LITMIR.BIZ

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sound of disgust from the adjoining room alerted him that he’d sung the lines of the old ditty aloud.

      “Don’t go clucking your tongue at me, Miz Nancy,” he called out. “I can sing. A man has every right to sing in his own house.”

      “Humph. You call that singing? I thought the neighbors’ hounds just treed a coon.” The gentle clack of her knitting needles punctuated the statement.

      He finished his drink with a long swig, and oh-so-silently set his glass on the age-scarred sideboard.

      “Don’t matter how quiet you try to be,” Nancy called. “I know you been at the spirits.” A moment later she stepped through the open pocket doors and came into the shabby parlor, her cane tapping along the floor until it encountered the threadbare carpet. Her African face, wizened by years she had never learned to count, held equal measures of patience and exasperation. Her eyes, clouded with blindness, seemed to peer into a deeper part of him even he didn’t see. Nancy had the uncanny ability to track his progress through a room, or worse, to track his very thoughts sometimes.

      “Humph,” she said again, this time with a self-righteous snort. “How you going to shoot a gun if you all full up with Jim Hooker’s whiskey?”

      Hunter gave a humorless laugh, poured another drink and gulped it down. She was the only person he knew who could actually hear a man drinking. “Drunk or sober, Nancy, have you ever known me to miss a target?”

      Setting his empty glass on the smoke-stained mantel, he said, “Excuse me. I’ve got something I have to do.” He paused to fill his silver hip flask with more whiskey. Nancy waited in silence, but he felt the cold bluster of her temper as if she’d scolded him aloud.

      It was too much to hope she wouldn’t follow him. He could hear the busy tap-tap of her cane as she shuffled along behind him, down the central hall toward the back of the big house. In his parents’ day, the gun room had been a hive of activity on hunt mornings, when neighbors from all over Northampton County came to call. Now the room contained only the most necessary of firearms—a Le Mats revolver, a percussion shotgun and a Winchester repeating rifle. He went to the gun cabinet and took down the Winchester, cocking open the side loading gate to make sure it was well oiled.

      It was. He had known this moment was coming. In preparation, he had lit himself with whiskey, but suddenly strong drink wasn’t enough.

      He looped a deerskin sack of .44-40 cartridges to his belt, then stood for a moment at the window, staring out the wavy glass at the broad gardens of Albion. Dogwood and rhododendron grew profusely at the verges, though the flower beds had a weedy, untended look.

      “You best get a move on,” said Nancy. “Miz Beaumont took the children off to lessons at Bonterre for the day, and you want this dirty business done ‘fore they get back.”

      “I reckon I do.” He flinched, picturing his son Blue’s silent censure when the boy learned what had happened in his absence. Blue had suffered so much loss already, and here his own father was about to take something else from him.

      A wave of self-loathing washed over Hunter. Earlier that morning, he had sat down to breakfast with the children, putting jam on Belinda’s biscuit and pouring the cream for Blue, pretending—God, always pretending—that things were right between them.

      With her strange, unerring sense of direction, Nancy joined him at the window and caught hold of his arm. “I’m real sorry, son. I’m just as sorry as I can be,” she said, gently fingering a rip in the sleeve of his shirt.

      “I know you are, honey.” He stared down at the dark, papery-dry hand, the knuckles gnarled and shiny with rheumatism. That hand had soothed his feverish brow when he was a baby and dried his little-boy tears. It had mended his breeches with a lightning flash of the needle, and, when the occasion warranted it, delivered a smack to his backside a time or two, though never without drawing him into a hug afterward.

      And when he had signed the manumission papers to set her free, that trembling hand had cupped his cheek, her touch more eloquent than the words she could not summon.

      Nancy’s mothering hand couldn’t soothe him now. His nervous fingers strayed to the slim hip flask in his pocket, but he didn’t take it out. Nothing could soothe him this morning.

      “I’ll be back by and by, honey,” he said to Nancy, then stepped out on the veranda.

      Setting his jaw, he jerked open the gate of the rifle and loaded the cartridges. Then he hitched back his shoulders and strode down the steps to the walkway. The brilliant Virginia morning mocked him with its bright promise. Thready high clouds veined the April sky, and sunlight flooded extravagantly down through the twisted live oaks of Albion. The long misty acres rose up into the sloping green hills.

      At one time the tidewater plantation had been as busy as a small village. Tobacco fields had covered hundreds of acres; the cultivation and curing of the leaves had occupied hundreds of hands. Now everything had changed. All that remained were Hunter and his children, a small staff of misfits and a dream that was about to be shattered.

      Not for the first time, he contemplated giving up, selling out. Would a prospective buyer notice the chipping paint on the soaring columns that flanked the entranceway? Would he see the brambles and creeper that encroached on the once-pristine lawn?

      Would a buyer see the work and sweat that had gone into the riding hall, the round pen and lunging ring, the barns and paddocks and the only mile oval racing track in the county? Would the mares and foals in the hills show themselves? Would a stranger be dazzled by Albion’s wild promise, or disappointed by its failed glory?

      He simply didn’t know. These days, he had no answers.

      He sucked in a deep breath, tasting the cool green tang of the Spartina grass that fringed the marshes by the bay. The weight of the Winchester pressed insistently on his shoulder. His strides kicked up droplets of dew as he walked, dampening the toes of his scuffed riding boots. No matter, there would be no riding today.

      A cluster of farm buildings lay in quiet morning shadow. A stone boat of thick planks laid over heavy runner beams had been brought out in readiness for the dead body.

      A high-pitched whinny broke the silence, and on the farthest hill to the west, the herd appeared, moving like a banner of silk across the spring meadows. No cart horses or farm plugs these, but Thoroughbreds. Against the green-draped landscape, they were magnificent and primal, their loping forms stretching into one entity, like a mythical beast, as they traversed the hill. As always, Hunter’s heart caught at the sight of them.

      At one time the racehorses that had beggared his fortunes had also brought him true happiness. The enterprise was the beginning of his hope and the end to the troubles that had shadowed the years since he’d inherited Albion. But after Lacey’s death, he’d turned away from the dream, for a dream seemed too auspicious a thing to have when your world was falling apart.

      Still, through everything, his affinity for the unusual horses remained a powerful force. Most days, “Hunter’s Folly” as the neighbors called them, were the only things in his world that made sense.

      Putting two fingers to his lips, he loosed three shrill whistles. The lead stallion—once declared unridable, which was why Hunter rode him—broke away from the herd and headed down at an angle, answering the summons with his customary mixture of obedience and disdain. Hunter walked over to the fence and treated the horse to a piece of barley sugar. “There you are, Julius,” he said quietly. “How’s my old boy?”

      From the time he was very young, and had no inkling of the troubles ahead of him, Hunter Calhoun had possessed a God-given way with racehorses—the more spirited, the better. The stallion called Julius had been his triumph, the most remarkable Thoroughbred Virginia had ever seen.

      But Julius had run his course and could no longer race or stand stud. He finished his barley sugar and nudged at the pouch of cartridges on Hunter’s belt.

      “That’s not for you,” Hunter said, stepping away from the fence. “Though Lord knows, some breeders

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