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

Chapter 18

The meadow fell silent so suddenly that even the wrong-way pony seemed embarrassed.

Rowan Thorne, Duke of Ravensmoor, stood on the boards of his own viewing platform with his sister’s papers in his coat and three months of the county’s pity falling away from him like a rug thrown to the ground. His legs shook. I saw that from twenty feet, and so did everyone else, and I have never cared less about a thing in my life. He stood tall enough for every soul in that meadow to see him over the heads of the crowd, and then he reached out and seized his cousin by the wrist.

“Your hands,” he said, “are on my chair.”

Corbin’s mouth opened and shut. Somewhere in the crowd a woman screamed, and then a man’s voice, hoarse with delight and disbelief, shouted the words that would be printed in the county paper under the headline THE DUKE WHO ROSE.

He can walk.

Cinder came to a halt beside the platform, blew out a long breath through his nose, and tossed his head with the profound smugness of a creature whose testimony has just been vindicated in open court.

Told you. Liar.

I laughed.

I want to be honest about this, because it was not a dignified thing to do. There was a man who had tried to murder a duke, a fraud of nineteen thousand pounds, a dead woman’s letters, and a table full of forged paper, and I stood in the middle of the meadow with the mud on my boots and laughed until I had to hold on to the fence. It came out of me like a cork out of a bottle.

Rowan looked at me. Then — with his cousin’s wrist still caught in his hand and two hundred people staring at his legs — he laughed too.

That ruined Corbin more than any accusation would have. He had planned for fear, for pity, for confusion, for a weeping invalid and a sympathetic county and everything going quietly according to plan. He had not planned for a duke and a horse trainer laughing in a meadow because a horse had been right.

“It is not what it looks like,” Corbin said.

“It looks,” said the Duke, “like a man who has been paying forty pounds an envelope to my steward for three months, and whose hands were on my chair when it tipped.” He turned, and I saw the strength go out of his right leg and felt my own body twitch toward him — but he caught the rail of the platform with his free hand and did not fall, and the crowd saw it, and the crowd saw him decide not to fall, which is a different and better thing than not falling. “Constable Pike.”

Lord Cawthorne had not waited. He had the folder under his arm and he was moving through the crowd toward the lane where the chaises stood, using the confusion the way a rat uses a hole, and it might have worked — people were milling, the race was ruined, the whole meadow was a stew of shouting and hooves and Lady Ottoline demanding to know whether anyone had seen how gracefully she had managed not to faint.

But between Lord Cawthorne and the lane stood a black stallion with a white star on his forehead and no lead rope at all.

Cinder stepped sideways, planted himself, and looked at the red-faced man with the flat, unhurried authority of a wall that has decided it dislikes criminals. He did not bite. He did not rear. He stood, sixteen and a half hands of opinion, and Lord Cawthorne — who had arranged a rope across a lane to bring a man off a horse — stopped dead in front of an animal that was simply not moving.

No, said Cinder.

Wexom… Cawthorne stood there with the folder in his arms, and then Constable Pike arrived at a heavy, unhurried trot with mustard on his cuff from a meat pie and duty in his expression.

Mr. Prine came forward with the day-book, holding it in both hands like a man carrying a church plate. Gidley was brought out from behind the oak tree, sobbing and steady by turns, and told the magistrate’s clerk about the valuation, the eighty pounds, and the man who had put the paper in his hand, and he named Lord Cawthorne and did not once look at Corbin Vane, which was the only detail anybody in the meadow got wrong all afternoon.

The constable took the folder. The constable took Corbin Vane’s arm. Corbin looked at his cousin standing on the platform, and his face did something I have never seen on a face before: grief, for a moment, real grief, as though some part of him had genuinely loved the boy he had grown up with and had spent two years selling an eighth of an ounce at a time.

“You deceived us,” he said.

“Yes,” said the Duke.

“For three months. You sat there—”

“I learned from experts.”

The crowd murmured, which is what a crowd does when it has just heard something it will repeat for the rest of its life.

Lady Ottoline fainted into a chair, woke up immediately, and asked whether anyone had seen how gracefully she fell.

I walked Cinder back across the meadow with my hand on his neck, shaking, because my knees had waited politely until the danger was over and had then become entirely useless. At the fence, the horse lowered his head and pushed his nose into my shoulder — the same shoulder I had used for three months to guide his turns and hold up his duke — and I put my arms around his neck and stood there with my face in his mane while he told me, in the mildest thought I had ever had from him, that I was a good girl and a terrible trainer and that my laugh was honest but I should work on it.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

Rowan heard, twenty feet away, in the middle of papers and constables and scandal. He looked over, and his gaze found mine, and he took one step toward me without the cane and then another, and each step cost him and I saw the cost and so did everybody else, and he did not stop.

“Miss Calloway,” he said, loudly enough for the county to hear, “I owe you my life.”

That was too much. Too public, too dangerous, too much of a promise made in front of two hundred people who would repeat it at every dinner table from Welby to the coast.

“Your grace,” I called back, “you owe Cinder peppermints. I was only assisting management.”

The crowd laughed. Rowan laughed with them. And Cinder, standing beside me with his nose in my hair, gave his judgment with immense satisfaction.

Finally. Someone understands rank.

It was over. It was finished. Corbin was in a cart with a constable, Lord Cawthorne was in another, Gidley was being fed bread and tea by the women of the village like a hero out of a song, and the whole thing had come apart in eleven minutes.

Or so we thought, that bright windy afternoon, standing in the mud with the ribbons trampled around us.

Corbin said one thing as they put him in the cart. He said it quietly, to his cousin, past the constable’s shoulder — the way a certain kind of man always keeps a last knife for the people who love him.

“You have caught the hand, cousin.” He smiled. “Nobody ever asks about the arm.”