Page 53 of The Mad Baron's Bride
Or at least, she hoped so. What, then, was Muriel hiding?
Nora had offered one explanation.The Hall is full of ghosts.
Leda experiencedthe strangest sensation as she stepped off the small front porch of Holme Hall, tugging on the leathergloves she would use for driving. She had not had occasion in years to wear driving gloves; driving a horse was something her father had taught her when she was young, and she had barreled around in the pony cart until her parents banned her from gollumping about the neighborhood proving she was naught but a hoyden, as her grandmother would say, though she put it in less kindly terms. Leda had enjoyed her grandmother’s strict house even less than she appreciated her mother’s many rules.
What they thought when she went to the madhouse for killing her husband, Leda couldn’t say. They’d stopped speaking to her.
And with a husband stricter than her grandmother, then being locked up and running away after, Leda hadn’t been on a horse, nor had her hand on the ribbons of any sort of conveyance, since those long-lost days of hoydenhood. Her heart expanded in her chest with a sense of fullness, like the tide rolling in.
She heard the water all the time now, and the cry of the shore birds, especially the migrations that came through in swarms that could block the sun. And a small, high call out on the water that she couldn’t place, but might be mermaids. She’d seen small sleek heads breaking the surface just this morning as she watched the water from her window.
Mermaids. She chuckled to herself at her fancies.
“Alright, me kiddie?” she asked her companion.
Muriel narrowed her eyes, not drawn in by Leda’s light tone. Now the dialect of her youth was coming back, too. She felt younger here than she had in years. The land was made for flinging one’s arms out and twirling. One couldbreathehere as one couldn’t in Bath, where the muck of the street waste and the coal smoke from so many chimneys hung heavy in the air.
And Eustace would never find her. Not here.
Henry stood at the head of the horse, harnessed into the market cart and waiting patiently. “The bor’s botty a’smornum, and he’ll allus pull left if you let um.” He held the ribbons as if reluctant to share. “S’name’s Pontus.”
“God of the sea. We’ll get along, won’t we?” Leda scrubbed his muzzle with her knuckles. The big gelding blew and butted his forehead beneath her hand. Leda scratched between his ears, delighted. She’d forgotten she loved horses.
Henry helped her settle on the board that served as a seat and handed up the reins. “Dew yew keep a’ troshin, miss.”
She heard this phrase often among the servants, and Leda gathered it was a mixture of “fare thee well” and “mind how you go.”Keep threshing—an injunction to carry on, no matter what. Because one day, one might step out of a grand old hall that felt like a home—the first home one had had in ages—on the way to meet a strapping man who sent up flutters beneath one’s stays at the sight of him. There might be a pale sun peeking out behind clouds, and the wilding scent of salt and sea, the edge of the world falling open.
And there might be a quiet, troubled girl beside one whose heart Leda longed to know. Almost as much as she wished to know that of her father.
“So it seems I must teach you the minuet.” Leda concentrated first on getting a feel for the harness and horse, and keeping her seat, but when she’d assembled some level of confidence in her own abilities, she thought to speak to the girl sitting beside her.
“I won’t need it.” Muriel looked away, pointedly indicating her lack of interest in conversation.
“You don’t expect you will dance at assemblies, or have suitors who will want to dance with you?”
Wasn’t that every girl’s dream? Although Leda’s girlhood dreams had not tended toward men or marriage. She’d wanted to read all the books she could lay hands on. Travel to theremotest corners of Britain, and then beyond. To go to school—how she had longed for school—and make friends who would be hers for life, like happened in the books.
“I won’t.” Muriel said this firmly.
“Don’t wish to marry?” Leda probed. “Or don’t wish to dance?”
The girl’s head swiveled toward her. A field vole shot across the path, and the horse’s ears flickered back. Worried he would shy, Leda took a moment to comprehend Muriel’s answer.
“I won’t have any of those things,” she snapped. “Who will offer for a mad woman’s daughter?”
Pontus snorted and tossed his head, and Leda realized she had pulled back on the ribbons. At once she loosened her hands.
“Your mother was not—” Leda chose not to finish this thought. The woman had abandoned her child. What frantic thoughts had preyed on her mind to force her to such a choice?
Although, if one listened to certain farm wives of Snettisham market, Anne-Marie Burham hadn’t jumped from the cliffs. She’d been pushed.
“And my da, too,” Muriel went on ruthlessly. “I’m the mad baron’s daughter, aren’t I?”
“Your father is not mad,” Leda said in a sharp tone. This she was certain of. Jack Burham was as sane, assolida man as it was possible to find.
She concentrated on keeping her hands light on the ribbons, but something of her distress must have communicated itself down to the leather to Pontus. He flicked his ears, then picked up the pace into a trot.
Muriel held on to the seat on both sides. “Of course you think that. You want him to marry you.”
