Free The Deception by Joan Wolf Page B

father would have gotten along great guns with Adrian.”
    This was not as great a surprise to me as you may think. I had been both astonished and delighted when I first got on Elsa to discover how rhythmic her gaits were, how responsive she was to the lightest of aids. And Elsa had been Adrian’s horse.
    Harry was going on, “Your father would have been happy to know that one of Adrian’s projects in France this last year has been to get the king to restore the cavalry school at Saumur.”
    Papa would have been more than happy to hear this; he would have been ecstatic. It had pained him deeply to think that the art of classical equitation might be lost forever.
    I smiled radiantly at Harry. “That is wonderful news,” I said warmly.
    Harry blinked.
    “Why don’t you let Willie saddle up one of the other horses for you and we’ll go for a ride together?” I suggested.
    * * * *
    By the time we returned from our ride across the Downs, Harry and I were great friends. He would not be going back to Oxford after Christmas, he confided to me as we were sitting in the dining room over Mrs. Noakes’s roast beef dinner. He had been sent down for some silly prank—he did not think it was silly, but I did—and now he had to write to tell Adrian the bad news.
    “I don’t get control of my own money until I’m twenty-five,” he told me gloomily. “So for the next four years, I’m dependent upon Adrian. He’s going to kick up stiff when he hears that I’ve been sent down.”
    “I don’t blame him,” I said candidly. “Whatever are you going to do with yourself for the next eight months?”
    “Damn!” he said. Mr. Noakes gave him a dire frown, but he didn’t notice. “Adrian never went to Oxford. When he was my age he was having fun out in the Peninsula. Now that the war’s over, there’s nothing for my generation to do except go to boring old school.”
    I smiled at Mr. Noakes to show him that Harry had not offended me. “How thoughtless of Wellington to have ended the war before you had a chance to get killed,” I said.
    “Dash it all, Kate,”—we had gotten on first-name terms in the first half hour of our ride—”I know war ain’t fun. But, don’t you see, it’s a way of becoming a man.” He scowled at his glass of wine, picked it up, and drained it off. “Of course, you don’t understand,” he muttered. “You’re a girl.”
    I understood more than he thought. It could not be easy for an ardent young boy like Harry to have such a paragon for an elder brother. Harry was searching for a way to prove himself as good a man as Adrian, and the only outlet he could find was the harebrained pranks that he knew in his heart were not manly but simply juvenile.
    “How did your brother come to go out to the Peninsula?” This was a question that had puzzled me for quite a while. The heir to a great title was not expected to risk his life in battles—that was something a younger son was supposed to do.
    We had finished dinner by now, and Harry said abruptly, “Let’s go back to the library.”
    I certainly did not want to leave him alone with a bottle of wine—I thought he had had quite enough already—so I agreed.
    “Adrian went to the Peninsula to get away from my father, of course,” Harry said when we were once again settled comfortably in the blue chairs in front of the library fire. “The same reason that Caroline let herself get talked into that wretched elopement.”
    I thought about this for a while. “Your father was not a ... kindly ... man?” I asked.
    “He was a monster,” Harry returned bluntly. “Used to fly in a rage and use his whip on us.”
    I was dumbfounded. “He hit you?”
    “He hit Adrian, mostly.” Harry ran his fingers through his hair and regarded me with somber eyes. “He used to take the blame for things Caroline and I did. He was bigger, he’d say. The hitting stopped when Adrian got big enough to hit back, but the fact of the matter was, my father was a