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

Chapter 15

I have seen men frightened before. I have seen a man frightened of a horse, which is a healthy fear; I have seen a man frightened of the law, which is a mathematical fear; and I have seen a man frightened of a woman whose gin he has drunk, which is a coward’s fear.

I had never seen a man frightened like Mr. Prine that night — not of being caught, but of the thing that had been standing in front of him all along while he sold its hours for forty pounds and tried not to think about what it meant.

“Your grace,” he said. His voice came out like a hinge. “Your grace, you are—”

“Standing,” said the Duke. “Yes. Sit down, Mr. Prine, before you fall down, because I have questions and I would rather ask them of a man on a bench than of a man on the ground.”

The steward sat on the bench outside the tack room with the lantern at his feet and his hands on his knees, and he told us everything without being asked twice. That is the thing about selling your soul three times at forty pounds: you have already practiced the confession in your head four hundred times, and it comes out whole.

Three payments, one every five weeks, left in the feed room in an envelope under the sack of oats. Doors left unlocked. The day-book copied out — which nights the Duke slept badly, which days the physician came, which afternoons the household was out. The man who collected the envelopes never gave a name, but he smelled of lemon soap and was always careful to say the money came “from the solicitor’s office, for the arrangement of the estate.”

“Did you know about the rope?” the Duke asked.

Mr. Prine began to cry.

He did not wail; he leaked, quietly, the way an old bucket leaks, and he told us in pieces that he had not known — that he had begun the arrangement in June, that the accident was in August, that when it happened he had shut himself in his pantry and been sick, and that he had gone on taking the envelopes because stopping would have meant admitting what he already was.

“I did not know,” he said. “I swear it on my wife’s grave, your grace. I did not know before. But I knew after, and I took two more payments anyway, and that is the same thing.”

“Yes,” said the Duke. “It is.”

For a while there was no sound in the yard except the wind.

“Here is the arrangement,” the Duke said at last. “You will write down everything you have just told me, dated and signed, and you will give me the day-book, and you will keep every envelope that has not yet been collected, and you will tell me what else has been arranged for this month — because you are not a fool, Mr. Prine, and a man who is paid to report hours is usually paid to know the plan.”

The steward wiped his face with a handkerchief that had once been white.

“They mean to have him declared incapable,” he said.

I felt the ground shift under me.

“The solicitor in Welby has been instructed,” Prine went on, low and fast, “to prepare a petition for a commission of lunacy — that the injury to his grace’s back has affected his mind, and that he can no longer manage his affairs, and that a trustee should be appointed to hold the estate.” He swallowed. “And that the trustee named is Mr. Vane.”

The Duke said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “And the transfer of the canal shares.”

“To be signed first, this month, publicly, at the race — so that the county sees him sign, and so that the shares are out of the estate before the commission is filed and everything is looked at by strangers.” Mr. Prine raised his head. “They need him to be a broken, obedient invalid in front of two hundred witnesses. That is what the race is for. That is why Mr. Vane has been so eager for it. If your grace stands up in front of the county —”

“He does not need the estate,” I said slowly. “He takes the estate because it is there. What he needs is for no one to ever believe you.”

“Yes,” said the Duke. “That is exactly what he needs.”

He looked at me across the lantern, and I have never in my life seen a man so calm and so furious at the same time, and I thought about what it would cost to be him: three months in a chair, letting men discuss his lands over his head, letting his own steward sell his hours, and waiting, always waiting, because the one thing he could not do was stand up and be believed.

“Two days,” he said.

“Two days,” I agreed.

“Then we need the harness maker.”

“I will fetch him tomorrow.” I was already thinking: Welby market was on Thursday; Gidley kept a stall by the wool exchange; if I rode out at dawn I would be in the town before the carts came in. “And we need him alive, and willing, and sober.”

“Take money for his debts.”

“I will take money,” I said, “and I will take Empress, because her ladyship’s gray mare can find a man in a crowd faster than any dog, and because nobody in Welby will think twice about a stable girl on a countess’s horse.”

The Duke stood up. It cost him, and he did it without the cane, and Mr. Prine watched him do it with the expression of a man seeing a miracle and being ruined by it in the same instant.

“You will have the cottage at the north gate,” the Duke told him. “And your wages. And you will not be prosecuted, because my sister wrote that a frightened man is not a wicked one, and I have decided to find out whether she was right.” He picked up the cane at last. “But you will stand in front of the magistrate and say all of it, and you will not be given a chance to change your mind, and if you send so much as a note to Mr. Vane before Thursday, I will finish you.”

“I understand, your grace.”

“Go to bed.”

Mr. Prine went, and the lantern went with him, bobbing across the yard and out through the arch, and Cinder let out a long breath that turned to steam in the cold.

That one is finished, he said. Now the lemon man. Then the carrots.

I rode to Welby at first light with my hood up and the money in my boot, and I was at the wool exchange before the shutters came down, and I found the harness stall by the second aisle — the tray of buckles, the sign, the little stool with its worn seat.

There was no man at the stall.

There was no tray, either. Just the frame, and the sign turned face-in against the post, and a boy of about twelve leaning on the rail with a mouth full of bread.

“Where is Mr. Gidley?” I asked.

The boy shrugged and swallowed. “Gone. Yesterday evening.”

“Gone where?”

“A gentleman came for him in a chaise. Big thing, all shiny.” He chewed. “Gidley came back for his box and he was white as a fish and his hands shook, and he told my uncle he was finished with the leather trade and going to stay with his sister in the north.”

“Did he say where in the north?”

“Nope.” The boy looked at the empty stall with the disgust of a person whose wages have just evaporated. “He left the buckles, though. Every one. Said they were an insult to his profession.”