Free Susie by M.C. Beaton Page B

had forgiven him, realizing thoroughly and for the first time that she did have something to forgive.
    He led the lady in his arms to a convenient summer house and performed his part with athletic expertise, while all the time his thoughts roamed homeward to the bleak castle on top of the steep cliffs above the roaring sea.
    “Use your whip, you ninny! Use your whip!” But Susie would not.
    It was her fifth riding lesson, and she was so bruised and battered, she could hardly stay on the vicious mount that Lady Felicity had deliberately chosen for her. The horse was called Dobbin and was anything but the docile animal that its pedestrian name conjured up. He had a nasty temper and a rolling eye. He did not want Susie on his back; he did not want any human on his back, and only endured Susie for brief stretches at a time because she fed him sugar lumps and spoke to him in a soft, pleading voice that somewhere in the back of his bad-tempered brain he rather liked.
    Lady Felicity was herself a hard-bitten horsewoman, and prided herself on the fact that there wasn’t a horse alive she couldn’t ride.
    During this, the fifth lesson, she and Susie were riding toward the steep edge of a gravel pit. The sky still lowered above them, and a dry, cold wind whipped across the rock-strewn moor. Felicity had become bored with Susie’s torture and turned her attention instead to Susie’s horse.
    Suddenly she reined in her own mount. “It’s time I showed you and that animal of yours how a horse should be mastered,” she said. “Dismount and take my horse, and I’ll take yours.”
    Susie gladly complied, climbing awkwardly up onto the back of Lady Felicity’s more docile horse.
    Felicity leapt nimbly into the sidesaddle on Dobbin’s back, wrenched his mouth, and then lashed the animal viciously across the rump with her whip so that a thin trickle of blood ran down his flanks.
    She then dug a wicked-looking spur hard into his side. “Gee-up!” she said.
    And Dobbin did.
    Right to the edge of the gravel pit he flew like an arrow from a bow, and right at the edge he dug in all four hooves and stopped short.
    Lady Felicity went sailing over his head. Her astonished voice sailed back in the wind as she seemed to hang suspended for a moment over the gravel pit.
    “Deary me…!” cried Lady Felicity.
    And then she crashed down and down and down and died instantly as her neck snapped on a convenient rock.
    There was a great silence. Then a sea gull screamed overhead, and Susie began to shiver uncontrollably, climbing down from her horse and falling onto the ground, because her trembling legs could not support her.
    After a time she gritted her teeth and, rising, made her way slowly and painfully down the steep sides of the gravel pit, her long skirts bunched over her arm.
    There was no doubt about it—Lady Felicity was very much dead.
    Susie began to laugh hysterically. Then she burst into stormy tears while a startled rabbit fled in fear from this peculiar human.
    Susie sat down beside the still body and cried and cried, wrapping her head in her arms and rocking to and fro. This un-English manifestation of shock, this lack of stiff upper lip, was what kept her from having a complete breakdown.
    Finally, after a long time she made her way slowly back to the castle on foot while Dobbin, now lazy and placid, strolled after her, accompanied by the other horse.

Chapter Six
    A year had passed since the death of Lady Felicity. Susie had recovered a long time ago from her shock, but still remained much the same dreamy, immature girl as ever.
    Giles had thrown himself into plans for modernizing the castle, and workmen seemed to be hammering upstairs and downstairs morning, noon, and night. He had not had the energy or the inclination to find a home for Susie and had, instead, invited an elderly aunt to stay as a kind of chaperon. His aunt, Lady Matilda Warden, was a fanatical knitter, tatter, and stitcher, and trailed cheerfully from room