TWELVE
Dougless watched Nicholas atop the stallion and held her breath. She’d heard of people riding horses like this one, but she’d never seen it. Every employee and every visitor at the riding stables had stopped to watch as Nicholas brought the high-strung, angry, mean-tempered animal under control.
Last night they’d stayed up until after one A.M. while Dougless made him tell her all about his relationship to the Harewoods. They’d had estates near one another. Dickie was old enough to be Nicholas’s father and he’d had a daughter, Arabella, who’d married Lord Robert Sydney. She and her husband had hated each other, so after she’d given him an heir, they’d lived apart, although Arabella had given birth to three more children.
“One of them yours,” Dougless had said, taking notes.
Nicholas’s face softened. “There is no reason to think ill of her. She and the child died in that childbirth.”
“I’m sorry,” Dougless said with a grimace, and knew that the woman could easily have died from something as simple as the midwife’s not washing her hands.
Dougless tried to think of a way to get invited to the Harewood estates as quickly as possible, but she had no credentials as a scholar, and although Nicholas was an earl, his title had been taken from him when he was condemned for treason. He couldn’t even claim to be his own aristocratic descendant. She thought until she couldn’t stay awake any longer; then she’d bid Nicholas good night and gone to her own bed.
“This is better,” she thought as she drifted into sleep. She had her emotions under control. She was getting over Robert and she was no longer thinking she was falling for a married man. She’d help Nicholas get back to his wife, help him clear his name; then she’d go home feeling good about herself. For once in her life she was not going to fall for an unsuitable man.
Nicholas woke her early the next morning by throwing open the sitting room door. “Can you ride a horse? Can anyone today ride a horse?”
Dougless assured him she could ride, courtesy of her Colorado cousins; then after breakfast she’d found a nearby riding stables. It was four miles to the stables and Nicholas insisted they walk. “Your machines have made you lazy,” he said, slapping her on the back as he set off at a brisk pace. At the stables, as Dougless sat on a bench fanning herself, Nicholas had turned up his nose at all the horses for rent, but his eyes had lit up at the sight of an enormous black horse in a field. The animal was prancing about and tossing its head as though it dared anyone to come near it. As though in a trance, Nicholas had walked toward the creature. When the horse ran toward him, Dougless sat up and bit her knuckles in fear.
“This one,” Nicholas said to the stableman.
Dougless hurried to him. “You can’t really think of riding that horse. There are lots of horses here; why don’t you pick one of them?”
But nothing anyone could say would change Nicholas’s mind. The owner of the stables came into the yard, and he seemed to think it would be a great joke to see Nicholas break his neck. Dougless knew that in America there’d be talk of insurance, but not in England. A groom got a rope around the stallion’s neck, then led it into a stall, where another groom saddled it. Finally, the horse was led into a cobbled courtyard and the reins were gleefully handed to Nicholas.
“I never seen nobody ride like that,” one of the grooms said as soon as Nicholas had mounted and pulled the horse under control. “He ride a lot?”
“Always,” Dougless answered. “He’ll get on a horse before he’ll get in a car. In fact, he’s spent much more of his life on a horse than in a car.”
“Must have,” the groom mumbled, watching Nicholas with awe.
“You are ready?” Nicholas asked Dougless.
She mounted her sedate mare and followed him as he took off. Never had she seen a happier man, and it struck Dougless afresh how different the modern world must be from what he knew. He and the horse fit together as one being, as though he’d become a centaur.
Rural England is full of footpaths and horse trails, and Nicholas went galloping down one of them as though he’d been down it a thousand times—which he probably had, Dougless thought. She called out to him that maybe he should ask directions, but then she doubted if someone had moved Goshawk Hall in the last few hundred years.
She had trouble keeping up with him, lost him repeatedly, and once he returned for her. She had stopped at a crossroads and was looking at the ground for his tracks. When he saw her, he was very interested in what she was doing. Dougless, trying her best to control her mare, who was reacting to the aggressive nearness of Nicholas’s stallion, told him she’d buy him some Louis L’Amour books and read to him about tracking. Laughing, he pointed the way to her, then left in
a flurry of mud and leaves.
At last she reached an open gate with a small brass plaque that said, “Goshawk Hall.” She rode down the drive to see an enormous, rectangular fortress of a house set amid acres of beautiful, rolling gardens.
Dougless felt a bit embarrassed to be riding up to this house uninvited, but Nicholas was there, already off his horse and walking toward a tall, grubby-looking man on his hands and knees in a bed of petunias.
Gratefully dismounting, Dougless took her horse’s reins and ran after him. “Don’t you think we should knock on the front door first?” Dougless asked when she reached him. “Why don’t you ask for Mr. Harewood and tell him we’d like to see the papers.”
“You are on my ground now,” he said over his shoulder as he walked toward the gardener.
“Nicholas!” she hissed at him.
“Harewood?” Nicholas said to the man on his knees in the flower bed.
Turning, the tall man looked up at Nicholas. He had blue eyes and blond hair that was now turning gray, and his face had the smooth, pink complexion of a baby’s. He also didn’t look especially intelligent. “Ah, yes. Do I know you?”
“Nicholas Stafford of Thornwyck.”
“Hmmm,” the man said as he stood up, not bothering to dust off his dirty old trousers. “Not the Staffords with that rogue son who got himself tried for treason?”