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she swung up into the saddle.
    ‘Fooled you,’ she told him, and Cuba laid his ears back and walked reluctantly to the gate.
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    ‘Out along the road and then along the riverbank,’ advised the groom. ‘Careful. They’re full of beans.’
    Cuba shied violently at a piece of blowing paper, looked back to see if his rider was still there, saw that she was and gave in, trotting amicably onto the verge and turning to await his stablemate.
    ‘How did you tame him?’ asked Lin Chung. He was keeping his seat with ease and Phryne saw that he was a good rider; light hands and confident balance.
    ‘I didn’t tame him – he isn’t tame. He’s biding his time. Come on,’ she saw a stretch of road, flat as a plate and grassy. ‘Let’s gallop.’
    She dug her heels into Cuba’s sides. He danced, complained, then put his head down and went like the wind. Lin galloped behind, admiring the grace of the flying horse and the rider, who had crouched down like a jockey, high on Cuba’s shoulders. They looked like the pen painting he had seen in Shanghai of the mongol invaders; man and horse melded into one.
    It was possible that Phryne never saw the obsta-cle. Cuba certainly didn’t. In one moment, the sepia Ming drawing of fleeting horse and rider was destroyed. Cuba crashed to the road on his knees, and Phryne was flung over his head.
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    CHAPTER THREE
    Great examples grow thin, and to be fetched away from the passed world. Simplicity flies away, and iniquity comes at long strides towards us.
    Epistle Dedicatory, Urn Burial, Sir Thomas Browne.
    LIN CHUNG leapt down and ran past the foun-dered horse to where Phryne must have fallen. He shoved aside the dense matted ti-tree, found a gloved hand and then a shoulder, and hauled.
    He gathered Phryne into his arms, feeling her over for broken bones. Both collarbones intact, and both legs and arms. He was stroking her hair away from her face, checking for fractures, when she sat up and said crossly, ‘What in Hell’s name happened?’
    ‘Cuba fell,’ said Lin Chung. ‘I thought you had been killed – you should have been – you fall like a cat, Silver Lady, like an acrobat. Where does it hurt?’
    ‘Everywhere,’ she groaned. ‘The secret of my 33
    miraculous survival is ti-tree. Great stuff. Help me up, Lin, and we’ll see to this poor hack.’
    With Lin’s arm around her, she limped back to Cuba, who was struggling to get up, nuzzled anxiously by the brown mare. Phryne called gently to the horse and he managed to regain his feet.
    Both his knees were bleeding.
    ‘Poor Cuba. What on earth made you fall?’ she took up each hoof in turn but there were no stones. Mopping at the horse’s knees with her handkerchief she stared at the wound, silent for a moment. Then she gave the reins into Lin Chung’s hand and said tautly, ‘Tie them to a fence and come and look at this. This isn’t a graze – it’s a cut.’
    Lin Chung looped the reins around a handy branch and did as requested. Cuba looked at him mournfully and he stroked his nose.
    ‘Surely caused by the fall?’ Lin Chung commented.
    ‘He fell on grass, soft – well, relatively soft, grass. Walk back with me – ouch! God, I hit the ground hard. I saw bloody stars.’ Lin supported her slight weight without trouble, feeling as anxious as the mare now licking at Cuba’s knees.
    ‘Look,’ she said. A long thin tarred wire stretched from one side of the bridle-path to the other. It had been secured from fence to fence until Cuba’s fall had broken it.
    ‘More rustic humour?’ asked Phryne, wincing as she straightened.
    ‘Has it been there long?’
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    ‘No. The wire’s new, not at all rusted, and it hasn’t had time to bite into the wooden fencepost. What a nasty little mind – I wonder whose it is?’ She coiled up the wire and stuffed it inside her shirt.
    ‘You’re shivering,’ said Lin Chung, embracing her more closely. She laid her face against his warm chest for a moment, then remembered