The Winter Bride by Anne Gracie

Author:Anne Gracie
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-31T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

“Where the wound had been given, there must the cure be found, if anywhere.”

—JANE AUSTEN, EMMA

Rain was sleeting down next morning, and after breakfast Damaris excused herself, saying she wanted to write some letters. Freddy took himself gratefully off to spend the morning in the stables. His grays had arrived and, besides, the unalloyed delight of his parents’ company was getting on his nerves. What he really wanted was to go for a good hard ride, but when he went to saddle up a horse, his father’s head groom said, “In this weather, Mr. Freddy?”

Collins had put Freddy on his first pony as a child, and he was right; it would be foolhardy to take a horse out in such atrocious weather. Damn. Freddy seized a currycomb and went to work on one of his grays. Some of the newer stable lads raised their brows at seeing the son of the house doing such lowly work, but Collins just nodded wisely and waved the others back to work. He understood Freddy’s demons.

As a boy Freddy had worked off many a head of steam in the stables under Collins’s benevolent—and critical—eye. Son of the house or not, Collins held Freddy to the same standard as anyone else employed to work with the prime cattle under his care, even if the horses belonged to Freddy.

Stripped down to his shirtsleeves, Freddy plied the currycomb with a will. Blasted weather. Not only was it preventing him from riding off his frustrations, it also kept him stuck in the house, and while he was enjoying Damaris’s company to an extent that was starting to worry him, his parents’ constant cuts at him were bound to distress her, no matter how gamely she tried to parry them. He was so used to it he barely noticed.

Freddy knew how to take his punishment. He should, after sixteen years.

But then, for years he’d spent only one day a year with them. Hardly enough to notice how they were aging, to know who they were now, one adult to another. They still treated him as a boy, and he, well, he did his best not to notice them at all.

But now he was seeing them through Damaris’s eyes. And it wasn’t pleasant.

He finished the first horse, then moved on to the next. It had barely taken the edge off. What he really needed was a fight. He finished the second horse and looked around for something else to do.

“Still wound tight as a spring, lad?” Collins asked quietly. “Wood to be chopped out back if you fancy it.”

He did. He’d removed his coat and waistcoat to groom the horses in his shirtsleeves, but after chopping and splitting the first dozen logs, he’d started to sweat, despite the cold, and stripped off his shirt. As the pile of neatly chopped and split wood mounted, the tension gradually eased out of him.

There was satisfaction and release in the rhythmic swing of the ax and the contained, precise violence of the action.

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