“C-could I…” Darcy shook her head. “Never mind.” She got out the door before Ruth Ann managed to catch her hand and stop her.
“What did you want? Darcy, look at me.” Finally, she had to turn the girl’s face toward her to see her dark-brown eyes. “Ask your question. It’s okay.”
“I just wondered if…if I could watch you feed the horses.”
As Ruth Ann stared, the words came tumbling out. “I’ll stay out of your way. I won’t touch them or anything, I promise. I won’t make them mad or hurt them. I just want to watch.”
“Whoa.” Ruth Ann took one of Darcy’s hands in both of her own. “Slow down. Relax.” She saw that Ingrid was holding up the rest of the group, waiting for Darcy. “She’s staying here,” Ruth Ann called. “I’ll bring her to dinner myself.”
Ingrid nodded, waved, and turned away, with the girls following. Still holding Darcy’s hand, Ruth Ann went back into the tack room. “Sit down for a second.”
Looking scared to death, Darcy dropped onto the couch. She had a habit of keeping her arms folded around her waist, for protection or camouflage, Ruth Ann wasn’t sure which.
Moving the magazines, Ruth Ann sat on the coffee table directly across from Darcy. “You’re welcome to stay and watch,” she said. “I need to see how you are around the horses, to be sure that you’re safe. Jonah said you’d broken your arm earlier this year?”
Darcy nodded. “In May, at a horse show. Rufus jumped a crossbar fence and I fell off. Before they caught him, he ran through a couple of other fences, tripped, and strained his leg. It was gonna take him months to get better.”
“That’s too bad for Rufus. I guess your broken arm needed a few months to heal, too, didn’t it?”
The girl shrugged. “It was okay. I don’t like swimming, anyway, so I stayed in the house.”
“Maybe Rufus doesn’t like jumping in the summer heat, either.”
“Oh, no.” Darcy looked shocked at the idea. “He loves to jump. My mother was going to take him to Europe with her, until he got hurt. He would have competed with some of the best three-year-olds in Germany.”
“You were jumping on a three-year-old? Have you done that much riding, Darcy?”
“Since I was five.” She sighed and shook her head. “But I don’t seem to get better at it.”
“What’s Rufus like?” Ruth Ann asked the question, though she thought she could predict the answer.
“He’s a seventeen-hand chestnut thoroughbred with a white blaze and four white socks,” the girl recited, as if she were reading off a sale list. “Really eager, jumps four feet and over, no problem.”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’d be scared to death sitting on a young horse that big.” Ruth Ann stood up and motioned for Darcy to do the same. “Sounds like a recipe for disaster. I’d give him another two or three years before I’d trust him not to dump me at a fence.”
“Oh, he didn’t dump me. I just…fell. I’m too fa—clumsy to ride.”
“Right.” Ruth Ann relaxed her jaw and tried not to hate Jonah Granger and his wife. “Okay, the way this works is, I clean up a stall, then walk the horse out to the pasture and bring one in. It’s kind of labor-intensive, but since I’m the one doing the work, nobody complains. All these horses are calm—no Rufuses here to worry about. So you just stand there and talk to them while I muck out. Okay?”
Darcy nodded. “Okay.”
Four horses later, as they walked back in from the pasture with Filigree, Ruth Ann asked casually if Darcy wanted to hold the lead rope. “Fili is a very sensible lady,” she promised. “She knows how to walk quietly beside you without making a fuss.”
“O-okay.” Darcy took the rope and held it correctly, about a foot from Fili’s chin with one hand, gathering the rest in her other hand. As Ruth Ann dropped back slightly, the girl and the mare walked without incident to the waiting stall. Darcy was so busy talking to the horse that she didn’t even think about leading Fili into the stall, where she turned her around, unbuckled the halter and stepped back outside to shut the door.
“Very good,” Ruth Ann told her. “Seeing you handle Fili, I can believe you’ve been around horses since you were little. You’re good with them, Darcy, calm and sure of yourself.”
The girl blushed bright pink, and she didn’t say anything. But her eyes shone with happiness.
Once they’d led the grays in, Ruth Ann set the manure fork aside. “I’ll clean up the last four stalls after dinner. We can just take these guys out to the pasture, and then I’ll walk you back to the Manor.”
The glow in Darcy’s face faded. “Okay.”
Leaving the indoor horses with hay to munch on, Ruth Ann showed Darcy the path from the stable back to the Manor. “You’re welcome to come visit any time. You don’t have to ride if you don’t want to. Horses are fun just to talk to or look at. As Winston Churchill said, ‘The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man.’ Or woman.”
“Maybe I will,” Darcy said. But she didn’t sound very certain. “I have to get my homework done, too. And practice my music.”
“That’s true, though I always thought there was time enough for horses and homework. I never got to do music.”
“Did you go to Hawkridge?”
“No, I went to the public schools out in town. But my dad managed the stable, so I was here every afternoon and all weekend, working with him.”
“Was it fun?”
“Well, sure. I loved being with the horses.”
“Did you like working with your dad?”
Now there was a tough question. “He could be picky, sometimes, and he’d get mad if I didn’t do something just the way he wanted it. But he was a great trainer and taught me all I know about horses.”
Once they reached the manicured lawns surrounding the Manor, they could see other girls heading toward the dormitory to prepare for dinner. Ruth Ann glanced at the jeans and sneakers and sweatshirt Darcy had worn to the barn.
“Guess you’d better get changed in a hurry.” She checked her watch. “You’ve got ten minutes before the warning chime.”
“Okay.” That seemed to be Darcy’s favorite word. As she veered away, though, she stopped and looked back at Ruth Ann. “I had fun this afternoon. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Darcy. Like I said, come back anytime.”
Ruth Ann watched the girl walk with dragging steps toward the residence hall. In the two hours they’d spent together, she’d gained the impression that Darcy’s energy level was dialed to Low—she simply didn’t put out much effort, even with the horses. She seemed competent with the animals, but uncertain of herself, reminding Ruth Ann of a child outside the toy store,
