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

Chapter 14

We went to the study at half past one, and the house was at its worst — all the doors breathing quietly, all the corridors full of the small noises that a person only hears when she has no business being there.

The Duke led. Not in the chair: on his feet, with the cane, in the dark, and it cost him, and he did it anyway, because the study was on the ground floor and the chair made noise on the stone flags and he had decided, somewhere in the last hour, that he was finished with being carried anywhere in his own house.

I followed with my boots in my hand.

The study door was locked, which meant nothing at all, because the Duke had a key to it, and because for three months a steward with a brass ring had been unlocking whatever was asked of him. Inside, everything was exactly as it had been: the fire banked, the desk square, the ledgers in their shelves, the smell of leather and cold ash.

The packet lay where he had left it, inside the drawer of the writing desk under a box of sealing wax. Untouched. It had not occurred to them yet to search his study, or if it had, they were waiting for a more convenient night. Either way, we had won the race by a few hours, and I did not intend to run it again.

“Where?” he whispered.

“Not in this house.”

“I have a strongbox at the bank in Welby.”

“The bank opens at nine and Mr. Prine has the account book, and Corbin can guess a bank before he can guess a stable.”

He thought for one second. Then he said, “The saddle.”

We put the packet back under the left panel of a ruined saddle in a burning-straw-smelling tack room in a stable with a stallion in it, and I stitched the seam shut with my own needle and salting thread while the Duke held the lantern, and Cinder stood over us both like a foreman.

Better, the horse said. He will never look there again. Men never look twice at a thing they have already destroyed. That is the whole of their character.

“He approves,” I said.

“I am relieved.” The Duke straightened, and hissed between his teeth, and stood still a moment while the pain moved through him the way weather moves through a house with a broken window. “Walk with me.”

“Your grace, you have been on your feet for an hour.”

“I have been on my feet for an hour,” he said, “and I have not been on my feet for three months, and I am going to walk to that ring and back if it kills me, which it will not, because my physician is a pessimist and my horse trainer is worse.”

So we walked out to the training ring in the dark, and Cinder stood lookout at his window and insulted us both in perfect detail, and the Duke went around the ring twice with his hand on the rail, breathing hard, sweating in the cold, and on the second circuit he did not hold the rail at all.

I said nothing. There are moments with horses when praise ruins everything, and there are moments with men when it does the same.

Afterward we sat on the upside-down water bucket at the ring’s edge, side by side, the two of us and the moon, and he said, “Miss Calloway. Wren.”

It was the first time he used my name, and it did something to the air between us that I have never been able to describe to anyone, except that it felt like a gate opening in a field where you had not known there was a fence.

“Your grace.”

“Rowan,” he said.

I looked at him. His face in the dark was not the pale tragic face of the chair, and it was not the cold face he used on visitors. It was the face of a man who had been holding something up for a long time and had just decided, for one minute, to put it down.

“I know the difference,” he said, “between gratitude and affection.”

“Do you?”

“I have had three months of the first from every soul in this county, and I know its smell. It is like cold soup. It is served politely.”

“And what do you think you have from me?”

“I do not know. That is why I am sitting on a bucket at two in the morning with a horse trainer instead of sleeping like a sensible invalid.” He looked out at the ring, at the two hundred yards of ground he had crossed without the rail. “I know that I am a duke who pretends to be more broken than he is, hiding letters in a saddle, and taking legal counsel from a stallion. I am aware that this is not a foundation.”

“There are worse,” I said. “Canal fraud. That is not a foundation; that is a prison sentence.”

He laughed — quietly, carefully, the same rough surprised sound as the first night, and this time he did not swallow it as fast. “You are the only person in England who speaks to me as though I were a man.”

“You are mostly a man. You are sometimes a chair.”

“Wren.”

“Yes.”

“I would like,” he said, “to hear you say my name.”

And I was about to say it, I truly was — I had it in my mouth, and my heart had already written a pamphlet about it, and the two of us were sitting so close on an upside-down bucket that it would have taken a very determined horse to separate us —

— when Cinder’s thought came through the dark like a hammer on a barrel.

Man in the yard. Keys. Lamp. Move.

I was standing before I knew it. The Duke rose beside me, and this time he did not stumble.

A lantern was moving along the stable wall, low and unhurried, the way a man walks who has every right to be where he is: through the arch, past the feed room, toward the tack room with its broken door and its hasp that would not close, carrying a lamp in one hand and a brass ring of keys in the other.

Mr. Prine.

He stopped at the tack room door and looked at it for a long moment, and then he did a strange thing. He unlocked the door, went in, and shut it behind him. The lantern light glowed through the cracks in the boards, and I heard the small sounds of a man moving boxes.

“Your grace,” I whispered. “He is searching the tack room. They know about the saddle.”

“Then he is too late.”

“He will see the new stitching.”

“Then,” said the Duke of Ravensmoor, “he shall see something else, too.”

And he walked — straight, silent, without the cane, across twelve feet of open stable yard, past the water barrel, past the arch, into the light of the open tack-room door, and stood there in front of a servant who had known him since he was a boy.

Cinder’s thought followed him with enormous satisfaction.

Finally. Someone is standing up in this house.

The tack-room door opened. Mr. Prine came out with the lantern swinging in his hand, and stopped, and stared, and the keys dropped off his ring onto the stones one at a time, scattering like coins.