The Shadowy Horses

"Good. And now, though you've been terribly polite to sit here listening to me, I'm sure you really are quite tired from your travels. I'll show you to your room."

"I'll take her up," Adrian offered.

"You most certainly will not." Quinnell's voice was firm. "I'd be a thoughtless cad to deliver any woman into your clutches, even one familiar with your Casanova ways. No, you may say goodnight to her, and / will take her upstairs, when she's ready."

Adrian was still smiling several minutes later, as he shrugged his coat on in the vestibule and bent to brush my cheek with a chaste kiss. "So," he murmured, with a quick glance over my shoulder to where Quinnell stood waiting in the entrance hall, "what do you think?"

"I think he's rather marvelous."

"I'm glad. Verity ..."

"Yes?"

“Nothing.'' He tossed his dark head back and fastened the final snap of his coat. "Never mind. I'll see you in the morning, then."

I watched him go, then turned and followed Peter Quinnell through the hall and up a winding stone stairway to the first floor. My footsteps dragged a little on the hard steps, and I realized that I actually was tired. By the time Quinnell had shown me where the bathroom was and introduced me to the plumbing, I was stifling yawns. And although his granddaughter had no doubt taken great pains to match my curtains to my coverlet, I'm afraid that when the door to my spacious back bedroom swung open, I only saw the plump twin beds.

Quinnell fussed around for a few minutes longer, demonstrating drawers and cupboard doors and making certain I had everything I needed for the night, and then with a final weary smile he gallantly withdrew and left me on my own.

Well, not entirely on my own.

One of the cats had come upstairs with us, and when I'd finished in the bathroom I returned to find it perched upon my window ledge, long tail twitching as it stared transfixed at the ink-black pane of glass. It was the tomcat, the big black one, and not the dainty gray tabby that had slept on my lap earlier. The gray one was Charlie, I remembered, and ... oh, what was the black one called? The name was vaguely Irish, I thought. Mickey? Mooney? "Murphy," I pronounced, with satisfaction, and the cat flicked an ear in response.

"You like that window, do you, Murphy? What is it you see?"

I myself could only see my own reflection, and the cat's, until I switched the lamp off. Even then, the view looked ordinary enough. Close by, a large tree shuddered with the wind, above a sea of ghostly daffodils that dipped and danced in waves. And beyond that, the fickle moonlight caught a sweep of field that slanted gently up to meet a darkly cresting ridge. "You see?" I said. "There's nothing ..."

The cat's hair bristled suddenly as it arched itself upon the window ledge, eyes flaming as its lips curled sharply back, fangs baring in a vicious hiss.

I know I jumped. And though the hiss had not been aimed at me, I felt my gooseflesh rising in response and fought to calm the jerky rhythm of my heart. “Murphy,'' I said sternly, "stop that."

He swiveled his head to stare at me, eyes glowing, then turned away again to watch the night. The second hiss came fiercer than the first, and rattled me so badly that I snapped the window blind down and nudged the black cat from the ledge with a less than steady hand.

Murphy settled benignly at the foot of my bed and blinked without expression. Stupid animal, I thought. There had been nothing out there, nothing at all. Only the tree and the daffodils, and the dark, deserted field.

Nevertheless, I was glad of the tomcat's company when I crawled beneath my blankets, having chosen the twin bed further from the window. And for the first time since my nursery days, I didn't reach to turn off the bedside lamp.

"Do you always sleep with your light on?" Fabia Quinnell asked me next morning, at breakfast. Waiting for me to finish my toast and coffee, she leaned an elbow on the kitchen counter and nibbled a dried apricot.

I hadn't yet made up my mind about Fabia. She was of an age with my sister Alison, not quite twenty, but where Alison was sensible and unaffected, Fabia Quinnell wore the deliberately bored look of an adolescent, and called her grandfather "Peter."

She was, as Adrian had said, a fetching young woman— quite stunning, in fact. And decidedly blond. Her pale hair, baby-fine, swung against her soft jaw at an artful angle, leaving the nape of her fragile neck bare. Small-boned and doe-eyed, she looked nothing like her grandfather. Nor did she appear to share his hospitable nature. The greeting she had given me was anything but warm.

I rather doubted she'd done anything to decorate my bedroom, despite what Quinnell had told me last night. More likely the old man himself had selected the curtains and coverlet, made things look comfortable. Fabia, I suspected, wasn't the sort of young woman to concern herself with someone else's comfort.

It surprised me that she'd even noticed my bedroom light, last night.

In answer to her question I replied, through a mouthful of cold toast, that I normally slept in the dark, like everyone else. "I just have a foolish imagination, sometimes—things that go bump in the night. Especially in strange houses. So I find it helps to leave the light on."

"Well, you gave me quite a turn, last night," she said. "I thought it might be Peter, waiting up for me. He drinks, you know, and then he wants to talk." She rolled her eyes with feeling. "A typical Irishman."

I wouldn't have guessed Peter Quinnell was Irish. He had, after all, that beautifully elegant voice, with no trace of a brogue whatsoever—but now that I'd had the fact pointed out to me I could recognize that indefinable quality, the faint hint of horses and hounds, that marked a certain segment of the Anglo-Irish gentry.