Chapter 23 #2
"You don't have to do anything with it. Not today. Today you ride with your children and you let the sun warm your face and you don't think about Cecilia or Arthur or any of it. Today is just a day. The first normal day we've had in over a week. Let it be normal."
Alexandra squeezed her hand. The tears came then, not a flood, not a breakdown, but three or four quiet tears that slipped down her cheeks and were dried by the breeze before they reached her chin.
She let them fall. She didn't wipe them away.
They were not grief tears. They were the tears of someone putting down a weight she'd carried for forty-four years and feeling, for the first time, how heavy it had been.
"When did you get wise?"
"I've always been wise. You were just too busy running a country to notice."
They reached the stables. The children were already there: Frank struggling with his riding hat while the groom tried to help, Florence standing beside Percy with her hand on his neck, speaking to him in the low, serious voice she used with animals, Matilda already mounted on Bramble, sitting straight in the saddle with her heels down and her hands quiet in the way that Vic had taught her.
The ponies were glossy and groomed, their tack polished, their ears pricked forward with the alert interest of animals who knew a ride was coming.
Sebastian had lost a shoe, the grooms explained apologetically, so Alexandra's horse today was a grey mare named Juniper, small, beautiful and the grooms assured her that Juniper would look after her. Alex didn’t mind one bit, she was happy to take to take Juniper.
Erin's horse was a young dark bay gelding named Fortitude, Fort for short, who had been Erin's favourite horse recently and who matched his rider in temperament: strong, direct and slightly impatient.
They mounted. The groom held Juniper's head while Alexandra settled into the saddle and adjusted her stirrups and gathered the reins, and the familiar sequence of movements: the slight rise onto the balls of her feet, the settling of her weight into the saddle, the opening of her hips around the barrel of the horse, was so deeply embedded in her muscle memory that her body performed it without thought.
The familiar feeling of the horse beneath her: the warmth, the gentle movement of the walk, the creak of leather and the smell of horse and hay and the particular scent of saddle soap that always made her think of her own fond memories of childhood.
"Ready?" Erin said from Fort's back.
"Ready."
They rode out. Through the stable yard with its cobblestones and its hanging baskets of trailing geraniums, past the kitchen garden where the gardener was already at work and raised a hand in greeting, and onto the bridleway that curved along the edge of the estate, the wide, sandy track that wound through open parkland and ancient woodland and eventually led to the ridge above the valley where you could see for miles in every direction.
Alexandra had ridden this track a thousand times.
In rain and snow and the blinding green of spring, in autumn when the leaves turned the woodland to fire, in winter when the bare branches made the sky look shattered.
But she had never ridden it with quite this sense of purpose: not riding to exercise or to escape or to think, but riding to be here, in this body, on this horse, with these people, on this morning.
The children went first: Florence on Percy, steady and careful, her small hands quiet on the reins the way Vic had taught her, Frank on his pony Captain ahead of everyone because Frank was constitutionally incapable of not being first, and Matilda on Bramble at a pace that suggested Bramble was in no hurry and Matilda had no intention of arguing with her.
The sun was warm on Alexandra's shoulders.
The air smelled of grass and warm earth and horse and the sweet, green scent of the hedgerows in summer.
Birds sang from the tree line: blackbirds and thrushes and the high, trilling call of a skylark somewhere above them, invisible against the bright sky.
The horses' hooves made soft, rhythmic sounds on the sandy track and the only other sounds were the children's voices, carrying back on the breeze, arguing cheerfully about the route.
Alexandra rode beside Erin. Their stirrups nearly touched.
The horses walked in step, matching each other's rhythm the way their riders matched each other's breath, and the world beyond the estate, the press, the politics, the investigation, the constitutional implications of what had happened, all of it receded to the edge of awareness, held at a distance by the simple act of being outside on a beautiful morning with the people she loved.
Florence turned in her saddle and looked back at them.
Her braid was coming undone again and her riding hat was slightly too big and her face was flushed from the sun and she was smiling, the wide, unguarded smile of a child who was on her pony and happy, and the sight of it was the most important thing Alexandra had ever seen.
More important than the crown. More important than the throne.
More important than every ceremony and every speech and every state dinner she had ever attended.
This. Her daughter on a pony on a summer morning, smiling, safe, home.
"Race you to the oak tree!" Frank shouted, and kicked Captain into a fast trot, and Florence rolled her eyes and followed at a controlled canter because Florence did not race but she did not intend to be left behind, and Matilda sat on Bramble and watched them go with the serene expression of someone who would arrive when she arrived.
Alexandra laughed. The sound surprised her, it came out full and warm and real, the kind of laugh that used the whole body, and Erin looked at her and the look on Erin's face was the same look she'd given her on their wedding day.
"What?" Alexandra said.
"Nothing. I just missed that sound."
They rode on. Through the parkland and into the dappled shade of the woodland and out again into the sunlight of the ridge, where the world opened up below them: green fields and hedgerows and the distant silver thread of the river and the village with its church spire catching the light.
The children stopped at the top and looked out and even Frank was quiet for a moment, held by the beauty of it, and the five of them sat on their horses on the ridge in the summer sun and the world was spread out before them like a gift.
"This is ours," Alexandra said. Not to anyone in particular. To the sky, maybe. To the land. To the morning itself, with its gold light and its birdsong and its three children on ponies and its two horses standing side by side at the edge of the world. "All of this. And nobody can take it from us."
Florence turned in her saddle. "Mummy Alex, can we canter back?"
"If you're careful."
"I'm always careful."
"I know you are, darling."
Florence smiled. Percy's ears pricked forward.
And then they were moving, all five of them, the ponies breaking into a canter and the horses following, the track opening up before them in a wide sweep of sand and sunlight, and the children were laughing and the hoofbeats were drumming and the wind was in Alexandra's face and in her hair and the world was beautiful and fast and full of the sound of her family being alive.
Erin reached across the space between their horses and took her hand, just for a moment, just long enough for their fingers to lock and squeeze and release, and they rode on, and the children's laughter drifted back on the warm air, and the day was theirs.