The Pretty Horse-Breakers Read online

  Lord Manville suddenly felt as though the beauty of his own possessions gripped at his heart and held him as they had never done before. Manville Park was the one place that would always be his home, the place where he had his roots, the place where he had been brought up.

  Almost mockingly, it seemed to him, he saw the face of the girl he had wanted to marry all those years ago, the girl whom he had planned to be Mistress here, his wife and the mother of his children.

  He had loved her wholeheartedly and, though there had been other women in his life before her, she had been the only one he wished to marry. He could now hear her saying in that light unfeeling voice,

  “I am sorry, Silvanus, but Hugo has so much to offer me that you have not.”

  “You mean,” he replied almost incredulously, “that because he is a Marquis, while I have not yet inherited, you love him more than you love me.”

  “It’s not exactly that I love him more,” she replied a trifle uncomfortably, “it is just that we would have to wait for so long, Silvanus. Your father is not yet old and, if I marry Hugo, I shall be the bride of the Season and a Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen. There are lots of other things too that he can give me, things which matter, however much one thinks they do not, in a girl’s life.”

  “But my love for you and yours for me,” he had insisted, “does that not count?”

  “I do love you, Silvanus,” she replied, her voice softening for the moment, “but it’s no use, you must see that. I have to marry Hugo, there is nothing else I can do. I shall always remember you and I hope you will remember me, but it would be foolish for us to be married, it would really.”

  He could recall at the time feeling as though someone had dealt him a sharp blow on the head. He felt numbed, almost as though he could not comprehend what had happened.

  Then later had come the pain and the anger, even the hatred, that someone could have hurt him so cruelly.

  He had never forgotten her and he had never wanted to marry any other woman. He had made love to dozens of them and they had loved him, perhaps trying all the harder to capture him because he eluded them.

  There was always something, even in the closest hours of passion, which made them know he was not their captive, not completely in their thrall.

  “Why do you stand aside and watch yourself?” one woman had asked him as they lay together very close, with only the gentle flames of a dying fire to light the room.

  “What do you mean?” he had asked.

  “You know exactly what I mean,” she replied. “You are always a little aloof, a little apart, never really one with me.”

  He had known exactly what she meant and, although she loved him desperately and he had been very fond of her, she was one of the lovely women whom he had left with a broken heart.

  He could not help it, there was something in him that made him despise and almost hate a woman while he held her in his arms. There was some part of his brain that told him jeeringly, ‘this love is not enough, it will never be enough, you will never be completely one with anyone’.

  He asked himself now if it was possible for him ever to find a woman as beautiful, who could hold him because their love for each other was enough?

  Then he laughed cynically at the thought and, putting down his untouched brandy on the table, turned from the beauty outside because it hurt him so intolerably and went upstairs to bed.

  Candida heard his footsteps coming up the stairs, for her room opened off the landing at the top of the grand staircase.

  Her room was in darkness and she lay tense and excited in the big four-poster bed, which one of the housemaids told her had been slept in by a Queen.

  She had been thinking of Pegasus, but now as she heard Lord Manville coming to bed she thought of him.

  ‘He was nice tonight,’ she told herself, ‘and not at all awe-inspiring. I think he means to be kind, both to Adrian and to me, but there is just something that stops him.’

  She wondered what it was and thought that it must have been a woman. Someone had hurt him and she knew instinctively that she had stumbled upon the truth.

  He was like a horse that had been injured or perhaps cruelly treated and had never forgotten it. He was rather like Pegasus, big strong and handsome and yet at the same time wanting love.

  ‘Perhaps – I can make him – forget whatever it is that he has – suffered,’ she thought sleepily.

  And when she slept Pegasus and Lord Manville were indivisibly mixed in her dreams.

  Chapter Eight

  Riding with Lord Manville on one side of her and Adrian on the other, Candida thought that she had never been so happy. The sunshine was warm on her face and the beauty of Manville Park had never ceased to thrill her.

  Now, after three days, she realised she had begun to love it deeply.

  She had found, Candida thought, a freedom and a gaiety that had seemed enchanted since that first evening when they had played childish games after dinner.

  Lord Manville no longer appeared to be aloof or awe-inspiring and he had even ceased to be cynical.

  And it was not only Lord Manville who had stopped frightening her. The formidable army of servants who ministered to their comfort in the great house had become people she could talk to as easily as she had talked to old Ned.

  Mrs. Hewson had soon lost her look of disapproval and Candida had been told all about her niece, who was consumptive and her sister, who was a housekeeper to the Duchess of Northaw.

  Candida learnt that Bateson, the Major Domo, who looked like an Archbishop, had rheumatism in his right leg when the wind was in the East and that Tom, the youngest pantry boy, suffered from chronic toothache.

  As she had dressed this morning, knowing with a little thrill of excitement that they were going off immediately after breakfast to ride over the parkland, she thought to herself how lucky she was to have found so many friends at Manville Park and to feel in some strange way as if she herself belonged there.

  The three of them had spent the previous day visiting the various farms on the estate and she had been entranced by the big oak-raftered kitchens with sides of bacon and haunches of pork hanging from the ceiling.

  She had noticed how easily Lord Manville adjusted himself to sitting down to a tea of newly baked bread, fresh eggs and slices of ham cured by the private recipe which every farmer’s wife believed was better than that of her neighbours.

  Candida had listened to him talking to his tenants and realised that they not only had a respect for him as their landlord, but a feeling of admiration and what might be almost termed affection.

  One farmer had said to her as they left,

  “His Lordship not only be a Nobleman but he be a man and a fine upstanding one at that.”

  Candida too felt an increasing admiration for Lord Manville as she watched him control Thunder, who was in one of his more difficult moods, prancing, behaving skittishly and even attempting to break unnecessarily into a gallop. It took a strong man and a really experienced rider to hold him that morning.

  Candida knew that she had never seen anyone who sat a horse better than Lord Manville or who looked more as if he was one with the animal he rode.

  Adrian was somewhat silent and she knew without being told that a new idea for a poem was forming itself in his mind. Already, with her help, he was getting a better sense of style and a poem he had read to her on the previous evening before Lord Manville came down for dinner had been so good that she felt that even her father would have approved of it.

  “That is indeed splendid!” she exclaimed. “The very best you have done!”

  He flushed a little at her praise, but his expression changed when she added,

  “Why do you not show it to your Guardian?”

  “No, no,” he answered quickly. “His Lordship would not approve and I would not wish to disturb his unprecedented good humour.”

  He slipped the poem back into the inside pocket of his evening coat just as Lord Manville came into the
room, at the same time giving Candida a warning glance in case she should feel compelled to betray his trust.

  She had given him a smile of reassurance and Lord Manville, advancing towards them down the salon, wondered once again with an irritation that he could not repress what it was they were keeping from him.

  This morning, however, there was no cloud on the horizon and he was laughing at some light remark Candida had made as they turned their horses towards the house.

  “The riding school will be ready this afternoon,” he said. “Shall we put Pegasus through his paces?”

  “Oh, could we?” Candida enthused. “That would be wonderful!”

  She had already found that Manville Park not only contained an indoor riding school but also one that had been constructed outside and which almost resembled a miniature racecourse.

  When Lord Manville’s father grew old, he was afflicted with such severe rheumatism that he was no longer able to ride. This did not prevent him from supervising the schooling of his horses and he would never allow any horse to be broken in except under his own surveillance.

  The two riding schools had been a joy in the last years of his life. In the winter he directed his grooms indoors and in the summer the charming little school laid out at the back of the house beyond the stables was a place where he spent many hours a day, schooling not only his horses but those who rode them.

  “I have had the jumps remade,” Lord Manville said, “and Garton tells me that the old water-splash has been re-dug and filled especially for our amusement.”

  “That will be something new for Pegasus,” Candida said. “He has never jumped water before. I shall be mortified if he fails.”

  “I am sure he will not fail,” Lord Manville declared.

  Candida’s face was turned towards him, her eyes alight with excitement, her lips parted and he thought then, as he had thought so often in the past few days, that she was one of the loveliest women he had ever seen.

  He had watched her and, without really consciously planning it, he had set traps for her to see if her sweetness and her kindliness were only a facade. But like her horse she appeared to be faultless.

  ‘There must be good blood in her somewhere,’ he thought and it was impossible not to compare her with the thoroughbreds she rode so fearlessly and with a grace that was unsurpassed by any of the other ‘Pretty Horse-Breakers’, however skilled and efficient they might be.

  One thing Lord Manville found very surprising was that, despite Candida’s gentleness towards the horses she rode, they never seemed to take advantage of her.

  He had watched so many women ride and he had begun to believe that the ‘Pretty Horse-Breakers’ in their attitude of almost cruel severity to their horses were using the correct method of breaking and schooling. Now he had begun to be doubtful.

  ‘Was it not some strange exotic quirk of their characters,’ Lord Manville had asked himself, ‘that their sweetness and subjection in bed should be set in direct contrast with what sometimes amounted almost to persecution of the animals they rode?’

  Candida was different, so different that he could not express even to himself what he felt about her. She had done everything he had asked her, she had indeed made herself so charming to Adrian that he could not believe the boy was not already deeply in love with her.

  Yet somehow he was not satisfied – why he could not explain.

  He found himself watching her, listening to her, thinking about her and for all that she seemed so open, so frank, so childlike he was convinced that she was in fact deceiving him. He told himself he was almost on his guard against her and then laughed at the ridiculousness of the idea.

  She was only a girl and only such was suitable in every way for Adrian. Again and again he congratulated himself on being so clever as to have found such a ‘Pretty Horse-Breaker’ for his Ward and wondered why the plan, now it was fulfilled, gave him so little pleasure.

  They reached the house and Candida dismounted and went upstairs to change her habit. There was an hour and a half to wait before luncheon would be served, and they were not to ride again before two o’clock.

  Her maid had prepared a bath for her, as was usual after riding. It was scented and the bath towels smelt of lavender. As Candida dried herself, she thought that never before had she lived in such luxury.

  Not only did she enjoy the comfort of it, but the loveliness of Manville Park seemed to tug at her heart.

  There were the gardens ablaze with blossom; there was the beauty of her bedroom with its huge four-poster bed and embroidered hangings, which had been stitched in the reign of Charles II, the mirror with its gilt cupids; the furniture inlaid and polished with beeswax from the still-room, the vase of pink rosebuds, standing by her bed, the first roses of summer.

  “I am happy! I am happy!” Candida said aloud and she suddenly had an urgency to find Lord Manville again to be with him.

  She did not attempt to explain the feeling to herself, she only knew that she must hurry. Somehow the sands of time were running out, she must not miss one second of this strange enchantment that she found in herself.

  Her maid hooked her into a gown of pale green silk with innumerable lace flounces on the wide skirt. There was lace too on the tiny puffed sleeves and round the somewhat décolleté neckline.

  When Candida had complained because Madame Elisa cut her bodices so low, Mrs. Clinton and Madame Elisa had merely smiled at her protests. Now she wished the gown was higher and then thought no more about it.

  She wanted to go downstairs, she wanted to see Lord Manville and, almost before her maid had finished tidying her chignon of red-flecked gold, she had left the bedroom and was speeding down the grand staircase towards the library.

  She opened the door and could not suppress a little throb of disappointment because the room was empty. Perhaps he had gone out again, she thought, and then remembered that she had promised Adrian she would try to find a book of Greek poems that they were quite convinced would be found somewhere in the library.

  Neither of them could remember the name, but Candida knew that she would recognise the cover the moment she saw it.

  She glanced along the closely filled shelves. At the top, high up, she thought she saw the book she was seeking and with some difficulty she fetched the tall mahogany ladder from the other side of the room.

  She climbed up it and drew the book from the shelf, only to find it was not the one she sought yet was nevertheless interesting.

  She was turning over the pages when she heard the door behind her open and looked down to see Lord Manville, also changed and exceedingly elegant, come into the library. She felt her heart give a sudden leap of excitement and, holding the book in her hand, she started to climb down the ladder.

  “What were you expecting to find so high up?” Lord Manville asked, a hint of amusement in his voice. “Is it that the sweetest fruits are always out of reach?”

  Candida was halfway down the ladder.

  She turned her head to smile at him and, as she did so, she lost her footing. For a moment she swayed and then half fell, half slipped into his arms.

  “You should be more careful,” he scolded, “you might have hurt yourself.”

  Then he looked down into her face. Candida was suddenly conscious of the strength with which he held her and the closeness of him. Her head just reached his shoulder and, as she looked up, their eyes met.

  Quite suddenly the world vanished and they were alone.

  Something magical and exceedingly strange passed between them, so strange that Candida drew in her breath and felt she could not breathe again.

  His arms tightened and she was tinglingly conscious that his lips were very close to hers.

  Then she must have moved, because she heard a tiny sound that broke the spell between them and distracted her attention. It was the lace of her dress, which had caught on the ladder. Quickly, because she was shy and afraid of her own feelings, Candida struggled and was free.

  �
��Oh, I have – torn my – gown!” she exclaimed breathlessly and her voice sounded strange even to her own ears.

  “I will give you another one.”

  His eyes were on her face and he spoke almost automatically as if he was not thinking of what he was saying.

  Candida disentangled her dress from the ladder.

  “I could not – let you do – that,” she replied. “It would not be – correct.”

  “Why not?” Lord Manville asked with a smile. “There was no difficulty about my paying for the one you are already wearing.”

  Candida turned to him and the expression on her face astonished him.

  “You – paid – for this – gown?” she asked, the words coming slowly from between her lips.

  Lord Manville was just about to reply when they were both startled by the sound of voices and of laughter. It seemed as though a hundred tongues were speaking all at once and a second later the library door burst open.

  There was a sudden vista of laughing faces, feather-trimmed bonnets, flashing jewels, of silk and lace, tarlatan and velvet, of crinolines so large they had to be manipulated through the door.

  Then one person detached herself from the crowd – a live, graceful little figure with a magnolia skin and dark slanting eyes swept across the room towards Lord Manville.

  “Lais!”

  Candida heard him ejaculate the name and then two arms were round his neck and a gay voice was crying,

  “Is this not a surprise? Are you not pleased to see us? We could not allow you to vegitate any longer.”

  Lord Manville looked over Lais’s feather-trimmed bonnet at the women crowding behind her into the library. He knew them all. There was Fanny, who came from a Liverpool slum, but whose brilliant riding had made her one of the most famous and certainly the most expensive of the ‘Pretty Horse-Breakers’.

  There was Phyllis, the daughter of a country Parson, who had fallen in love with a married man who had taken her under his protection for several years. Then he had returned to the bonds of matrimony and so she had become one of the notorious ‘Pretty Horse-Breakers’ and it was considered fashionable to be seen in her company.