Chapter Text
England, May 1988
“Good boy.”
Elizabeth swung her right leg over Piano Man’s hindquarters and dropped to the ground, then ran up both stirrups before checking her watch. 3:47. Good. She’d be able to untack Piano Man and sponge his legs with liniment before Oliver returned from the cross-country field with Ember, and then Piano Man’s legs could dry while she sponged Ember, and Ember’s legs could dry while she wrapped Piano Man’s legs, and then she could wrap Ember and tuck them both into their stalls. Of course, she still had evening barn chores to complete after that, along with feeding out grain and hay. But running on time this far into the day was objectively a very good thing.
Piano Man had Elizabeth’s second-favorite canter and maybe her favorite personality out of all eight horses currently stabled at Oliver’s yard, and he knew it. Hoping for a treat, he nuzzled at Elizabeth’s pockets with his ears pricked forward. She reached up to rub the whorl between his eyes and watched as tiny brown hairs rained down. “You can have a carrot with your grain, okay?”
Elizabeth led him into the first grooming bay and went through the usual motions. Bridle off, halter on, crossties attached, saddle and girth and saddle pad off, hooves picked, coat brushed, legs carefully cleaned of any dirt to mitigate the risk of scratches developing from the wet English spring. Then she poured enough liniment into a twenty-quart bucket to cover the bottom and diluted it with lukewarm water.
Oliver rode into the courtyard on Ember just as Elizabeth finished sponging Piano Man’s legs. She glanced up. “How was she?”
“Good session.” He dismounted. “Save for being crapped on by a bloody pigeon while I was cooling her out.”
Exactly the type of educational training update Elizabeth had come to expect from one of England’s longtime top-ranked eventing riders. She snorted.
Taking Ember’s reins from Oliver, Elizabeth led her to the second grooming bay and set to work untacking her. Her chestnut coat was rumpled where the saddle pad had been, but she’d barely broken a sweat. Elizabeth easily curried the marks away.
They worked in silence for a while, Elizabeth tending to Ember and Piano Man while Oliver took the hose around to top off the water buckets in each stall. She would feed out hay and grain only after Piano Man and Ember were put away and all of the other horses were brought in from their fields, or else Ember might break both crossties and stage a coup.
Oliver looked her up and down as he coiled the hose around the huge hook by the faucet. “Good riding today.”
Startled by the compliment, Elizabeth absently rubbed the white patch on Piano Man’s nose. “Thank you.”
“You’re alright to finish up with turn-in and feeding?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll handle night check tonight. Go do something fun once you’re done here.”
“You’re sure?”
Oliver chuckled. “Don’t make me reconsider.”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said again, even though she didn’t have anything fun in mind. Night check meant walking through the barn sometime between 9:00 and 10:00 to give each horse another flake of hay and mucking stalls again to make sure that they’d all passed manure after dinner. It also meant that Elizabeth could rarely leave the farm for any sort of nighttime adventure if she wanted to sleep more than a few hours—her daily exercise-rider duties and the sheer quantity of never-ending barn chores required a 6:00 start almost every morning. With Oliver’s eventing season well underway and his entire string of horses in full work, she could easily go days without leaving the property.
She liked it that way. As soon as she’d finished her last high school exam three springs ago, she'd taken off to spend the summer riding in England—away from Virginia, away from her aunt and Will, away from the memories. She’d wanted, needed, to be too busy to think.
That was what she’d told Oliver the day she’d dropped by his stable uninvited in search of a job. He’d dismounted from Bitter Creek (17.2 hands, gelding, gray, sold to an American showjumper the summer after Elizabeth’s freshman year at UVA), told Elizabeth to mount up and jump the gelding around the schooling course, and hired her fifteen minutes later. Housing included. Elizabeth had figured at first that it was because he pitied her, the pathetic American orphan who’d just turned eighteen and so no longer had the right to be sad about it. But he’d asked her to return the next summer, and the one after that.
“You’re still running away from your problems,” Will had declared a few weeks ago in the way that only a younger brother with a superiority complex could. "Impressive."
Siting atop her suitcase to get it to close, Elizabeth had scowled at him. “Must be genetic.”
She’d immediately wished she could unsay the words.
She was nearly done wrapping Ember’s legs—cotton padding rolled around her freshly iced cannon bones and held in place by stretchy blue stable wraps—when a car horn blared at the base of the hill for several seconds straight. Ember stepped forward and sideways with a low, alarmed snort. The slack in both crossties disappeared.
“Woah.” Elizabeth adjusted her numb legs from a low squat to a half-standing position to minimize her reaction time if Ember broke one of the crossties. “It’s okay.”
The faint sound of shouting carried over from the same direction as the car horn. Elizabeth’s brain began to supply her with a list of alarming possibilities. Maybe there had been a car crash. (Her first guess now and forever.) Maybe one of the horses turned out to pasture had jumped out of their field and ran for the road, in which case she’d be out of a job in a matter of hours. “Hold on,” she said to no one in particular, except maybe to whoever was shouting at the base of the road, as she hurried to finish Ember’s last stable wrap. “Hold on, hold on, hold on…”
After pulling the top of the wrap snug just below Ember’s knee and pinning it to itself, she retrieved Ember’s lead rope from the hook in front of the wash rack and led her back to her stall. Unlike American barns, which usually contained two rows of stalls facing inward on each side of a covered aisle, Oliver’s stable and many of the other stables in this part of England consisted of one row of stalls in the shape of a horseshoe, all opening into a central courtyard. Oliver had designed this one from scratch—five stalls making up the left side of the horseshoe, five on the right side, and two more stalls in the middle framing two grooming and wash bays, the tack room, and the feed room. Ember was a menace toward any other horse who looked at her the wrong way, so she’d earned herself the outermost stall on the right side.
“I’ll be right back," Elizabeth told Ember. She slipped her halter off over her ears and locked her stall door. "Dinner in a few minutes, I promise.”
Ember flattened her ears.
Elizabeth took off at a run down the drive. It didn’t take long to find the source of the racket: a little red car sporting a mailbox-sized dent and a busted headlight, Oliver’s mailbox sporting a little-red-car-height crack in its post, and a girl around Elizabeth’s age sporting a red sweater, a very short black skirt, a cigarette in one hand, and a scowl. “Are you okay?”
The girl wheeled around to face her. “What do you think?”
“You’re American,” Elizabeth observed aloud.
The girl ignored her. “I rent a car for one fucking week,” she said, half to herself, and kicked the nearest tire. “One week to drive around on my own and have a little fun between shows and a fucking cat—is it your fucking cat that just ran across the road? Orange?”
“Probably.” Oliver had adopted Kenneth to be a barn cat just before Elizabeth’s first summer at the yard. He’d been a problem-child kitten back then. He hadn’t matured much since.
“Well, he ran off somewhere over there—” she gestured to the patch of woods across the road—“but I didn’t hit him and he’s not dead, so you’re welcome.”
“I’m Elizabeth Adams,” Elizabeth said. The girl hadn’t asked for her name, but it seemed like a less dangerous thing to say than pointing out that she wouldn’t have had to sacrifice a car and a mailbox for Kenneth if she hadn’t been speeding along a back country road to begin with. She didn’t look like someone with much respect for speed limits.
The girl muttered something too quietly for Elizabeth to hear.
“What?”
“Nadine.” She didn’t offer a last name. “I’ll need to use your phone.”
Elizabeth lifted an eyebrow. “Pardon?”
“Your phone.” Miming holding a receiver to her ear, she looked at Elizabeth as though she had two heads. “You have one, right?”
Her sheer level of presumptuousness was almost admirable. “—Yes.”
“I need to tell the company that I’m not going to make call time.”
Nadine said it as though it should make perfect sense to Elizabeth with no context whatsoever. Elizabeth intentionally decided not to give her the satisfaction of asking for clarification. It was easy enough to guess that she was a dancer, anyway. She had maybe never seen someone look so thin and so fit at the same time. Her collarbones jutted out over the boat neck of her sweater and Elizabeth could see her ribs and spine through the thin fabric, but her long legs were all muscle under a pair of black fishnets. And she had so much hair—dark curls reaching halfway down her back and exploding in every direction.
Heaving an enormous sigh, Nadine tapped ash from her cigarette and casually flicked the butt to the ground before reaching for the driver’s door handle. “Fuck.”
“Pick that up.”
Nadine’s left eyebrow twitched.
Oh, the nerve. “You want to be responsible for starting a fire anywhere near a hay shed?”
Never taking her eyes off of Elizabeth’s face, Nadine bent down and retrieved the butt.
Feeling as though she’d just won some small battle, Elizabeth dared at last to ask for a shred of context. “Where is it you need to be?”
“The Davies Theatre. Call time is 6:00. I’ll get pulled over if I take that damn thing into the city with a bum headlight.” She once again took hold of the door handle. “But I don’t have time to try to get another rental either. Or catch the train. So—”
Go do something fun once you’re done here.
“I could drive you.”
She blurted out the offer before her brain caught up to her mouth. Dropping her hand away from the car door, Nadine cleared her throat. “What?”
Elizabeth decided to return the favor and ignore her for a change. “I would just have to finish turn-in and feeding first.”
Nadine started to say something—a clarifying question of her own, probably—but cut herself off. “I don’t know you.”
Elizabeth didn't know her either, but she was starting to believe that she ought to. She shrugged. “Or you can be late instead.”