Edwina wandered from room to room, not looking at anything in particular, filling in time. Seven more hours until she could retire – any earlier and she would wake long before dawn, unable to control the maelstrom of regret that during daylight hours she was able to repress.
Without her daily stint at the stables she was left with what was, ironically, considering the state she was in, a feeling of hollowness. Whoever first named this section of a woman’s life ‘confinement’ couldn’t have chosen a more accurate word.
She found herself facing the corridor leading to the billiard room, a male domain she had seen once during her initial tour of the house after she’d arrived as a bride. She hadn’t had the inclination since to view it again. She moved down the corridor. Along the inner wall were oil paintings featuring lots of fruit, especially grapes with the bloom still on them, arranged around silver goblets, joints of meat and dead creatures. They looked so real she felt as if she could taste the grapes, and touch the skin, fur, feathers and scales of the foxes, rabbits, pheasants and fish. She hadn’t noticed them before and wished she hadn’t now, as the sight of all that food exacerbated her morning sickness.
Twenty yards short of the billiard room was an ornately carved oak door, which was the entrance to the tower she had visited once during that introductory tour and hadn’t seen since. At the time she thought it was the defining thing, apart from the horses, that assured her she had made a superior match, but because the marriage had soured so early on, it had lost its appeal. Now, to fill in a few minutes of this endless day, she decided to visit it for a second time. The thickness of the door, the grating noise of the hinges, the cobwebs, dull light and narrowness of the stairs reminded her of a fairy-story illustration that, as a child, promised magic and secrets. She felt a slight lift of spirits as she ascended the stairs.
The room at the top was bare except for a pile of books, a broken table, chewed-up paper, a tea chest and a telescope on a sailor’s chair, all covered in dust except for the last two items which had only a light film over them.
She looked through the narrow window. To her left she could see the avenue emerge from the beech trees and curve up towards the house and in the distance she could see the stables. In the practice yard at the back of the stables a small group was assembled. Mandrake and Manus could be identified from their outlines, but she couldn’t make out who the other two figures were.
She picked up the telescope. Was it Waldron who had left it there, she wondered? He wasn’t a bird watcher, as far as she knew, and she couldn’t think of anything else he’d be interested in that would necessitate its use. She tore some pages from one of the leather-bound books on the floor to wipe the dust from the chair seat before settling, leaning her elbows on the window ledge to keep her arms steady, and focused on the group in the yard for a long time.
“I can’t believe this,” she said aloud at last. “When did she become so accomplished?”
Charlotte on Mandrake was showing a skill Edwina didn’t know she possessed. Manus was supervising, and Miss East was watching, clapping at intervals.
Edwina’s heart rate increased as she studied the dynamics of the little group.
She had expressly ordered Manus to let one of the lads tutor Charlotte, and not waste his time doing it himself. Had he been instructing her all those years for her daily hour while Edwina was having lunch? Had he expanded that hour? What was Miss East doing down there neglecting her duties? When she had put Charlotte in the housekeeper’s care in a moment of fury she didn’t mean for her to actually look after her; she expected Charlotte to drag around behind her all day whining and whingeing until Miss East could stand it no longer.
The next day, rather than taking the usual two hours to summon up the energy to move, Edwina rose immediately on waking and was at her station in the tower within thirty minutes.
At around ten Manus appeared in the exercise yard on Sandstorm. The oldest stable lad, Archie, built up all the jumps to a higher level and Manus eased Sandstorm over them, smoothly and calmly. She had expressly told Manus that Sandstorm was not to be tamed while she was housebound, only exercised and fed, and she had instructed Les, the middle lad, to do it, not Manus, as she knew Manus would ignore her wishes and do whatever he was going to do in the first place, and here was proof of it before her eyes.
It was all right for Beatrice to want a Manus-trained hunter – at her age she needed a foolproof mount – but Edwina was half Beatrice’s age and what she wanted was wildness and unpredictability.
She and Manus could never agree on training methods, but this flagrant disobeying of her orders was beyond endurance. Fear was the best teacher, she was convinced. “Break a horse’s will and it will obey one for life!” she had shouted at Manus one day after she’d lost patience with him. Manus had turned his face away from her after she’d said that, sadly shaking his head.
She had a good mind to march down to the stables this minute and set him straight with commands that he couldn’t deliberately misinterpret or ignore.
She often had a good mind to do something with Manus, like putting him in his place. But what was his place? Or showing him who was boss. But who was boss once the threshold of the stables was crossed?
The first time she saw him, such was his air of quiet authority, she took him for Waldron’s younger brother Charles until he spoke and she heard the soft musical Cork accent for the first time. He had come upon her beating a mare between the ears with a whip to stop it rearing its head.
“There’ll be no more of that now, ma’am,” he had said, reaching up and relieving her of her whip as if she were just an ordinary person, and not the new mistress of the Park, and such was his confidence she had obeyed him. At the time, she was only twenty years old to his twenty-five and had no idea how to assert her authority.
Movement in the yard. Charlotte on Mandrake. Manus talking to her, using his hands to demonstrate a point. The two of them laughing (laughing?), then becoming serious as she started the course. Manus watching, concentrating.
The excellence of the riding gave Edwina a pain in the region of her chest. She couldn’t take her eyes off her daughter, transformed, despite her burgeoning plumpness, into a figure of grace. Only nine years of age (Was she nine yet? Or was she ten?), riding with faultless judgement and timing.
To think her own introduction to riding had been so different – at the age of four being led under the branch of a tree by an older pupil to be scraped off, and hitting the ground, hearing the pupil and her friends chanting “Get back on! Get back on!” and when she ran away, “Scaredy cat! Scaredy cat! Eating mother’s bread and fat!”
But she had shown them eventually. She was now acknowledged as the most fearless horsewoman on the hunting scene. “She rides like a man,” was finally said about her, and she treasured that compliment above all others, even above “wonderful rider”, the words Beatrice had used to describe her. Soon, if Manus didn’t ruin Sandstorm in the meantime, she would show them that she could ride not just as well, but better than any man. What she lacked in masculine strength she would make up for in training, guile and daring.
Charlotte was still jumping the course – she seemed to spend all her time down there these days now that Dixon wasn’t around to make sure she returned to the nursery after only an hour at the stables – and there were Beatrice and Bertie, leaning on the rails, watching her.
At the end of the demonstration Manus lifted Charlotte out of the saddle, even though she was well able to dismount, and Edwina stared at his beautiful, sun-browned hands and face (she knew the ladies of the county referred to him as ‘the divine Manus’ – Beatrice had told her) and Charlotte’s round animated face as he hugged her, twirled her around and placed her on the ground, then patted her on the shoulder as she led Mandrake back to the stable.
Three years into her marriage that had turned out to be no marriage at all, she had watched Manus handling a newly weaned colt, seducing it with the music of his voice, making sounds that might be Gaelic or might be words without sense, turned half away in an unthreatening stance, all the while soothing and stroking with those beautiful hands of his. The colt leaned in towards him, nudging his arm, while Edwina stood transfixed beside him, unnoticed, burning and grieving at the same time. Without premeditation, she caught his hand in mid-stroke and placed it on the side of her face and held it there. Manus turned towards her and his eyes refocused, reading her intent. When he registered her distress, he put his other hand on her back. “There, there,” he said. “There, there. Don’t upset yourself, ma’am. There, there. It will be all right,” and she let herself lean into him, and she remembered how the foal pushed his head in between the two of them and tried to butt her out of the way, and how she managed to ignore it.
Best not to think of those times.
Beatrice was full of apologies about being late when she finally arrived. She and Bertie had lost track of time while watching Charlotte, who showed the most amazing promise for a girl of her age or any age. Edwina must be proud, but then she and Waldron must take some credit, as the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. “Bertie and I both think she is a wonderful rider. Wonderful. Perfect seat, perfect hands.”
Edwina knew those words by heart, having repeated them often in her mind to give her spirits a boost. She now turned her burning face away from her friend to hide her mortification.
Fool! Fool! Not only had Beatrice, speaking to Lady Wentworth, been praising Charlotte and not her, as she’d thought, but had placed her at the same level of skill as Waldron. How could she bear the double ignominy?