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“Right.” Given that Sam and Will were riding without helmets, it should not have come as a surprise that she would be too. It was no wonder that the life expectancy in this century was so low.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
She wanted to say yes. Half an hour ago, she’d thought she was. But now that the stablehands were leading Sam’s and Will’s ponies toward the nearby building, her nervousness was increasing.
“How will this work exactly?” she asked.
“As soon as the ponies are restabled, the stablehands will bring out Belle. Miss Tomlinson will take the boys back to the house, and we shall focus on the basics of mounting and walking the horse. When you feel sufficiently comfortable in the saddle, I shall have my horse readied, and we can take a short ride together.”
When, not if. Isla swallowed. Lord Bancroft had considerably more confidence in her ability to pick up the necessary riding skills than she did. “I’ll do my best.”
He smiled. “Of that I have no doubt.” He paused. “Tell me, these cars that you claim you drive, was it a hard skill to learn?”
“I suppose so.” Isla thought back to her first driving lesson with her father. “Timing depressing the clutch with releasing the break or pressing the accelerator was tricky. And I shifted into the wrong gear more than once, which stalled the car.”
“You see,” he said, “if our roles were reversed, even after you had broken down the most basic instructions into language I understood, I would surely struggle to make the vehicle move.”
“Are you trying to make me feel better about not knowing what to do on a horse?”
He did not answer. Instead, he offered her his arm. “May I make a prediction, Miss Crawford? I would hazard a guess that once you have a feel for the horse’s gait, you will fall in love with riding.”
She set her hand on his sleeve. She wasn’t trembling quite as much as she had been moments before. “Can I make a prediction too?” she asked. “If you were to ever get into a car—especially a nippy little sports car—you’d figure out how to operate it in record time, and you’d drive it very fast.”
He laughed. “I rather like your prediction.”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling at the thought. “Me too.”
“Impossible,” Miss Crawford said, eyeing Belle as though he’d just told her that mounting the horse would take her back to the twenty-first century.
“I assure you it is not,” Simon said. “There are countless numbers of young ladies who successfully ride sidesaddle every day.”
“I’m sure there are,” Miss Crawford said. “It’s not the sidesaddle I have an issue with. It’s getting on it with these enormous hoops under my skirt.”
Simon shifted uncomfortably. He had never considered how ladies managed their farthingales when using a sidesaddle, but he had no desire to discuss the complexities of a lady’s underwear in front of a stablehand. “Ezra will hold Belle steady,” he said, “and if you will allow me, I can help you into the saddle.”
Her gaze shifted from the patiently waiting horse and stablehand to her wide skirts. “Will you give me two minutes?” she asked.
“Give you two minutes?”
“Yes.” She lifted the hem of her offending skirts and ran past the door to the stables. “And don’t let anyone come behind the building until I come back,” she called.
Simon ran his hand across the back of his neck. Blast it all, trying to understand this woman was like trying to make sense of a butterfly’s flight path. Just when he thought he understood what she was about, she took off in a completely different direction. Should he dismiss Ezra and continue this ill-fated riding lesson alone? At this rate, he and Miss Crawford would spend the entire morning discussing the difficulty of sitting upon a sidesaddle rather than actually riding a horse.
“Are you needed in the stables, Ezra?” he asked.
“It’s all right, m’ lord,” the lad said. “Duncan’s takin’ care o’ the ponies. ’E knows t’ bring Blaze out when ’e’s got ’em settled.”
“Very well.” They would wait Miss Crawford’s allotted two minutes, and then he would go after her.
He heard her running footsteps moments before she appeared around the back of the stables.
“I’m sorry for keeping you waiting,” she said, her blue skirts billowing loosely around her legs as she slowed to a walk. “I’m ready now.”
He stared at her. “What did you do?”
“Took off the farthingale.” She said it as though she’d simply taken a pin out of her hair. “I left it under the bush behind the stables. I’ll pick it up again before I go back to the house.” She set her focus on the sidesaddle. “If you tell me what to do, I think I can manage to sit on the horse now.”
Counting his lucky stars that Miss Crawford had not also hiked her skirts to her knees, and that Ezra was the only other witness to her unconventional approach to a riding habit, Simon pointed to the pommel atop the sidesaddle. “Your right leg will hook around the pommel to anchor you to the saddle. Although both legs will be to one side of the horse, you will be able to face forward.” This saddle was an improvement over the traditional sidesaddle with a wooden platform for the ladies’ feet that had been commonplace before Queen Elizabeth’s reign, but as far as Simon was concerned, there remained significant room for improvement.
