The Paralyzed Duke’s Horse Called Him a Liar—Only I Could Hear It

Chapter 12

Adeline Thorne wrote the way she must have ridden: fast, straight, and without any patience for the parts that did not matter.

To the girl who listens —

If you are reading this, then either I am dead or my brother has finally stopped being stubborn, and I am not certain which of those troubles me more.

You will not remember me. Do not pretend you do; I have no vanity about it. Four summers ago you took a bay mare off my hands at a village yard in Barrowfield and walked her over a bridge in an afternoon after three men had failed, and when I asked you why you had managed it, you said, “Because she told me.” I paid your mother, I tied my ribbon in your hair, and I drove away, and I have thought about that afternoon ever since. I have thought about it in drawing rooms, at dinners, in the offices of the Harrowmere Canal Company while men in good waistcoats explained to me, slowly, as to a child, why a woman need not trouble herself with a valuation.

Here is what I need from you, and here is why I am writing to you and not to a magistrate.

My brother’s name has been used to borrow money he never touched, and the men who did it have been careful, and careful men are never caught by lawyers. They are caught by witnesses. There is a harness maker in Welby called Gidley, a red-faced man with bad debts, who signed a false valuation because he was frightened and paid, and who will tell the truth if he is spoken to properly — by someone who understands that a frightened creature is not a wicked one. There is a day-book at Ravensmoor kept by a man who sells my brother’s hours. And there is a proxy document in London with a signature so like my brother’s that I sat and studied it for an hour before I found the flaw.

I will bring the papers home myself. Keep this letter. If I do not arrive, then someone decided that I should not.

One more thing, and I will be quick, because I have never been good at this and my hand is shaking, which is ridiculous.

Tell my brother that I was never angry with him. Two years of letters, and I never once said it properly. Tell him I was angry with the wheel.

And when you walk into that house, look at who moves first when a door opens. That is the one worth watching.

I do not know your name. I never asked it, which I have regretted for four summers, because a person who can hear what horses know should be asked her name before she is asked for anything. So I will call you what the mare called you when you had your hand on her neck and she finally put her hoof on the stone.

The one who listens.

A.

I read it twice. The second time, the words blurred, and I had to hold the paper away from me, which is a ridiculous thing to do with a letter and is what people do anyway.

“She thought about a bridge for four years,” I said.

“She thought about everything for four years,” said the Duke. “She wrote to me twice a month and never told me she was frightened. She told a stranger instead.”

“Not a stranger. She had decided what I was before she needed me. That is not the same thing.” I folded the letter along its creases. “She also told us who the third payment belongs to. ‘A man who sells my brother’s hours.’ She knew. She just did not know his name yet.”

“Mr. Prine.”

“Then we must buy him before he is paid to disappear.”

We sat in the stable until the lantern burned low and the sky over the stable roof went from black to grey, and we made the plan the way you build a fence — one post at a time, and none of them where a horse can lean on them.

The tenants’ race would be revived. It was less a sporting event than a controlled riot with ribbons: every September, farmers and grooms and the reckless sons of minor gentry raced around the lower meadow for a silver cup, bragging rights, and the chance to fall into the mud before witnesses. The Duke had cancelled it after his accident. Corbin had spent three months urging him to bring it back, because a man who revives the village’s amusement looks generous, and because a chair carried to a viewing platform is a very good way to remind the county who owns the land and who cannot use his legs.

He announced it at breakfast the next morning, and he did it beautifully — weary, gracious, and just reluctant enough to be believable.

“I have been thinking,” he said, over eggs he did not eat, “that the tenants have had a dull September. Let us have the race again. The trustees may arrange it. I shall attend, of course. I can hardly ride, but I can be carried, and I am told I look well in a chair.”

“You look tragic in a chair,” said Lady Ottoline, with her mouth full of his toast. “But reviving the race is very good of you, Ambrose. It gives the village something to talk about that is not your spine.”

Corbin’s face performed pleasure so well that I nearly admired it. “A capital thought, cousin. I will take care of the arrangements myself. Leave the details to me.”

“Thank you,” said the Duke. “I always do.”

Across the table, Corbin Vane smiled the smile of a man who has just been handed something he believes he has stolen. He did not know — could not know — that the whole of Ravensmoor Hall was at that moment moving into position around him like a fence being built in the dark.

I caught the Duke’s eye for exactly one second. Neither of us smiled.

That evening, Lady Ottoline’s morning room was found to be missing a small silver-framed miniature of the late Duchess.

The whole house turned upside down for it: footmen lifting rugs, housemaids opening cupboards, Lady Ottoline standing in the hall in her feathers announcing to anybody who would listen that she had kept it in that room for thirty years and would rather have lost her own hand.

I went to bed early, because the next night’s training would be hard on both of us, and slept for perhaps four hours.

I woke to a hand shaking my shoulder and a lamp in my face.

Lady Ottoline’s own maid stood over me, pale to the lips, with two footmen behind her and Mr. Prine in the doorway with the keys on his belt, and behind them all, standing in the corridor with his arms folded and his head tilted like a man listening for rain, Corbin Vane.

“Miss Calloway,” said the maid, in a voice she had clearly rehearsed. “Her ladyship requests that you open your trunk.”

“My trunk?”

“Someone,” said Corbin kindly, “saw you come down from the attics two nights ago with something in your apron. We are all obliged to be certain.” He smiled at me, and it was a good smile, warm and regretful, the smile of a man who hates to do this and will do it thoroughly.

“Open it, Miss Calloway,” he said. “Unless there is some reason you would rather not.”