“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 8

The hard old man in the brown coat had already come across the room.

He took the ledger off the table before Ballentine’s hand reached it. He stepped between them without appearing to notice that he had, and put his spectacles on.

“Go on, girl,” said Eyde.

“Two whorls of hair on the neck. Upper high and set forward. Lower a hand’s-breadth below, and turned back.”

Selena was watching Ballentine now, and nobody else.

“Drawn in ink in 1810. And a mare standing in the small yard forty yards from that door, since seven this morning, Mr. Eyde.”

“For men who dislike me, I do not need to come.”

“You are a liar,” Ballentine said.

“Then it will take you four minutes to prove it.”

Eyde was already walking. Eleven men went out after him into the April sun.

The long room stood and waited.

Nobody spoke to Sir Hector Ballentine, and nobody looked away from him either.

They were gone rather less than four minutes.

The door opened. Eyde came back in with the ledger held open in both hands, his spectacles pushed up on his forehead. He stopped in the middle of the floor. He looked at Ballentine.

And he laughed once.

A single dry crack of a laugh that went across that long room like a gun going off in a stable.

“Hector,” he said. “She has drawn the horse.”

“One more thing, and then I have done.”

Selena did not raise her voice at all.

“In the August of 1812, that mare broke down at Ilsley at the eleventh fence. A groom called Tom Reeve, aged seventeen, went down behind her, and died on the Tuesday.

“His mother lives at Kintbury. She has been told for six years that it was bad luck.

“It was not bad luck, Sir Hector. It was four hundred pounds of profit — and a boy nobody wrote down.”

Sir Hector Ballentine stood in the long room at the Windsor kennels with a glass in his hand, and seventy people between him and the door.

He looked round for his daughter.

Georgiana Ballentine was standing by the second window, with her gloves in her hand.

She did not move toward him. She did not move away.

She looked at her father with an expression that was not surprise.

That was what finished it.

Every soul in the room saw it.

Ballentine put the glass down on the table beside the ledger. He went out through seventy people who did not get out of his way, and did not say anything to him either.

The door closed.

Selena found that she was holding the edge of the table.

By the door, the Master of the Buckhounds had not moved at all.

Georgiana Ballentine came to her in the small yard twenty minutes later.

Selena was standing at Meridian’s door with a handful of nothing, letting the old mare lip at her palm. Georgiana did not apologize, and Selena would have thought less of her if she had.

“The gray,” Georgiana said. “He told me she was rising five. Possibly ten. She was in a sale at Ilsley Down in 1815 as a six-year-old, which was also a lie, but a smaller one.”

She went on scratching the mare’s nose.

“She is still the best gray I have seen in seven years. Nothing I said this morning makes her a worse horse. It makes her a horse with four or five good seasons instead of eleven. Go on as you are going, and you will have all of them.”

Georgiana Ballentine stood there for a moment.

“At Cadmore,” she said, “I said a thing about the way you ride.”

“You did. It went round the county for a fortnight. I made sure it did.”

She pulled her gloves through her hand.

“I have been riding since I was four. I am the best woman across country in this shire — and I have never once been asked a question about a horse by anybody who mattered. They asked my father.”

She looked up.

“You came over that gate, and you did not care who was watching. I said the worst thing I could think of. It took me eleven weeks to work out why.”

“You do not have to tell me why.”

“No,” Georgiana agreed. “I do not.”

She put her gloves on.

“The gray’s name is Fen,” she said. “Come and look at her sometime. Bring the book.”

They moved off at eleven.

There were a hundred and forty riders out, and every one of them had spent the last hour talking about one thing.

The Master of the Buckhounds took his horse from a boy at the gate and did not mount. He stood in the middle of the yard with the reins over his arm, and waited until the field had settled and turned and noticed him — which took perhaps forty seconds.

He said:

“She will be riding the brown mare.”

Somebody near the back said, quite distinctly:

“On that.”

“On that,” said the Duke of Langmir.

Selena brought Ren up out of the crowd.

The plain brown mare with the coffin head and the one white foot came through a hundred and forty of the best horses in England — past Georgiana Ballentine’s gray, past four royal grooms and a great deal of scarlet. She stood at the head of the field with her ears going, having cost eleven shillings off a knacker’s cart.

They went away east toward the great park with the sun in their faces.

Selena Langmir rode at the front of the royal hunt the way her father’s head lad had taught her, which was to say she rode like a boy of fourteen with somewhere to be.

No lady in England rode like that.

And there was nobody left within four miles of her who was going to say so out loud.