Chapter 3
Some two years after this peculiar debut, Lucy was once again walking through the moonlight towards the woods.
Now, however, she was a far cry from the curious and naive young woman who had gone exploring against her better nature.
In the time since, she had become a steadfast regular, an aficionado, as the suave Spaniard Dante Torres had once quipped.
While the comment had made her blush at the time, she could scarce deny its accuracy.
She seldom missed the Night Races, and even then only because of uncontrollable events, such as a family visit to relatives in the north or the untimely contracting of an autumn fever.
The seasons also played their role, and in recent years the winters had been unfavourably frosty, causing the races to be suspended for intolerable months.
Lucy had never paid much attention to the lunar phases, abstracted as they were from the practical calendar, but now she was acutely aware of the moon’s wane and wax in the sky.
The Night Races were always held at the full moon, the English lanes ghostly, but visible to the racers and spectators alike.
The frosts of winter had departed but there was still a chill in the air that night.
Lucy pulled her coat tight around her as she walked along the path.
Molly’s wool cape, with several patches visible even in moonlight, seemed barely sufficient to repel the night, but the Irish girl was of hardy stock.
‘I heard Dante and his crew are back,’ she offered casually.
‘I do wonder where they spend their winter,’ Lucy mused.
‘Spain, I suppose.’
‘Torres is an exile, Molly. And Spain is under the rule of Napoleon.’
‘Oh,’ the girl replied then was silent for a time as they walked.
Lucy still pondered her curious connection with Molly.
It was only occasionally they would encounter each other in the house and pass with a formal nod.
The Night Races were a different world, and those worlds were not to entwine.
The whole district – for all Lucy knew, the whole country – was populated by a strange group of friends, acquaintances and rivals who were aliens to each other for all but one night a month.
There was a kind of magic to that, augmented by the moonlight, though a sensible woman like Lucy dismissed the notion of magic as anything but artistic licence.
Yet her friendship with a woman close to her age and so vastly below her station certainly felt like an impossibility in the natural order.
It was only on certain issues that Lucy was reminded of their disparate stations. Molly’s work kept her busy and she scarcely had time for reading newspapers and learning about the world. Though in fairness, Lucy’s father was discomfited by Lucy’s fascination with studying the periodicals.
‘I don’t know why you read those things, Lucy,’ he’d protested. ‘The nature of trade policies with France is hardly the type of conversation that will acquire you a husband.’
‘I have no intention of conversing in such a manner,’ she had replied.
‘But it can hardly be a disadvantage to know what fashions and styles might be influenced by a decline in textiles and fabrics. Or how the mobilisation of troops might affect the regiments’ attendance at balls.
Or indeed how these new carriage designs might improve our travel time on visits. ’
Andrew Elliot had sighed and shaken his head as he always did when he had resigned himself to defeat, or when he ended a disagreement with his daughter, though in practice these two situations amounted to one and the same.
‘It will be good to see Dante and his crew race again.’ Lucy broke the silence between her and Molly, hoping her earlier correction had not offended.
‘It will.’ Molly nodded keenly, able to brush off curt comments as easy as the cold. ‘I wonder if Ulcha will be on messenger again.’
In the Night Races, each coach seated two competitors: one the driver, responsible for controlling the horses, and the other the messenger, watching the lanes and the other coach, calling the turns and anything the driver might have missed. Dante Torres was a driver. Ulcha was his messenger.
Lucy could understand why her friend found the messenger fascinating. Even in the world of Night Racing, seeing a woman racing seemed improper to Lucy, but then Torres’s entire entourage was as motley a crew as seemed possible.
Just as that thought crossed her mind, Lucy Elliot walked into the race clearing, and the very group she had been imagining stood assembled before her in the lantern light.