‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s not much of a tour, in this weather. The countryside all looks the same when it rains.’
‘That’s all right. You can’t control the weather.’
‘We could try to wait it out.’ But from his doubtful tone I knew that he felt fairly sure, as I did, that this rain had settled in to stay awhile, and he was not the sort of man to wait for long.
I had been looking forward to this morning more than I’d have wanted to admit. I’d been watching the clock till he’d come up half an hour ago and walked me down to where his beaten-up white Vauxhall waited parked beside the harbor wall, with Angus wagging happy in the back. But we had only gone a short way when the clouds that had been smothering the morning sun had opened. It was clear now that we’d have to end our driving tour before we’d even properly begun. I tried to hide my disappointment.
Graham must have seen it anyway, because he put the car in gear again and, turning up the wipers to their highest speed, eased back on to the narrow road. ‘I tell you what. I’ve friends who have a farm not very far from here. We’ll stop and visit them, all right? Put in a bit of time, till the rain eases.’
Angus, who’d stretched out along his blanket on the back seat, raised his head to note the changing of our course, and by the time we’d reached the farm’s long lane was standing on the seat, tail wagging, obviously pleased by where he was.
The lane was rutted deep and muddy, ending in a neat square yard with sheds joined in a squat row to the front of us, and barns along our right hand side, and to the left a low-walled whitewashed farmhouse with a bright blue door.
‘Sit tight,’ said Graham, pulling up his jacket’s hood, ‘I’ll see if they’re about.’
He stood at the farmhouse door, with water sluicing down a drainpipe at his shoulder, and knocked. No one came, so with a shrug and quick smile of encouragement, he jogged across the hard-packed yard and through the open doorway of the nearest barn.
He hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said that Angus hated being left behind. The dog had merely sat and whimpered while his master had been knocking at the blue door, but when Graham disappeared into the barn, the spaniel stood and scrabbled at the window of the back seat and began to howl, a piteous, heart-rending noise designed to move the listener to action. I could only stand a minute of it—then I turned and rummaged for his leash. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘all right, we’ll go, too. Just hold on.’
I didn’t have a hood. But I had boots, which I was thankful for, because my first few running steps were ankle-deep in rainwater. With Angus pulling hard against the leash, we moved with near-Olympic speed across the courtyard, and were through the door and in the barn before the rain had soaked me.
It was warmer inside, dusty from the hay and from the movement of the animals, and smelling sharply of straw and manure. After what I’d written last night, it seemed fitting, somehow, that I should now find myself confronted by a row of tidy horse stalls—three with horses, and one empty— and that one of the three equine faces turned to watch my entrance should look strangely like the mare that I’d created for Sophia, with the same great liquid eyes and coal-black mane and gentle features.
Graham wasn’t anywhere in sight. He must, I thought, have gone the full way down the barn and round the corner, to the sheds, which I could see now were connected at the far end. Angus would have followed, but I held him back a moment, keen to have another minute with the horses.
I loved horses. Every young girl did, so I’d been told, and I had never totally outgrown the phase. My more discerning readers sometimes commented on how I always managed to work horses into all my plots, though I at least could claim that I could hardly write historicals without a horse or two. Truth was, they were my private weakness.
There was no great black gelding in any of the stalls, like the one I’d given to Nathaniel Hooke, and no bay gelding either. Only a tall chestnut hunter who eyed me, aloof, and a curious grey in the end stall, and standing between them, the mare—or the horse that I thought was a mare, since she looked like the one I’d imagined. She stretched out her nose as I offered my hand and with pure joy I petted the velvety hair by her nostrils and felt the warm push of her breath in my palm.
‘That one’s Tammie,’ Graham said. He had, as I’d deduced, been in the sheds, and was returning now with his unhurried stride. ‘You want to watch him, he’s a ladies’ man.’