She guided the horse through it with a quiet command, losing no momentum, and rejoined the throng on the other side. It was a sensible move, a practical one. Most of the ladies, determined to be seen as daring, had urged their more delicate mounts over the wall, landing with jarring force. Alister frowned. It was a minor thing, but it was efficient.
The chase led them towards Brierwood, a dense and tangled forest that marked the boundary between his lands and the neighboring estate, Oakhaven. He knew of it, of course. A once proud property that had been sliding into neglect for years under the mismanagement of the late Mr. Vance. The daughter, he'd heard, was now trying to hold it all together.
That must be her. The picture began to make a grim sort of sense. The faded habit, the plow horse, it wasn't eccentricity. It was poverty. The thought soured the taste of the chase in his mouth.
His laugh had not been aimed at an eccentric, but at a woman's desperation. The knowledge sat uncomfortably in his gut. Inside the woods, the pace slowed. The path was narrow and treacherous, a lattice of gnarled roots slick with damp moss. The air grew colder, smelling of earth and decay.
The hounds' cries became more sporadic as they worked to pick up the scent. Here, the hot-blooded flighty thoroughbreds were at a disadvantage. They danced nervously, their delicate legs ill-suited to the uneven ground. Alister saw Lady Annelise, the season's reigning beauty, pull her mare up short, the animal having stumbled badly. Further on, a young baronet was dismounting to check his horse's leg.
And then he saw Miss Vance again. She was moving through the trees on a parallel track, one he knew well but that most riders avoided. It was steeper, but clearer. Her big horse placed its feet with the slow, deliberate confidence of an animal born to navigate difficult terrain. It did not fight the ground.
It yielded to it, accommodated it, and the woman on its back moved with it, a part of its steady rhythm. She was not fighting the woods. She was part of them. His curiosity now piqued, sharpened into something else. Respect.
He watched as she came to a place where a great oak had fallen long ago, its trunk blocking the path. It was too high to jump, even for his Ares. The main body of the hunt was forced to detour, adding a quarter of a mile to their route. Miss Vance, however, simply dismounted. She did not hesitate.
She looped the reins over Perseus's head, and with a soft word, led him through a narrow, difficult gap between the fallen trunk and a thicket of thorns. She moved with an economy of motion he had only ever seen in his most experienced grooms. Then she remounted smoothly and without fuss, and continued on. By the time the rest of the hunt emerged from the far side of Briarwood, breathless and scratched, she was already there, waiting patiently, her horse's sides barely heaving. Julian Thorne, her cousin Alister vaguely recalled, rode up beside her, his face flushed.
Alister was too far away to hear the words, but the man's posture was aggressive, leaning in towards her. Miss Vance simply looked ahead, her expression unreadable, and Thorne eventually spurred his horse away in a show of pique. The fox broke cover then, streaking across the open moorland that stretched for miles. The chase was on again, faster and more frantic than before. This was where the thoroughbreds should have shown, on the long, open gallop.