Read Online The Incredible Honeymoon (Bantam Series No. 46) by Barbara Cartland - Free Book Online Page A

handle!”
    “That’s true, M’Lady. Ye’ve a way with animals, as Oi’ve always told ye. ’Tis something as be born in a person. They either has it, or they hasn’t!”
    There was a silence during which Ives went on whistling through his teeth and the Duke was aware that Antonia too was rubbing down her horse.
    “How does the Marchioness of Northaw ride?” she asked in a low voice.
    “A Park-rider, M’Lady!” Ives replied disparagingly. “But she’s hard on her horses.”
    “ What do you mean by that?” Antonia enquired.
    “A groom from Northaw Place were here t’day asking me what Oi uses as a poultice.”
    “You mean she has spur-galled her horse?” Antonia asked.
    “Oi be afraid so, M’Lady, and pretty bad the groom told Oi it were.”
    “How can these fashionable women be so cruel ... so insensitive?” Antonia asked furiously. “Seeing the way they ride, only trit-trotting in the Park, there is no reason for them to use the spur, especially the five-pointed rowel, unless it actually gives them pleasure.”
    Ives did not answer and after a moment Antonia went on, still with a note of anger in her voice:
    “Do you remember what Lady Rosalind Lynke did to the horses when she stayed here two years ago?”
    “Oi do indeed, M’Lady. We both worked hard on the horses she damaged.”
    “I have never forgotten it,” Antonia said.
    “No more have Oi, M’Lady,” Ives agreed. “And very helpful ye were. The horses were that nervous and restless from the harsh treatment they’d received that only ye could calm them while Oi applied the poultices.”
    “I wondered then, and I wonder now,” Antonia said reflectively, “what it is that makes those feminine frilly sort of women so cruel when they are on a horse?”
    “Perhaps it be a sense of power, M’Lady. Some women resent a man’s superiority, so they takes it out on a dumb beast what can’t answer ’em back!”
    “I am sure you are right, Ives, and I loathe them for their cruelty! I swear to you I will never wear a spur however fashionable it may be, or whoever tells me it is essential to the training of a horse.”
    She spoke passionately. The Duke turned and retraced his steps towards the house.
    As he went he was thinking not of the Marchioness but of Antonia.
    The carriage decorated behind with two horse-shoes, two old boots, its roof be-speckled with grains of rice, rolled away down the drive.
    The Duke sat back against the cushioned seat and thought with a sense of unutterable relief that it was all over!
    He had been spared, for which he was extremely relieved, a Wedding-Breakfast which might have lasted interminably, simply because there were too many guests for the Earl to consider entertaining them in such a lavish manner.
    Even if they had restricted the Breakfast to relations there would not have been enough accommodation in the Dining - Room at The Towers.
    The Church ceremony had therefore been followed by a Reception from which the Duke and his bride could escape in little over an hour.
    He had risen in the morning in a depressed mood which he could not shake off, even though he broke his rule of never drinking alcohol at breakfast-time.
    The brandy, good though it was, did not seem to alleviate his sense of being pressured into doing something he had no wish to do and also his apprehension about the future.
    When he entered the village Church to find it packed to over-flowing and stiflingly hot, he had an almost irresistible impulse to back out of what he told himself was a ‘mockery of a marriage’.
    It had been Clarice who had instigated the whole thing, and as he came from the vestry accompanied by his Best Man and she smiled at him from the fourth pew, he told himself he would willingly strangle her!
    She was looking inexpressibly lovely and he thought that it was most insensitive of her to be present at his wedding.
    Since she was a near-neighbour, it might indeed have caused comment if she had refused the Earl’s