unwitnessed. Dated by herself. Produced by her past self, on the morning her husband needs it.

“Let me see it. If it is honest, it will bear looking at.

“Give me the book.”

He was three steps away, and he did not stop coming.

Selena did not move, and did not lift the ledger.

“Before you take it, Sir Hector, here is the fourth thing,” she said. “Mrs. Kumb keeps her husband’s order book as well as his shop. I bought both, along with the rest of his papers, when nobody else in Lambourn would trouble to. There is an entry in his widow’s own hand, for the second of April, 1812 — three guineas, received in coin, for what she has written as a certificate copied out in the old form. No horse was brought to her for examination. She did not ask whose it was. A newly widowed woman with a shop to keep open does not always ask.

“But she remembers who carried the coin to her door, because she remembers thinking it a strange errand for a gentleman’s groom to be sent on. A groom in your own livery, Sir Hector.”

“Mr. Eyde,” she said.

“You have been buying at Hyde Park Corner since before Waterloo, and you have never in your life taken my word for anything. Would you read it instead?”