The morning of the Ashford hunt dawned brittle and bright, the kind of October light that turned every hedgerow to a spine of gold.
Margaret, Duchess of Ashford, stood at the edge of the assembly, her gloved hands folded before her as liveried grooms led out the mounts. She was 23 years old, married 6 weeks, and still entirely a stranger to her husband's world.
She heard the whispers before she saw the horse.
"That creature for her? Oh, delicious."
"The Duke should have kept his country bride locked in the still room where she belongs."
Margaret's jaw tightened, but her expression remained smooth as pressed linen. She had been raised to smile through slights, a skill her mother insisted was more valuable than silver.
When a groom halted before her with a raw-boned, swaybacked bay whose spine rose like a ridge of hills and whose eyes held all the fire of a damp hearth, she understood the game.
The horse was named Gimlet. She caught the name muttered by a snickering stable boy, and he looked as though he had been assembled from forgotten parts. His coat was the shade of weak tea, his mane a tangle of burrs.
The other hunters stepped out in gleaming muscle, thoroughbreds and Irish crosses with arched necks and hooves that struck the earth like hammers.
Margaret's husband, Alexander St. Clair, Duke of Ashford, sat his own 17-hand black without a flicker of expression. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a face that might have been carved from a cliff face, all hard angles and shadowed planes. When he glanced toward her, it was with the polite disinterest of a stranger acknowledging a fellow passenger.
Their marriage had been a swift, bloodless transaction. Her father's renowned stables in exchange for a dukedom's protection from some unspoken scandal. No tenderness had attended the union, only signatures and a cold kiss on the back of her hand.
"Is there a difficulty, Your Grace?" Margaret asked the groom, her voice carrying a note of gentle inquiry.
The groom reddened. "The—ah—the stable master assigned this one, ma'am. The others are spoken for."
Lady Penelope Vale, her riding habit the shade of sour cherries, tittered behind her glove. "Do be careful, Duchess. That one looks as though he might expire before the first hedge."
Several ladies laughed. Lord Fenwick, a man whose fortune depended entirely on his eldest son's marriage prospects, added, "One hopes Her Grace does not plan to win. The trophy would look rather odd on a milk cart horse."
Margaret did not flinch. Instead, she stepped toward Gimlet, moving without haste. She placed her palm flat against the animal's warm, slightly matted shoulder and let him feel her stillness. The horse's ears, which had been pinned flat, twitched forward. She breathed out and he turned his heavy head to nose at her sleeve.
She had not always been a duchess. Before the title, before the cold duke and his colder house, she had been Margaret Thornwood, daughter of a man who bred the finest hunters in Shropshire. She had sat her first pony before she could pronounce the word stirrup. She had mucked stalls, pulled colts from tangled fencing, and learned that the worst conformed horse often carried the bravest heart.
"Gimlet," she murmured, so low that only the horse could hear. "We are both judged before we leave the gate."
The master of the hunt raised his horn. Alexander nudged his mount forward without a backward glance. The field gathered, a riot of scarlet coats and glossy hats. Margaret gathered the reins, slipped her worn boot, polished but not new, into the iron, and rose onto Gimlet's back as though she had been born there. A groom scrambled to adjust her stirrup, but she waved him off. The horse shuddered, then steadied beneath her.
The horn blew. Hooves surged. Margaret's legs closed around Gimlet's barrel, and she gave him his head.
The first fence was a low post and rail, nothing to trouble a seasoned hunter, but half the field over-jumped it on their high-strung mounts. Gimlet, with no opinion of his own, simply followed Margaret's command and popped over it as neatly as a cat. They landed in stride, and she angled him toward a gap that the others, in their panic to lead, had overlooked.
Lady Penelope's voice, shrill with shock, reached her ears. "She's not falling off."
Margaret allowed herself a smile so small that only the wind noticed. Then she leaned forward, and Gimlet, responding to a cue no one had expected him to understand, lengthened his canter into a gallop that ate the ground with a rhythm like a heartbeat.
The Duke was 40 yards ahead, wrestling his black as it fought the bit, when he heard the drumming. He turned his head and saw his wife, his quiet, unremarkable wife, drawing level on a horse that had no right to be in the field, let alone challenging the leaders. Her hat had come unpinned and hung by its ribbon down her back. Her hair, a deep chestnut, streamed behind her, and her face was not serene but fierce, the mask of politeness stripped clean away.
She passed him. She passed him on a 20-year-old nag that cost less than his saddle, and she did it with the ease of a hawk slipping the wind. He saw her hands, so still, so exact, and understood in a single thunderous moment that he knew absolutely nothing about the woman he had married.
Part Two
Gimlet's hooves never faltered. Margaret guided him with the lightest pressure, her seat deep, her back straight as a lance. The second hedge loomed, a wicked barrier of thorn and timber that had already claimed three riders. She felt the horse hesitate, a mere flicker, and she gave him the whisper of encouragement that said, "I am here, and I will not ask what you cannot give."
The bay gathered his bony hindquarters and sailed over the hedge with a foot to spare.
Margaret laughed, the sound snatched away by the wind, because she had forgotten what joy felt like. For 6 weeks, she had been a piece of furniture in Ashford House, a silent observer at dinners, an afterthought in her husband's study. Here, on this wretched, magnificent horse, she was herself again.