Miss Spencer Rides Astride (Heroines on Horseback) (2 page)

He blinked and stopped his own poetic reverie. He really was behaving like a madman. Suppose he started speaking his thoughts aloud without realizing it, like Timothy Boswell had done at Lady Robbin’s garden party last spring? He had better guard himself. Timothy Boswell had disappeared to the Continent and the last letter Lady Boswell had shared stated that he would be remaining in Rome indefinitely.

And Timothy had only thought that Lady Robbins’ youngest daughter really did have a magnificent bosom, the sort of a bosom that a man could use as pillow and mattress. That wasn’t exactly news, even if it wasn’t something you announced about a young lady in mixed company at two o’clock in the afternoon. Fact was, Penelope Robbins was so gifted in the bosom department that she fairly tipped forward. She swept into rooms like the figurehead on a ship sailing into a foreign harbor. She was like the prow of a ship herself.

Timothy Boswell had simply been overcome.

Stop it, William told himself. Stop comparing Mr. Spencer’s daughter’s bosom to Penelope Robbins’.

But her lovely little chest, what he could see of it beneath that loose blouse, was nothing like the Robbins girl.
 

He suspected it was much finer.

William, unable to control his thoughts for one moment, decided he was certainly going mad. The pressure of the past few weeks’ events had finally gotten to him.
 

Spencer’s daughter eyed him with uncertainty, as if she was trying to come to some decision. Then she nodded again, perhaps trusting that he had not seen her curtsy the first time. It was very generous of her, he decided. She was a creature of good heart. She was as kind as she was beautiful. She was —
stop.

He managed a clumsy bow in response, then congratulated himself on looking so disjointed. A huntsman would not have the same panache as a peer of the court, after all, and in coming to Ireland, William had been seeking to shed the Archwood name, however temporarily. It would never do to retain his aristocratic manners.

“My daughter, Miss Spencer,” the master was saying, and William nodded again.
 

“Miss Spencer,” he repeated, somewhat coarsely. “William Archer at your service.”

She nodded and lowered her eyes. “Mr. Archer.”

It was all properly done. Mr. Spencer looked pleased. The wrinkles on his leathery brown face caused his eyes to nearly disappear when he smiled. “Miss Spencer is my best rider and my right-hand man,” he said expansively. “So I expect the two of you shall work together often. Now my dear Grainne, you must not give Mr. Archer trouble!” He waggled his finger playfully in her face, and she smiled tightly, feigning amusement. Her father did not observe the deception. “Do not distract him when he is riding a young horse, or misdirect him when he is out in the field. We have horses enough for both of you.”

Grainne Spencer pursed her lips and looked positively surly. It was not an unattractive pout, made more interesting by the genuine anger smoldering in her eyes… her misty grey eyes. She looked like a cat plotting a mouse’s demise.
 
William was enchanted.
 

“As for you, Mr. Archer,” Spencer said gravely, “I only ask that you treat my only daughter with the respect due a lady.”

William nodded with equal gravity. “I would never dream of disrespecting your daughter. I shall protect her as befits a lady.”

He didn’t bother to acknowledge the snickers and guffaws that escaped the stable lads at the word
lady
, but Grainne Spencer did. She whipped her head around, displacing more of that glorious gleaming hair, and fixed the line of boys with a look so ferocious that every single one was quelled in an instant.

But William didn’t see her terrifying expression. He was too busy in his own head, running his fingers through the hair coming loose from her cap, slipping his lips to the white nape of her neck, letting his tongue flutter across her —

“I’ll leave you lads to get to work, then,” Mr. Spencer said pompously, and William was brought back to the present with a shock. “Mr. Archer, choose a horse. You may as well start this afternoon.”

***

“Yer old man’s replacing ye,” Tommy Boxton said with a grin. He forked hay into a wheelbarrow with quick, practiced strokes, all the while fixing Grainne with a mocking leer. “He knows ye’ll soon be married off and be nay good to him no more.”

“Stop that nonsense, Tommy Boxton, or I’ll box you,” Grainne snapped. She slipped into Magyar’s box to check his rug was straight. He greeted her with a nicker and she tried to ignore his affection; he wasn’t her horse any longer. Mr. Lark’s boy would be calling for him in the morning.
 

“Grainne Maxwell, with a babe on each lug,” Tommy went on. “Missus Maxwell, the lady of Boyle House, counting the eggs in the larder.”

“You’re a dolt,” Grainne said airily, changing tack. There was no reason to counter Tommy’s ceaseless teasing with temper. If it wasn’t her he was harrassing, it was someone else in the yard.
 

“He might be right though.”
 

Grainne shut Magyar’s box again and fastened the latch carefully. He was a clever horse; he’d find his way out if she didn’t finish the job properly. Only when she was certain the door was secure did she look up.

Seamus was looking at her with a concerned, fatherly expression. She sighed. The only thing Grainne found more nettlesome than Tommy Boxton’s heckling was Seamus O’Doyle’s paternal worry. For pity’s sake, the man was only a few years older than she!

And not half the rider, she thought privately.

“Father will not be marrying me off without my consent,” she assured him, patting his arm. “That’s not what this is about at all. We’ve needed a new huntsman this year and more. The yard is full, the kennels are bursting, and every meet I swear the old lord is asking for more mounts for his guests. These horses have to be kept in top condition all the time, Seamus. This English fellow is just the thing to help us out. He knows what Kilreilly’s guests are looking for in a mount.”

Seamus didn’t look much comforted. “If you say so, Grainne,” he said worriedly. He put out a brown hand and let Magyar lip at his fingers, sweet with the apples he’d been peeling into the feeds. “But you’re a woman grown, and your father must want you a woman wed, even if you are the finest rider he could ever hope for.”

Grainne lost patience then. “I’m sure that’s none of your concern, Seamus O’Doyle. Now shift yourself and get the saddle on Gretna. I want to take her out for a gallop before it rains again.”

Seamus grinned at her sharp tone and busied himself fetching Grainne’s worn saddle. It wasn’t his job to saddle her horse, but no one in the yard was willing to gainsay Grainne Spencer when she was in a black mood. The girl had a temper, Seamus thought, that would keep that silly soft Maxwell lad on his toes until he tipped them up in sheer exhaustion.

Grainne was not thinking of Edward Maxwell, and if she had been, it would have been with a decided lack of sympathy. A squire so fond of his sheepdogs he might as well marry them, she would have answered, had anyone asked her opinion of their only neighbor of any consequence. But no one ever asked Grainne’s opinion on anything but horses. And since she had so many opinions on horses, and was so eager to share them and so confident in their correctness, no one ever would. Grainne Spencer had a well-deserved reputation as a ruthless, roughshod know-it-all.
 

But for a rare moment, Grainne was flustered, and only by retiring to check the hind hooves of a young hunter who had recently gone lame could she hide the pink in her milky cheeks. She had felt the heat of those blue eyes on her body. That Mr. Archer… he was a handsome devil, she could tell already. She pressed a calloused thumb against a discolored spot on the sole of the hunter’s hoof and whispered a soothing command to be still when the horse jumped, nearly jerking his hoof from her grasp.

“Hush, love, it’s only a little abscess,” she told him, straightening and letting the horse drop his hoof back to the straw. She went to his head and stroked his neck in long rhythmic sweeps of her palm while he nuzzled at her pockets.
 

“You are a darling,” she told the horse. “I shall sell you to a young lady and you shall climb into her pockets just like this, yes?” The horse wriggled his nose along her side, tickling her sensitive waist. She pushed at his nose. “Now you stop. You are as lascivious as a man. You are as naughty as…” she thought. “As that Mr. Archer is, I daresay.” Grainne smiled despite herself. “I’m sure he’s a dreadful flirt,” she went on hastily, digging out the boiled sweets that the horse had been rooting for the entire time.
 

He lipped them from her palm with a velvety muzzle and watched her worshipfully while he crunched them between his teeth, dripping sweet sugary foam from his lips. “He looked at me as if he wanted to undress me,” she whispered to the hunter. “And believe me, I know what that looks like. Len looks at me in such a hungry way every time we meet.”

Len! Her whole body seemed to clench up at the thought of him. His greedy kisses and his roving hands — he was exciting, there was no doubt about that, and he was waiting for her this very moment. She must hurry.
 

“Seamus!” she bellowed, barrelling out of the stall. “Is Gretna saddled yet?”

“Aye, she is saddled and bridled and waiting here for you.”
 

“Perfect.” Grainne softened both her tone and her expression as she came out of the stall. “Thank you, Seamus.”

“Will you want a leg-up?”

“Not at all,” she said pleasantly, and, sticking a foot in the stirrup, swung aboard the dark mare as cleanly and quickly as a man.

Everyone thought of her as a man, anyway, she thought grimly, nudging Gretna forward. Everyone except for Len.

And perhaps that terrible Mr. Archer.

Gretna, Grainne’s favorite mare, was eager to stretch her legs that afternoon. It had been a wet fortnight, indeed a wet year, and Grainne was always careful not to over-work her horses on heavy going; it was hard enough on them when they had to hunt all day in sucking mud and slippery turf. But horses still needed to be built up, and the winter’s hunting was nearly upon them: the leaves were turning golden on the trees, and the wheat was being brought in from the fields on the estate. Soon the big house would be filling up with guests from other country houses, Dublin, even London, and the old lord would be calling for horses nearly every day.

Novices, rank amateurs, dandies, these were the sort of men who rode Grainne’s good horses, and it took all her skill to settle the mettlesome hunters into mounts quiet and reliable enough for the house guests to ride across the countryside. The real riders amongst them would bring their own horses, never thinking to enjoin a country party without bringing at least two hunters of their own. There was another yard of boxes, the cobwebs being scrubbed from it this very day, set aside for just those guests’ horses, as well as the sundry carriage horses that would bring them all here.

Winter-time was for merry-making in the gentry set, and for hard work and frostbitten fingers for the huntsmen who made it all possible.

Grainne set the bay mare up for a hedge looming in their path, separating two fields of close-cropped pasture, and smiled as the mare lifted her forelegs and cleanly jumped the obstacle, galloping away smoothly afterwards without a thought of a buck, all her attention focused on finding even ground for her hooves. “You’re a lovely, steady girl,” she told Gretna, and the mare flicked her ears back to listen.
 

Then the mare pricked those black-tipped ears forward, her head lifting up and her stride shortening abruptly, staring into the copse at the bottom of the field. Grainne sat back in the saddle and brought her to an uneasy halt, sitting deep while Gretna danced worriedly from side to side, never taking her attention from the little wooded valley.

Then the mare made a mighty leap as, with a crash of brambles and branches, a big chestnut horse, rider poised and still above his neck, came plunging out of the thicket. As his hooves touched the grass the chestnut lurched into a canter and came rolling up the slope towards her. With a start, Grainne recognized that the horse was her own Bald Nick, a horse she had started some years ago who was now a stalwart of the hunting meets, and the rider grinning between Nick’s pricked ears was none other than her father’s new huntsman, that dangerous Mr. Archer.

“You took the hard way,” she ground out as she fought to settle the over-excited Gretna. “There are nettles down that path.”

“Thankfully done for the summer,” the huntsman laughed, pulling up Nick next to her. He let the chestnut touch his big white nose to Gretna’s and laughed when she squealed and pawed in disgust. “Typical mare, isn’t she! Lovely little girl, though,” he added, letting his eyes rove over the mare. “Like the whole yard. Not a donkey in the lot.”

“I should say not! We have the finest horses in this part of the world. Perhaps the Empire.” Grainne ran a hand down Gretna’s wet neck. “But they have to cart about a lot of undeserving folk. I hope you can settle a horse as well as you can ruffle one up.”

“I can turn a raging stallion into a lady’s pony in one afternoon,” Mr. Archer drawled. “I just prefer not to. It’s so unfair to the stallion. To say nothing of the lady.”
 

Grainne colored, although she wasn’t perfectly certain why. Something to do with stallions and ladies… it just wasn’t delicate. Not that she had been raised to be the sort of woman who blushed… delicacy was not really the thing in a stable full of men. Why did it sound different, coming from Archer’s cultured vowels? He was not your typical stableboy, that was for sure.

“Well, that’s what you’ll be expected to do,” she went on after a pause, as if the jest had never happened. “So be sure to keep anything you ride under your strict control at all times. They have to learn to do as they’re told at all times.”

“An unfortunate trait in a hunter, which must be clever enough to get itself out of trouble whilst a rider is slithering around on its back trying to keep their own balance.”