The Horsemaster's Daughter. Сьюзен Виггс
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СКАЧАТЬ he continued along the winding path toward the sea, Hunter wondered what he could have been thinking, allowing himself to be persuaded to bring the stallion here. What a fool’s errand it had been. What a waste of time.

      The horse was a menace. It needed to be shot.

      It was not a duty he embraced, for the truth was, he loved horses. He always had. Against all caution, good sense and advice from well-meaning neighbors, he’d made the breeding and racing of Thoroughbreds his life.

      Necessity, as much as desire, had dictated the change. His father, the master of Albion, had left the tobacco plantation to his first-born son. Hunter had expected the legacy. From the day of his birth he had been groomed for it. By the age of eight, he knew the worth of a peck of tobacco on the Richmond exchange. By the age of eleven, he knew how many pickers were needed to bring in a crop.

      The only thing he hadn’t been prepared for was bankruptcy. When the will was read and all the dust settled, Hunter discovered something his father had concealed for years: Albion was swamped by debt. The once-prosperous tobacco plantation teetered on the verge of collapse.

      Everyone had expected him to either go down with the plantation like the captain on a sinking ship, or to cut his losses, take what he could salvage and rebuild.

      But to the amazement of the Tidewater plantation society, and to the consternation of his wife and her family, he did neither. He appalled them all with his actions. Before the small-eyed, hated trader came to sell off the slaves of Albion in order to pay pressing debts, Hunter set each one of the slaves free. Hunter’s father-in-law, Hugh Beaumont, had shrieked that the servants and field-workers were worth a small fortune as chattel, but nothing as free people.

      What could Hunter have been thinking?

      He knew setting them free was foolhardy, yet the day he signed the stack of manumission papers, Hunter had felt ten feet tall. His father-in-law had accused him of going insane, but Hunter had simply turned away and called in an estate agent to auction off some of the remote tobacco fields and furniture.

      When all was done, he was left with a huge, half-empty house and a handful of ex-slaves who stayed on out of old age, infirmity or loyalty. In addition to the house, he kept the barns, the paddocks and acreage in the high meadows suitable for pasturing.

      He remembered the day he’d told Lacey what he intended to do with Albion. He and his wife had sat together in the still-elegant parlor; the estate liquidators had not yet come to seize the Waterford candlesticks and chandeliers, the Heppelwhite chests, the Montcalme harpsichord and Aubusson carpets. His voice low and deep with excitement, Hunter had finally confessed his life’s ambition. He told his wife that he wished to make a new start and turn Albion into a Thoroughbred breeding and racing farm.

      She had laughed at him. He’d recognized the merry, girlish laugh that had captivated him when he was a boy, only this laugh had a harsh edge of desperation. “Darling, you can’t mean it. Making a horse farm will take far more money than you have, and years of work. And you’ve just set all your laborers free.”

      Her lack of belief in him struck hard. He had looked down at his large, pale hands, holding them to the light and splaying the fingers wide. “Sweetheart, these hands have held the reins of the finest horseflesh in Virginia. They’ve cradled bottles of wine worth more than some men earn in a lifetime. They’ve been dealt hands of cards that won or lost a small fortune. And they’ve loved you with all that I am for eight years. The one thing they’ve never done is a day of hard, honest labor.” He turned them palms up, studied his long fingers as if they belonged to someone else. “Right now, these hands are the only thing I can truly claim as mine. So I reckon I’d better get used to the idea of doing the work myself.”

      Lacey Calhoun had wept, certain her husband had lost his mind. She had begged him to consider their young children, Belinda and Blue, and what this would do to their position in society. But Hunter had stood firm. For once, he was going to go after something he truly wanted. For the first time in his life, the dream belonged to him. Not to his father or to the other planters, to his neighbors or Lacey’s family, but to him.

      Lacey had not understood. Hysterical, she had run from the room to pack her things. Then she’d taken the children to her father’s house, refusing to see Hunter until he regained his senses.

      That day had marked the end of their marriage. He hadn’t noticed it at the time, of course, because he had given himself, to the last inch of his soul, to the new enterprise. He’d worked like a madman on stables, arena, round pen, racing track, starting gates. Working side by side with Noah, he had sought out broodmares and studs—bargaining, borrowing, buying, breeding and praying his luck would hold. Slowly, as time passed, things began to happen. His horses won races. He received invitations to run his horses at Clover Bottom, Metairie and Union Course. Breeders from Virginia and Maryland, Tennessee and Kentucky sought out his studs. The foals out of his mares were considered to be among the best in racing. He inaugurated an annual yearling sale at Albion.

      But as he gained a hold on the racing world, he lost it on his wife. The daughter of Albion’s nearest neighbor, Lacey had been groomed to be a planter’s wife and had no idea how to cope with a husband who worked like a man possessed and didn’t seem to care whether or not he profited from his labors. The tobacco culture, which made up her world, no longer welcomed Hunter Calhoun. Planters looked down on him, branding him a brawler, a gambler, a horse racer. If he’d grown wealthy from his enterprise, they would have changed their minds, but despite the success of his horses, the expenses always outpaced the profits. He should have known the change would be too much for Lacey. But he had been naively certain she would come to believe, as he did, that there were better ways for a man to live his life than employing slave labor to grow a weed that would make him rich.

      By that time, it was too late to win Lacey back. He tried—Lord, he tried—but to no avail. His pleas and promises fell on deaf ears. His reminders of their marriage vows and their duties to the children were met with stony silence. He had humiliated her in front of the society that meant everything to her, an unforgivable offense. Never once did Lacey crack, never once did she allow herself to show a flicker of feeling for the man she had pledged to love until the day she died.

      Then she had died, in the most hideous possible way, leaving the shattered wreckage of a broken family in her wake—a husband whose only solace lay in a dented silver flask of whiskey, a son whose soul had been sucked away by shock and grief and a daughter who was too young to understand anything except the fact that all the joy had gone from her life.

      The prospect of repairing his fortune became the only thing that gave shape and meaning to Hunter’s future. Importing the swiftest Irish Thoroughbred on record should have been the culmination of his ambitions. Deemed a bad foal-getter, Finn was undervalued, and Hunter’s agent in Ireland had acquired him at a low price. Even so, it had cost him all the proceeds of his first yearling sale, and he could not afford to insure the animal through Lloyd’s. He had not once paused to consider that a disaster could befall the horse on the voyage from Ireland.

      By the time Hunter breasted the broad dunes facing the southeastern end of the island, he had worked himself into a black and thirsty mood. The need for whiskey sharpened to a gnawing hunger in his gut, and until he reached Albion he had no way to assuage it.

      At the high tide line, he reached the scarps in the dunes, forming cliffs where heaved-up surf had clawed into the sand. The roots of sea oats dangled in a dense snarl from the underlip of the cliff. Hunter stood at the crumbling edge, scanning the shore for his scow. He could make out the shadow of a cove, and noticed that the sea changed color not far offshore, indicating a decent deepwater anchorage.

      Pirates had СКАЧАТЬ