Chapter 8
The invitation had come through Westbrook, who mentioned to Sebastian at one of their Tuesday meetings that there was to be a steeplechase on a private course outside the city, forty people or so gathering on a Saturday in May for an occasion that existed outside the formal machinery of the Season and was better for it.
Sebastian had mentioned it at breakfast without making anything of it.
Juliana had said Sophia should go. Sophia had said she would think about it.
* * *
She went.
The Surrey road south of the city felt like London releasing itself into something less decided.
The houses thinned, the air changed, and by the time the carriage had properly left the streets behind, the sky stretched wide and pale above the fields, open and generous in a way no city sky ever managed.
She came with the Colvilles. They went in Westbrook’s carriage, with Louisa already inside when it arrived in Clarges Street at half past nine, while Roland rode ahead of them on horseback.
He had gone out the previous evening to walk the course, Louisa said briefly, her brother’s habits requiring no further explanation.
The estate belonged to a family called Pemberton, not the county Pembertons Sophia had grown up hearing about, a different branch entirely, or possibly no relation at all.
The drive was good, the grounds well-maintained, and as the carriage came up the last rise the course appeared below them, a long sweep of grassland with post-and-rail fencing, a water obstacle at the far end catching the May sun, and a small natural rise beyond before the course turned.
The crowd was already assembled along the near rail, forty people as described, gathered in the loose clusters of people who had done this before and needed no arrangement.
The day was proper May, which was to say warm without qualification, the sun committed for once rather than provisional. The women had left their heavier wraps in the carriages. The men had their coats on but would not keep them.
Sophia stood at the rail with Louisa and looked at the horses being led out.
There were six of them. She did not know enough about horses to evaluate them individually.
She had grown up in the county and could ride adequately and possessed the basic vocabulary, but not the deeper understanding that came from genuine interest. Each one carried its energy differently, one dark and restless, tossing its head; one large and patient, almost bovine in its stillness.
Roland’s was a grey, lighter than the others and finely made, moving with an alert steadiness unlike the dark horse’s visible restlessness, its attention already on the course.
Roland was already up. He was talking to one of the other riders across the space between their horses, and his manner was different from any she had seen him wear in a drawing room.
Not transformed — unencumbered. The social apparatus was not there.
He was looking at the course, at the water obstacle, at the other horse, focused and practical, like a man doing work he understood completely.
She had written him as decorative. She turned this over.
Philip appeared beside her so quietly that she only became aware of him when he spoke, and the surprise of it made her turn more quickly than dignity strictly required.
“Miss Lockwood.” He had come from the direction of the house, his coat slightly dusty at the hem, a notebook in his breast pocket. He looked as though he had been attending to something before this. “I did not expect to find you here.”
“Nor I you,” she said. “What brings you?”
“The estate’s land agent is a man I have been corresponding with on a drainage question,” he said. “He was good enough to include me in the invitation.” He looked at the course. “I have not seen one of these before.”
“Neither have I.”
They stood beside one another watching the horses in easy silence. Four years of correspondence had translated, over the past weeks, into companionship without awkwardness, and she was glad of it.
Louisa came to stand at Sophia’s other side, having been momentarily claimed by Westbrook for an introduction to someone. She arrived in her direct way, assessed the course, and looked at the horses with an appraising eye.
“Miss Colville,” Sophia said, “may I introduce Mr. Philip Ashworth. Philip — Miss Louisa Colville.”
Philip turned. He bowed. Louisa regarded him with the same open curiosity she extended to everyone new, making no effort to conceal that she was assessing him as she did so.
“Mr. Ashworth,” she said.
“Miss Colville.” He looked at her for a moment and did not look away. “Your brother is riding today?”
“He is.” She nodded toward the grey. “The grey there.”
Philip looked. A pause, brief but present. He looked back at Louisa. “He sits it well.”
“He always has,” Louisa said. “He was on a horse before he was reliably on his feet.”
Something changed in Philip’s face as his interest settled more fully on her.
She had seen the same look directed at rare books, at a well-made argument, at a passage of natural philosophy that surprised him.
She saw it now and did not reach a conclusion because the horses were beginning to move toward the start and the crowd’s attention was reorganising itself.
Westbrook appeared at Louisa’s side and said something low about the grey’s form today, and Louisa turned to answer him, and Philip stood at Sophia’s left with the course spread before them and the May sun warming the grass, the rails, the horses’ coats, drawing brightness out of everything it touched, and at the far end Roland moved the grey into position and became very still, in the same absorbed way she had seen once before, every stray element of charm or performance fallen away in concentration.
The crowd quieted by degrees, conversations fading first, then the restless shifting of feet, then even the scattered coughing.
The starter raised his flag.
* * *
The flag dropped.
The sound hit first. Six horses taking the ground at once, a percussion felt through the soles of the feet, through the hands on the fence rail.
And then they were past, and the air moved in their wake, and Sophia breathed in the smell of churned grass and horse and the cold speed of them and held the fence post and did not think about anything at all for a moment.
She had not expected it to be like this.
The dark horse took the early lead. Roland was a length back on the grey, and she found him immediately in the field and did not lose him.
He was in breeches and boots, no coat, his shirt white against the green of the course, and the absence of the usual layers of clothing was itself a kind of information: the shoulders, the arms, the line of him over the horse’s neck, nothing between the body and the work it was doing.
She had seen him in drawing rooms and at dinner tables for weeks. She had not seen this.
This was a different man entirely, or rather the same man with everything unnecessary stripped away, and the difference was — the difference was that he was, in this version of himself, the most physically beautiful thing she had ever seen, and the word beautiful arrived in her mind without permission and she did not send it back.
The white shirt against the green of the course.
The forearms, bare where the sleeves had been pushed back.
The set of his thighs against the horse’s sides, the whole body working as a single instrument.
She had been watching him in drawing rooms for weeks, buttoned and cravated and managed.
This was underneath all of that, and it was —
She gripped the fence rail harder.
He took it without hesitation. Not without thought.
She could see the continuous adjustments in him, the body reading the horse reading the ground, but none of it carried the slightest trace of display.
Just the action. The grey lifted and came down and the rhythm did not break, and something in Sophia’s chest did not break either, though it came very near.
The field spread across the course and the noise of the crowd rose and fell around her and she heard none of it.
She was watching the white shirt across the field, the way he held the rise at the far end where three of the other horses lost their line, while Roland kept his without any visible effort at all.
The grey finding the ground, both of them finding it together, the conversation between horse and rider that had begun before the start and was continuing still.
He was not being admired in it. That was the thing.
Every other version of him she had seen had existed, in some degree, before an audience: in rooms, at dinner, in crowds, always aware of being observed even when the performance appeared effortless.
Here there was no audience. There was only the course and the horse and whatever was required of him in the next ten seconds, and he was entirely in it, and watching him produced in Sophia something she could not have classified if she had tried and did not try.
The water obstacle glinted at the far end.
She felt the crowd around her tighten, the collective intake, the held breath.
She held hers. The grey did not falter. They went over clean and fast and landed running, and Sophia let the breath out and her hands were hurting where she had been gripping the fence.
He came into the final straight first.
The crowd made its noise and she made hers, involuntarily, and did not notice she had made it until it was done.
He crossed the line, the grey blowing hard underneath him, and he sat up and slowed her and bent forward to say something against the horse’s neck, unselfconscious and tender, like a man in private, not performing for anyone.
Sophia stood at the rail.