The Horsemaster's Daughter

The low islands were lawless, dangerous places where shipwrecks happened, and not always by accident. The favored haunts of pirates and fugitives, the long, shifting islands had become the stuff of legend, featured in spooky bedtime stories and tall tavern tales.

Noah took a rolled pamphlet from his hip pocket and shoved it at Hunter. “His name’s listed here in the Farmers’ Register.” He stabbed his finger at an article called “The Horsemaster of Flyte Island.” “Claims he tames wild ponies for riding and farmwork.”

“Why would such a gifted trainer leave Lord Derby’s Thoroughbreds for a herd of wild ponies?”

“I don’t know,” said Noah.

Hunter flipped through the yellowing pages. “This Register is two years old. How do you know the horsemaster is still there?”

“How do you know he’s not?” Noah’s solemn, handsome face was drawn taut with intensity and pleading. “He can save this stallion,” Noah added. “I know it, I do!”

“Son, a miracle wouldn’t save this stallion.” Hunter turned back toward the paddock, angry that he was letting himself be swayed by this earnest, hopeful youth. Earnestness and hope were alien notions to Hunter—for good reason.

“Don’t matter whether you put him down today or wait until tomorrow,” Noah persisted, an edge of anger in his voice. “We got to go see the horsemaster.”

“He’d have a chance to kill again.” Hunter lengthened his strides, thinking of the broodmare, dead because of the crazed stallion’s punishing hooves and wolf-like mouth. He thought of the hired groom slumped against the well house, cradling a crushed hand but thanking God he’d been spared his life. “And what makes you think this horsemaster would come to Albion for the sake of this Thoroughbred?”

Noah hesitated. “They say he won’t travel.”

Hunter let loose with a bark of laughter. “Even better. You’re saying I have to go to him?”

Noah danced ahead in his agitation. “It could be done, sir. I’ve thought and thought on it. You and I can drive the horse into the squeeze and I’ll get him blindfolded and muzzled. Then we’ll get the drover’s scow, the one with the pen. It’s shallow draft. It can dock right here at Albion so we can use the penning chutes, and at high tide it can be poled over to the horsemaster’s island.”

The drover’s scow plied between the low-browed peninsula that reached like a long, stroking finger down the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay and the mainland. Herds of horses, sheep and cattle grew fat on the rich salt grasses of the peninsula and islands, and each season drovers came eastward to pen them and bring them back across the water to market. But the drovers worked with tame livestock, not demonically possessed horses.

“It can work, sir,” Noah said, his voice rising with desperation. “I know it can.”

“Step aside, son,” Hunter said in exasperation. “This is hard enough without you calling up all sorts of false hopes.”

“Shoot him and you’ll have a dead horse for certain. I ain’t digging no grave for him,” Noah said defiantly. “Take him to the horsemaster and you’ll get your champion back. Sir.”

Hunter eyed the horse with its nervously twitching skin, all caked with mud and filth. The agent in Ireland had praised this stallion’s coat and conformation, the depth of his chest and the breathtaking sight of him running at top speed. The horse had, the agent claimed, that elusive quality known as “heart.”

“There’s nothing but madness in this beast,” Hunter said.

“Can you be sure of that?” Noah looked not at him but at the horse. Every muscle in the youth’s compact, slender body was tense, as if he wanted to leap into the paddock and tame the beast himself. “Can you be sure entirely? Look at that beauty.”

“I can be damned sure this horse killed an expensive mare and he’d do the same to you or me if we let him. He’s ruined, Noah. I don’t want that to be so, but it is.”

Noah’s head came up sharply as he confronted Hunter. “I never did ask you for much. You been good to me, I ain’t denying that, and I count myself lucky. But now I got something to ask. Do this for me, sir. Sure as I’m your cousin’s born son, give this horse a chance.”

Not prone to displays of emotion, Noah swung away and snuffled, wiping his face on his voluminous sleeve. He faced the horse in the paddock.

Hunter’s hand closed around the rifle stock. The oiled barrel had grown warm with the coming of the day.

And then he too looked at the stallion.

Two

Eliza Flyte’s favorite time of day was evening, when the light of the setting sun fused the sea and sky into a single wash of color. The flood tide turned the salt marshes into a green, floating kingdom with the shorebirds gliding silently by to roost for the night. A breeze rippled through the beach grass and sea oats, and frogs and crickets started up, marking the end of another day.

At such moments, when the beauty of nature burst with such force across the island, she felt she had all the riches of the world. She liked the unspoiled wilderness and the safety of being completely alone.

She stood at the shore of the island, shading her eyes against the coppery glare of sun on sea, and watched the flight of the wild swans that had taken up residence in the reeds along the freshwater estuary that seeped into the Atlantic. Every bird in the sky, it seemed, chose to roost in these parts. She knew why they came, for this was a place apart from everything else, separated by time and tide and the mists that fogged it in so that it appeared to be drifting, unanchored to the rest of the world.

It was a safe haven for creatures whose only defenses were flight and camouflage.

The cry of the departing swans always sounded inexplicably sad. Eliza imagined the piercing obligato to be some terrible wordless lament for a lost mate, and the sound never failed to make her shiver.

She was about to turn away from the shore, to step over the tangle of trumpet vines and the dunes clad in beach heather, when another movement caught her eye. She noticed a flicker, low on the diffuse waterline, and she paused, squinting, holding herself tense, ready to flee.

Something was there, in the distance, coming from the lee shore. At first she thought it was a whale. She had seen one once, a finback strayed in from the briny deep to beach itself and die with a horrible exhausted shudder on the strand. For weeks afterward she had avoided the stinking blue-tinged carcass, and when a wild autumn storm skirred in and sucked the carnage back out to sea, she had wept with relief.

But she realized as it drew near that this new apparition was no whale. It was the drover’s scow.

She recognized the low profile of the wooden craft from the old days, when her father would bring horses from the annual penning on Chincoteague Island. But no drover had visited Flyte Island recently. There was nothing here for him, nothing at all, and there hadn’t been in a very long time.

A man worked on the deck of the scow, his brawny form silhouetted against the sky. Alarm spread through Eliza in a swift, silent wildfire, radiating out along limbs and spine and scalp, seemingly to the very tips of her hair. She responded with the same instinct as the wild ponies that ranged across the island. Her nostrils filled with the scent of danger, a thrill of panic quivered across her skin, and she fled.

She sprinted up the beach, vaulting over the wrack line choked with refuse from the sea. Her bare feet were soundless on the dunes, and she covered a hundred yards before reason took hold and she slowed her pace. In a grove of whispering cedar trees, she stopped running. Still breathing hard, she scrambled up the curved scarp of a dune that had been bitten away by the tides. The vantage point gave her a clear view of the shore.

What would a drover want here? Did he think to graze his sheep or goats on the island? It was well-known that the grazing was poor, and could only support a handful of animals. What wild ponies there were would not welcome an intrusion. Aggressive and territorial, the herd would close ranks against any outsider.

The ponies would be up on the high ground for the night, huddled together for protection. Sometimes when Eliza watched them, she felt a tug of yearning, for the animals lived in a herd, their society regulated by the turning of the seasons and the sense of social order that seemed ingrained in the mares.

By watching the herd, Eliza had learned long ago that some animals were meant to live in groups. Living alone was unnatural, and the single, unconnected individual never survived for long. Perhaps people, like horses, were meant to live together too. But despite her loneliness, Eliza had never found any humans she wanted to live with.

She edged back out to the lip of the dune where it dropped off sharply to form a cliff. Her gaze tracked a meander of the marsh current. The tide had risen so that only the tips of the cordgrass showed, marking a passage deep enough for a flat-bottom vessel. The barge, rigged with two canvas sails, lurched awkwardly up the beach, propelled by a gust of wind and helped along by the drover’s long pole. Then the craft beached itself upon a shoal of fine sand and crushed shell.

She wondered how in heaven’s name he intended to correct such a haphazard landing. The pole came up, touching the top of the mast, and with a windy sigh the sails collapsed onto the deck, covering the tall-sided narrow pen in the middle.

Eliza stood perfectly still in the sweeping shadows of evening and watched while her heart sent her another message of danger. It took all of her will not to flee deeper into hiding.

A lone figure stood aboard the shallow-draft scow. The golden fire of sunset outlined his form in a strange flaming nimbus. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing fitted trousers and a blousy shirt with sleeves so generously cut that they blew in the breeze. She could make out his silhouette, a sharp-edged shadow against the coppery sky, but was unable to discern his features. He seemed unnaturally big, a threat, as he cast down the two bowlines and stepped into the thigh-deep surf to secure the lines to an ancient, worn stump of heartwood.

Eliza mustered her courage on a breath of marsh-scented air, then descended the dune in a tumble of crumbling sand. She strode out to the beach, unconsciously tightening the rope that held her smock cinched around her waist.

The boatman struggled with the sails, pulling them to one side of the pen. He unhitched a long wooden plank, creating a walkway to shore. His movements were sharp and angry.

A frightened whinny came from the pen.

The sound raked over her senses, calling to her like the song of a siren. Her every instinct screamed warnings but that sound, above all others, cut through her timidity and brought her out of the shadows. She forced herself to go nearer the intruder. He straightened, rubbing at the small of his back. The movement alarmed her, and she fell still, waiting. She could hear him muttering under his breath. He had a low, mellow voice that seemed curiously at odds with the barely restrained violence of his movements as he hauled on the canvas.

From the tall-sided pen she could hear a thump, then another. And finally a low, eerie growl, unmistakably equine.

She hurried the rest of the way to the beach and stepped barefoot through the wrack line, where changing varieties of flotsam were heaved up by the tide. The tattered hem of her dress swirled in the surf.

“Are you lost?” she asked, raising her voice over the roar of the sea.

His shoulders jerked up in surprise. He turned to glare at her. She could tell he was glaring even though the sun behind him obscured his features. Shading her eyes and squinting, she was able to catch a glimpse of his face, and for a moment she felt disoriented, adrift, confused, because it was such a striking, cleanly made face. In her entire life she had met few people, but she knew that here was a man who happened to be gifted with an excess of beauty. He looked like Prince Ferdinand in her illustrated Tempest.

For some reason that disturbed her more than anything else she’d seen so far. With a face as idealized as any artist’s fancy, he made a romantic sight; despite the circumstances, he possessed the sort of unsmiling demeanor of a man of great dignity and stature. He regarded her with a haughty aloofness, as if he lived in a kingdom not of this world.

But when he spoke, she knew he was very much of this world. “Is this Flyte Island?” he demanded, rude as any two-legged profane creature known as a man.

“It is,” she said.

“Then I’m not lost.” He yanked on the bowlines, testing them. “Who the hell are you?”

She cast a worried eye at the pen on the scow. “Who’s asking?”

His shoulders, remarkably expressive for such a nondescript part of the anatomy, lifted stiffly in annoyance. He turned to her once again, a shock of fair hair plastered with sweat to his brow.

“My name is Hunter Calhoun, of Albion Plantation on Mockjack Bay.” He paused, watching her face as if the name was supposed to mean something to her.

“Hunter. That’s a sort of horse, isn’t it?”

“It happens to be my name. I am master of Albion.” His eyes—they were a strange, crystalline blue—narrowed as his gaze swept over her. At a thud from the barge, his brow sank into a scowl. “I’ve come to see the horsemaster, Henry Flyte.”

The sandy earth beneath her feet shifted. Even now, after so much time had passed, the mere mention of the name disturbed her. He had been her world, the gentle-souled man who had been her father. He’d filled each day with wonder and wisdom, making her feel safe and loved. And then one day, without warning, he was gone forever. Gone in a raging blast of violence that haunted her still.

She felt such a choking wave of grief that for a moment she couldn’t speak. Her throat locked around words too painful to utter.

“Are you simple, girl?” the intruder asked impatiently. “I’m looking for Henry Flyte.”

“He’s gone,” she said, her small horrified admission stark in the salt-laden quiet of twilight. “Dead.”

A word she’d never heard before burst from the man. From the stormy expression on his face, she judged it was an oath.

“When?” he demanded.

“It’s been nearly a year.” Her pain gave way to anger. Who was this intruder to order her about and make demands, to pry into her private world? “So you’d best be off whilst the tide’s up,” she added, “else you’ll be stranded till moon tide.”

“He’s been dead a year, and no one knew?”

She flinched. “Those that matter knew.”

Hunter Calhoun swore again. He took out a hip flask, took a swig and swore a third time. “Who else lives here?”

“A small herd of wild ponies, up in the woods. Three hens, a milch cow, a dog and four cats, last I counted. More birds than there are stars.”

“I don’t mean livestock. Where’s your family?”

A wave of resentment rose high, crested. “I don’t have one.”

“You’re all alone here?”

She didn’t answer. He drank more whiskey. Then, bending down, he fetched a long-barreled rifle. The scent of danger sharpened. Was he going to shoot her?

“What do you mean to do with that?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he cocked the gun and lifted the barrel toward the latch of the pen. With horror, she realized his intent. “Stop it,” she said sharply. Animals were sacred to her, and she wouldn’t stand by and see one slaughtered. “Don’t you—”

“I’ve a mad horse aboard,” he interrupted. “You’d best move aside, because when I open the gate, he’ll escape, and I’ll take him out.”

Eliza stood her ground.

Scowling, Calhoun lowered the gun. “Without Mr. Flyte’s help, the beast is a mortal danger to anyone and anything. He’s got to be put down, and it’s best done here, in this godforsaken place.” His haughty glare encompassed the marsh. Ever-softening light spread over the low ground, the placid water reflecting the rise of dunes and the forest beyond.

He paused for another drink of whiskey. Eliza scrambled aboard and grabbed the gun, using her finger to pry the shot out of the pan. “This godforsaken place, as you call it, is my home, and I’ll thank you not to be leaving your carrion on the shore.”

He wrenched the gun away, elbowing her aside with a hard, impatient nudge. He lifted the heavy latch to the pen. “Stand aside now. This horse is a killer.”

Eliza burst into action, planting herself in front of the pen, her back flat against the gate. She could hear the heavy breath of the horse within, and she fancied she could feel its heat. The smells of hay and manure brought back waves of remembrance from the days when her father was alive. She let her emptiness fill up with fury.

“Who in God’s name are you, that you think you can simply do murder right here in front of me?”

“Who the hell are you that you think you can stop me?” As he spoke, he touched the barrel of the gun to her shoulder, where a long tangle of her hair escaped its carelessly done single braid.

Though she’d unloaded the rifle, she stood frozen with fear. In an obscenely gentle caress, he used the barrel of the gun to move aside the lock of hair and the edge of her blouse with it, baring her shoulder.

“Darling,” said Hunter Calhoun with a low, false endearment in his voice, “I’ve had a long, trying day. I’m armed with a deadly weapon. You don’t want to cross me, not now.”

She ignored him and battled the fear, closing her eyes as the sweet fecund aroma of horse and the sense of a big animal’s warmth reached her, entered her, plunging down to her heart. She hadn’t worked with a horse since her father had died, and she had sworn she never would again. But the magic was still there, the potency, the wanting.

She should walk away now, let him shoot this hapless beast and finish his whiskey flask. Her father’s magical way with horses, legendary on two continents, had got him killed. Ignorant, superstitious men had gone on a witch-hunt after him.

But there was something the world didn’t know. The magic had not died with Henry Flyte.

“Step aside, miss,” Calhoun said brusquely.

She opened her eyes, put her hands on the cool gun barrel and shoved it aside. Then she turned and peered through the gaps in the pen siding. She caught vague glimpses, obscured by the movement of the scow and by the twilight shadows, of a proud head, arched neck and a cruel iron muzzle. An old rag blindfolded the animal. Moist sores ran with pus that coursed down the horse’s cheeks, and he swayed with a sunken-ribbed hunger. The sight tore at her heart, and the pain she felt was the animal’s pain. Rage at Hunter Calhoun made her bold.

“Was this horse mad before or after you muzzled and starved him?” she demanded.

“Look, I came here hoping to save him.”

“Well done,” she said sarcastically.

“It’s no fault of mine he’s in this condition,” Hunter Calhoun said. “He came off the ship from Ireland crazed by a storm at sea. Killed a mare and nearly did in a groom before we were able to stop him.”

“What did you need a horse from Ireland for anyway?”

“For racing and breeding.”

The precise things that had given her father his start. Racing had elevated the horse, but it had also been responsible for unforgivable abuses.

“And you’re absolutely certain this horse is ruined.” Even as she made the comment, she realized his opinion didn’t matter to her. She sensed the horse’s fear—but she also knew that the fear could be penetrated.

“Look, I’m good with horses,” said Calhoun. “Always have been. I can ride anything with hair, I swear it.”

“Lovely.”

“Horses are my life. This is the first one I haven’t been able to handle.”

“So you’re going to shoot it. Do you deal with all your problems that way?”

“Damn it, I won’t stand around and debate this with you, woman.”

She turned away from him and peered through the slats of the pen. She saw the filth-caked coat shudder. An ear twitched, angling toward her. And then she felt it. An awareness. A connection. The stallion could feel her presence. He sensed she was different from the brute who had blinded and muzzled him.

She clutched the rough wood of the pen, battling her own instincts. Her need to reach out, to heal, was acute. For a moment, she felt very close to her father, who had taught her to respect all living things. The horse made a sound low in his throat, and in an odd way he seemed to be pushing her, forcing her toward a decision that could mean nothing but trouble.

The dilemma lay before her, demanding a course of action. If she healed this horse, she would unmask herself to the world. As they had in her father’s day, ambitious trainers and jockeys would come calling, begging her to rehabilitate their badly trained stallions, and in the next breath condemning her as a necromancer.

“Get away. Now!” Hunter Calhoun tried to shoulder her aside. “You think I like doing this? I just want it to be over—”

“I can help you.” The words rushed out of her, unchecked by reason. The sensible response would be to turn her back on this stranger and his abused stallion. But when it came to horses she had no will of her own.

Calhoun gave a short, sharp laugh, and in the pen the horse huffed out a startled breath.

“You can help?” he demanded.

Eliza felt torn. By revealing her secret ability, she would end her own self-exile. She would make herself vulnerable to the same ignorant prejudice that had killed her father. She wanted to curse this poor, damaged horse for forcing her to choose. Yet another part of her wanted to discover how the animal had been hurt, to bring him out into the light.

She took another look at the furious muzzled creature in the shadowy pen. Her special affinity, which had always been a part of her, gave her a glimpse of the tortured confusion that muddled the horse’s mind. A wave of compassion swept over her.

“Aye.” She used the old-country affirmative of her father.

“The horsemaster is dead. You said so yourself.”

“I did. But his craft is still very much alive.” She made herself look the intruder square in the eye. “I am Eliza Flyte. The horsemaster’s daughter.”

Three

Hunter didn’t know whether to laugh or curse. It was a minor wonder he had actually made it to this godforsaken place. Having grown up on a tidewater bay, he was a good seaman and knew the shoals and currents, but making the crossing to the barrier islands with a wild horse aboard a clumsy scow had not been easy.

Now that he had finally reached the island, this ragamuffin of a female claimed Henry Flyte was her father. Her late father. Unless Hunter wanted to go traipsing off around the island, he had no choice but to take her word for it.

“Eliza Flyte, is it?” He tasted her name, let it find its way over his tongue. It suited her, somehow. In her tattered brown smock and bare feet, she seemed wild and a bit fey, quite unlike anyone he had ever met before. A darkling girl, possibly of slave or Indian stock, she had a flawless complexion enhanced by the silkiness of her long eyelashes and the blue-toned sweep of her indigo-black hair. She had eyes of some indeterminate color beneath two dramatic slashes of eyebrow. The expression on the pale oval of her face was a mixture of annoyance and compassion—annoyance at him, and compassion for the murderous stallion in the pen.

When the breeze blew the dress against her legs, he saw that this was no girl. She lifted her face to the light, and he noted a woman’s maturity in the clear, fine-boned features. And in her strangely light eyes, eyes the color of mist on the water, he saw a look that was a thousand years old.

She stood no more than thirteen hands high, the top of her head barely reaching his shoulder. Yet she claimed she could tame this horse.

She was a liar, a cheater, a marshland bumpkin taking advantage of him.

“How much do you want for your services?” he asked suspiciously.