Chapter 29
The Thornbury races were held on a Saturday in a field with a river at the bottom of it, and every Belmont in England came.
“You will not enjoy the first hour of it,” Leonora said in the carriage.
It was the first sentence she had aimed directly at him in two days.
“I want that understood before we arrive. I chose the races because they are two hours out of doors and everybody’s eyes are meant to be pointed at a horse, and I stand by every word of that.
What I did not sufficiently consider is that my entire family will be there.
There will be a very great deal of shouting.
My father will lose money, and my mother will pretend he has not.
Augusta will be sick from the pastry stall, which happens every year and which nobody prevents because it has become a tradition. ”
“You are trying to scare me.”
“I am trying to prepare you. Last year, Alexander was carried the length of the field by a horse he had backed and did not own.”
“Why?”
“Nobody has ever established that.”
“And what does one wear?”
“Anything. It is a field. My father wears the same coat he has worn since I was nine. My mother has spent a decade attempting to lose it. Last year, she gave it to a man in the village, and my father bought it back for six shillings and has never mentioned the matter since.”
“I have that coat,” Colin revealed.
“You have what?”
“I have a coat like that. I’ve had it for fourteen years. My valet left over it five years ago.” He looked out the window. “It is in a press at Thornton, and I did not bring it because I assumed it would be an embarrassment to you.”
Leonora sat forward. “Turn the carriage around.”
“Duchess.”
“Turn the carriage around. We have twenty minutes. My father will talk to you for the entire afternoon and you will never once have to find a subject.”
“You are not serious.”
“I have never been more serious in my life.”
But Leonora was laughing.
It was the first time she had laughed at him in a fortnight, and he sat and looked at her for a moment as though somebody had opened a window.
They did not turn the carriage around, but he was still holding back a smile at the turnpike.
It turned out he was extremely good at it.
That was what she had not accounted for and could not stop watching. He knew horses. He knew them the way he knew wood, from the outside in.
Within twenty minutes of arriving, he had walked the length of the rail with her father and her brothers and said perhaps nine words, and all nine of them had turned out to be right.
“The bay’s short behind.”
“He’s my favorite,” Evan said.
“He’s short behind, and the ground is soft. He will not get up that hill. Look at him slipping down.”
The bay did not get up the hill.
“How do you know all this?” Augusta demanded at his elbow, with a pastry in each hand.
“I have looked at a great many horses.”
“Where? You never go anywhere. Nora says you never go anywhere. Mama says it is because you are shy, and Evan says it is because you are rude.”
“Augusta Belmont!” Lady Huntington gasped in horror from four feet away.
“It is because I am rude,” Colin confirmed.
Augusta considered this for a moment. “Then how do you know about horses?”
“Because for fifteen years, I have gone to sales at six in the morning where there is nobody around but grooms, bought what I wanted, and returned home before anybody was up,” Colin explained. “You may go to any place in England you like, if you are prepared to go at an hour when it is empty.”
Augusta shook her head. “That sounds extremely dull.”
“It is.”
“Then why do you do it?”
Colin looked down at her for a moment.
“Because it was either that or not going,” he said. “And I wanted the horses.”
By the third race, Evan had stopped arguing and started writing down what Colin said, which was, Leonora thought, the most flattering thing her brother had ever done for a human being.
By the fourth, Alexander had lost four pounds and was delighted about it.
By the fifth, their father had cornered Colin against a rail and was explaining wool duties to him, and Colin was arguing back.
Lady Huntington had turned to make her way toward them.
“Leave them,” Marina said, catching her sleeve.
“He’ll go on for an hour.”
“Then let him go on for an hour, Mama. Look at Papa’s face.”
Their father was flushed, enormously happy, and being disagreed with by a duke in a public field, and every man within twenty feet had noticed.
Their mother stopped.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, the clever thing.”
“He isn’t doing it on purpose.”
“Then he is even cleverer than I thought,” she said, and went off to tell four people about it.
Leonora found the horse at the far end of the field, in the second-to-last race, and afterward she was never able to explain to anybody why it undid her.
It was a chestnut mare with a white leg, and it came out of the start half a length behind and got further behind with tremendous willingness the whole way around.
It was not lame. It was not badly ridden.
It simply could not go fast, and it seemed to have no idea.
It kept its ears forward and its head up the entire time, as though the whole business were a marvelous idea and it was very glad to have been asked.
It came in last by twelve lengths to a certain amount of laughter.
Leonora stood at the rail and watched it speed back past her, blowing, delighted, and her chest tightened.
“She is so pleased with herself,” she remarked.
Colin had come up beside her without her hearing him. “She has no business on a racecourse.”
“I know.”
“She has been put in the race by a man who wanted a fee, and she will be put in another one at Newbury in a fortnight. She will come last in that too.”
“I know.” Leonora heard her own voice crack and was appalled. “It is only that she does not know she is losing. She thinks she has been brought here for a treat. Everybody laughed at her, and she galloped past them with her ears forward as though they were cheering her on.”
She did not look at her husband. If she did, she would have seen his face give way, and she would very likely have said the words she had promised herself in a theater corridor she would not say, and the next fortnight would have gone differently for everybody.
She looked at the horse instead.
“She’s gentle,” she said. “You can see it from here. She’d not hurt anybody in her life.”
“No,” Colin agreed. “She wouldn’t.”
“My mother would tell me that is a great deal of sentiment about a horse I have watched for four minutes.”
“Your mother would be wrong.”
“My mother is never wrong. She is only occasionally unkind about being right.” Leonora watched the mare go in under the awning.
“There was a dog at Huntington House when I was nine that could not do anything. It could not fetch or guard. It was frightened of the geese, and my brothers were extremely funny about it for a whole summer. I used to take it out to the orchard where nobody could see us and tell it that it was excellent.”
“And what became of it?”
“It lived to be fourteen and died in front of the fire in my father’s study with its head on his boot,” Leonora sighed. “My father has never once admitted to letting it in there.”
Colin did not say anything at all, and she did not look at him, and the two of them stood at the rail for a while watching the tents.
Then she caught sight of her mother, forty yards off, waving a glove at her with tremendous urgency.
“Well.” Leonora straightened her own gloves. “That will be Augusta and the pastry stall. There is a tradition to prevent.”
With that, she walked away up the rail.
Colin stood at the fence for rather a long time watching a chestnut mare with a white leg being led back to the tents. Then he asked a man in a brown coat a question, the man pointed, and he went off in that direction.
He was quiet all the way home.
That was not unusual; he was quiet on most rides home.
But this was a different quiet, and Leonora, who had spent four Seasons learning the difference between a man who had nothing to say and a man with words he was refusing to say, sat opposite him in the carriage and watched him turn his hat over in his hands twice a mile.
“You had a good day?” she asked.
“I did.”
“Evan wrote down four things you said. He has never written down anything I have said in twenty-one years.”
“Your brother is a better judge of horses than he pretends and a worse judge of men.”
“That is the closest thing to a compliment my family has had from you.”
“It was not a compliment,” Colin said. “It was an assessment.”
She laughed before she could stop herself, and the sound echoed in the carriage.
He looked up at her, eyed her for four full seconds, then said, “Leonora,” in a voice she had not heard since a window seat in the morning sun.
Every inch of her went still.
The carriage slowed and rolled through the gates.
Colin closed his mouth and looked out the window. “The auction is on Thursday,” he said. “The one you kept. I have had Gedge send me a catalogue.”