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

Chapter 16

I found him with a horse’s help, which is the only way I have ever found anything worth finding.

The ostler at the Bell had a brown mare in the shafts of the fly that had carried Gidley to the crossroads, and she told me the whole story while I held her head and fed her a piece of apple I had been saving for Empress.

Fat man. Crying, a bit. He had a box and a coat with no lining and he kept saying he had done nothing wrong and then he kept saying he had. The gentleman told him he was going to his sister in the north and gave him an envelope and said if he came back to Welby he would be arrested for the valuation and hanged for the rest. She chewed. The gentleman was lying. Men who say “the rest” are always lying. The fat man got out at the crossroads and did not get on the stage.

“Where did he go?”

Toward the water. He asked me, actually. He put his hand on my neck and asked me if I would like to go and live in the north, and I said no, because I am a horse and I do not have opinions about counties, and he cried again and walked down the mill road.

The miller at Welby water-mill had a gray cob called Soldier, who was the most reliable witness I have ever interviewed, in that he was completely uninterested in the affair and therefore had no reason to lie.

Man in the loft. Third day. Eats bread, does not steal grain, which is more than the last one did. Cries at night. Terrible singing.

Gidley was sitting on a pile of empty sacks with his coat over his knees, and when I came up the ladder he went white and put his hands over his face, and I stood there in the dust and the smell of flour and said the only thing that could possibly have helped.

“Mr. Gidley. I am not a bailiff, I am not a constable, and I am not from Mr. Vane. I came to pay your debts and ask you to tell the truth in front of the county on Thursday.”

He looked at me between his fingers.

“You’re the horse girl,” he said. “From Ravensmoor.”

“I am.”

“She wrote about you.” His hands came down. He looked at me with red eyes. “The lady. Miss Adeline. Two years ago, in Welby, she sat on the bench outside my stall and bought a bridle she did not need and told me that if I ever found myself in a corner I should tell the truth, because the truth is the only thing nobody has thought to buy yet.” He started to cry again, which I had been warned about and was still not prepared for. “And I signed the paper anyway. In February. For eighty pounds and a debt forgiven. And I have not slept since.”

I sat down on the sacks beside him.

“I know what they paid you,” I said. “I know it because a woman who is dead found it out and wrote it down before they killed her. You are not the crime, Mr. Gidley. You are a man who signed a paper. The crime is what they did with it after.”

“Will they hang me?”

“No. You will be a witness, and witnesses are looked after, and your debts are paid — I have the money in my boot and I will do it in front of the bank clerk this afternoon. But first, you are going to come back to Ravensmoor with me, and you are going to stay in a place where nobody thinks to look, and on Thursday morning you are going to stand in a meadow in front of two hundred people and say the name of the man who put the paper in your hand.”

He looked at me for a long moment with the wet, exhausted face of a man who had spent three days in a flour loft deciding whether he was going to live.

“He said he would have me arrested for the valuation.”

“He can have you arrested for the valuation,” I said. “That is true. It is also true that I have a duke. You have been hiding in a mill for three days wondering which rich man is going to win. I am telling you which one is going to.”

We put him in the old ice house by the low meadow, because it was dry, it had a door with a bolt, and because I have a certain amount of spite in me that I do not apologize for.

The constable came to Ravensmoor Hall that afternoon, and he came about the miniature.

I was in the yard when he arrived — a broad, tired man named Pike with a war against paperwork — and I stood with Cinder’s head over my shoulder and watched him go into the hall, and I thought about how quickly a house can decide a person’s guilt and how slowly it decides to change its mind.

The mind was changed for me by a cat.

I have said that I hear horses. That is the whole of my gift, and I have been careful, my whole life, not to make more of it than it is. But a stable yard is a small kingdom and I have spent my life in them, and in a stable yard there are only two currencies: oats and cream.

Soot, the tack-room cat, had spent the night of the theft on the shelf above the boot room, and she was prepared to discuss it, for cream, at length, in the tone of a retired inspector who has been waiting for someone to ask the right question.

The one with the new boots. Up the back stairs at midnight. Down again with the linen square and something shiny. He put his hand over the silver so the candle would not catch it. Then he went out and washed his hands in the horse trough, which is an insult to the trough.

Porridge, the kitchen cat, required double cream and confirmed everything, adding that the man with new boots had also been in the pantry stealing cheese for three weeks and that she considered the whole household a disgrace.

I took it to the Duke, who took it to Lady Ottoline, who took it to the constable with the full authority of a woman who has been personally robbed and has decided to enjoy it.

The footman’s name was Ellis, he was nineteen, he had new boots and eighty pounds in a drawer, and he broke down in eleven minutes in front of a magistrate’s clerk, crying that he had only been told to move the picture from the morning room to the girl’s trunk, that he had been given the money by a man he did not know, that the man had smelled of lemon soap and had told him it was a joke that the family would thank him for.

He did not know the man’s name. Men like Corbin Vane do not give their names to nineteen-year-old footmen. And so the shadow slid off again, clean and unwet, and left behind it a weeping boy, a stolen miniature, and a lady’s maid who would never again touch another girl’s trunk without saying a prayer.

The miniature was put back in Lady Ottoline’s morning room. Lady Ottoline put Ellis’s wages in an envelope and sent him to his mother in Devon with a letter that I would very much like to have read. And I sat on the front steps that evening with the Duke beside me, in the chair, because he was tired and because the chair by then had become a piece of furniture rather than a confession.

“Two days,” he said.

“Two days.”

“Constable Pike tells me that a petition has been lodged in London on behalf of the family.” He watched the rooks going over the ridge. “A commission of lunacy. To be heard by the commissioners in a fortnight, upon evidence of my incapacity.”

“Upon evidence of your incapacity,” I repeated. “Which means they need you to be an invalid in public, on Thursday, in front of the county. They have stacked everything on that one morning.”

“Yes.”

“So we will give them a morning they will remember until they die,” I said.

The Duke of Ravensmoor looked at me, and I have to say, for a man who had just been told that his cousin intended to have him declared mad and his estate seized, he looked remarkably like a man looking forward to a race.