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

Chapter 13

I opened the trunk.

There is no dignity in being searched, and there is less in watching it done, so I stood with my hands folded and my back straight and my face arranged into the flat, patient stillness I use on a horse that is about to do something stupid in a sale ring.

Lady Ottoline’s maid went through it item by item, laying each thing on the lid: two work dresses, a spare petticoat, a tin of hoof salve, a hank of twine, my mother’s thimble, two buttons from my father’s coat, a comb.

And, at the bottom, under the winter shawl, a small silver-framed portrait of a woman with dark hair and a steady look, wrapped in a square of clean linen.

The room went quiet. I heard someone breathe out, slowly, in the corridor — not shock. Relief. A man getting what he paid for.

“That is not mine,” I said.

Nobody answered, which is the particular cruelty of a search like that. A thing is in your trunk; therefore the thing is yours; therefore you are the thing.

“Where did you find it?” I asked.

“In her trunk, my lady,” said the maid, unnecessarily, because Lady Ottoline was standing in the doorway by then with her feathers drooping and her face like a woman who had just watched a dog she liked bite a child.

I looked past her at Corbin. He was standing with one shoulder against the door frame, and he was watching me the way a man watches a horse he does not trust to keep its footing — with the calm, proprietary interest of the person who laid the stones.

“I did not put it there,” I said.

“Of course not,” said Corbin, gently. “Nobody ever did.”

“Mr. Vane,” I said, “two nights ago I was in the stable putting out a fire that someone set in your cousin’s tack room. If I had wanted the miniature, I had a better night for it.”

“You had an excellent night for it,” Corbin agreed. “The whole house was out in the yard. Nobody was watching the corridors at all.”

Lady Ottoline made a small distressed noise. Mr. Prine studied the wall.

“Since the evidence is clear,” Corbin went on, “I do not think we need trouble the constable with it. The Duke is in a delicate condition; the county talks; a scandal in the servants’ hall is a scandal in the house.” He turned to Lady Ottoline with a modest bow. “Let the girl be dismissed quietly. That is the merciful arrangement, and it spares everyone.”

Dismissed. The word went through me like cold water down the back of the neck. Not accused, not tried, not even shamed — simply removed, in the middle of the night, before the race, before the trap, before the Duke could —

“Miss Calloway will not be dismissed.”

The Duke’s voice came from the corridor, and a moment later the chair followed it: he had come up from his rooms, at that hour, in his own house, in front of his own household, which he had not done in three months. I saw the satisfaction flash across Corbin’s face and vanish — because this, too, was useful to him. A crippled duke rolling out of his chamber at midnight to defend a horse girl accused of theft was a picture the county would enjoy for years.

“Your grace,” Corbin said smoothly, “the miniature was in her trunk.”

“So was the fire,” said the Duke. “You may recall that we discussed it in the stable, and that I found your reasoning there equally convenient.”

“I am only trying to protect your house.”

“You are trying to empty it of everyone who watches me.” The Duke’s voice was level, and the levelness itself was the frightening part. “Miss Calloway stays until the tenants’ race. She is the only person in this county who can manage my stallion, and I have other things to occupy me this month than finding another trainer.” He turned his head to Lady Ottoline, who was looking between the two of them like a woman watching a storm decide which field to ruin. “Aunt. The miniature is missing. That is a real wrong and I will find who did it. But it was not this girl.”

“How do you know?” Lady Ottoline asked.

“Because I know who else was in the corridors that night,” said the Duke.

It was reckless and it was a bluff, and it worked, because Corbin’s eyes moved — one quick flick, from the Duke to Mr. Prine — before his face smoothed over again. One flick. That was all. But I had my answer about who had gone into my room with a stolen picture and a square of linen.

Lady Ottoline, to her enormous credit and my eternal surprise, drew herself up to her full height, put her feathers back into some kind of order, and said, “Then the girl sleeps in the house tonight, and no one speaks of this until the race is over, and if any of you breathe a word to the village I will have your wages and your references, in that order.”

She swept out. The maid followed. Mr. Prine followed. Corbin stayed for one more second in the doorway.

“You have a friend,” he said softly, to me, so quietly that only I could hear it. “That is new for you, and charming, and it will not last. After the race, the county will have its scandal, and your duke will be alone in a chair again with nothing to look at but the woman who robbed him.” He smiled. “I hear Barrowfield is very pretty in the autumn. You should go back before the roads turn.”

He went down the stairs whistling, and I stood in the dark of my little room with my hands shaking and my trunk open on the floor, and I thought about a letter and a bridge and a woman who had said look at who moves first when a door opens, and about how the whole of the last four years had been arranged around this house like a horse around a bad saddle.

Then I looked at the Duke in the corridor and said, “Your grace. We have a problem.”

“I know.”

“No. You have a worse problem. If they will search my trunk, they will search your study. Tonight. They cannot let a stolen miniature be the only thing found in a search — they need a second proof, something with your signature on it that they can say I stole. And you have letters from Adeline in your coat, and a ledger page, and a canal token, in a study with a door that a steward can unlock.”

The Duke of Ravensmoor looked at me for a moment, and then he swore, very quietly, in the way of a man who has just watched the fence he built in the dark get leaned on by a horse.

“Get the packet,” he said. “Now.”