Page 88 of A Baby for the Duke

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.”