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

Chapter 20

It had snowed all night, and Ravensmoor in the snow was a different country — pale, silent, with the ridge and the river merged into one long grey line and the trees standing around like patient witnesses.

Two horses were saddled at the yard gate. One was Empress, because Lady Ottoline had insisted for a fortnight that her gray mare needed exercise and would be insulted by anything less, and one was Cinder, wearing the old repaired saddle — the one that had carried a dead woman’s proof between its layers, stitched front and back now, oiled, mended by a Albury harness-maker who had been paid handsomely to say nothing about what he had been asked to repair.

Toby came out to hold the stirrup. He was pretending very hard not to cry he was pretending very hard not to cry about anything at all.

“Not far,” the Duke said, swinging up. It took him two attempts and a great deal of swearing under his breath, and Toby, wise man that he was, looked at the sky the whole time, and so did I.

“Not far,” I agreed.

“Not fast.”

“Your grace, that horse does not know the meaning of the word.”

I know the meaning exactly, said Cinder. I simply decline to be ruled by it.

We rode at a walk around the lower meadow with the snow coming down in flat quiet flakes and the hedges dusted white and the air so clean it felt like forgiveness, and I watched Rowan in the saddle the way I had watched him in the paddock on my first day, except that everything about the picture had changed.

He sat crooked. His seat was careful, his legs weaker than they had been before the accident and weaker than they would be in the spring, and his hands were the hands of a man who had learned, in three months of pretending, exactly how much of his weight a horse could carry without complaint.

But he was home. He was home in a saddle in a way he had never once been home in a chair.

Halfway round the meadow, Cinder sent me a thought full of pride, and it was so enormous and so gently meant that I had to bite my lip to keep it together.

There you are.

Rowan looked down at the black neck in front of him and put his hand flat on it, and said, “There you are, old friend,” and I turned Empress away so that neither of them would have to look at me for a minute.

Tell him he sits crooked, said Cinder.

“He says you sit crooked.”

“He is emotional and hiding it behind criticism.”

“That is exactly what I said.”

The horse flicked an ear, extremely pleased with himself.

No crowd watched us. No villain lurked behind a hedge. No newspaper would call it a miracle. Only a man, a horse, and a girl who could hear the things that love says when pride is too large to say them out loud.

We came back to the yard with snow on our shoulders, and Rowan refused help dismounting, and did it badly, and stood in the yard holding the stirrup leather with his teeth set, and I stood beside him with my hands behind my back and did not offer, because I had learned that too.

“Miss Calloway,” he said, when he could talk. “Come to the library when you have seen to him. There is a matter of business.”

The matter of business, when I got there, was a piece of paper on his desk with a solicitor’s seal on it and the words Terms of Appointment at the top.

I read it twice, and then a third time, and then I looked up.

“This is not a real occupation,” I said.

“It is now.”

“It says Equine Consultant to the Ravensmoor Estate. There is no such thing.”

“There is as of Monday.” He was standing by the fire with his hand on the mantel, which was where he stood now when he wanted to look as though he were not leaning on anything, and the firelight was doing to his face what firelight does to everyone’s face, which is to make the truth easier to look at. “Duties: to attend the stables, to advise upon the purchase and disposal of horses, to examine any animal involved in a matter of dispute on the estate, and to be paid two hundred pounds a year, with rooms in the east wing.”

“Rooms in the east wing. That is a family wing.”

“It is a wing, and it is east, and I am a duke and I may put a horse consultant wherever I like.”

I put the paper down on the desk because my hands were not entirely steady.

“Your grace—”

“Rowan.”

“Rowan.” The name still did that thing to the air. “You cannot simply promote a horse trainer in a courtship, because she heard your horse insult you and sat on a bucket with you in the dark. There have to be reasons. Things like—like rank, and fortune, and the fact that I can hear horses, which will be called witchcraft by four separate parishes before Easter—”

“I would argue there are worse foundations.”

“Name one.”

“Canal fraud.”

“That is not a foundation, that is a prison sentence.”

“Arranged dinners with my aunt’s friends for the rest of my life.”

“That is worse,” I admitted.

He came across the room slowly, and stopped a good two feet away, and did not reach for me. That two feet of floor between us was, I think, the most respectful distance any man has ever kept from me, and it did more damage to my common sense than any kiss could have.

“I am not grateful in the way that means loving,” he said. “I am grateful, yes. I am also annoyed, challenged, amused, humbled, and completely unable to walk into a stable without hoping that you will one day call me a bad decision with cheekbones.”

“I never said that aloud.”

“You said it in the yard in October, when you thought I could not hear you. I could hear you.”

“That is private medical terminology.”

“I treasure it.”

He reached out and took my hand — and then stopped, his fingers just closed around mine, warm and careful, and did not pull, did not presume, did not take one fraction more than was given.

“May I?” he said.

“You already have.”

“May I keep it?”

And that waiting — that quiet, patient, infuriating waiting — did more damage to my common sense than the whole of the autumn.

“Yes,” I said.

Our courtship was less scandalous than the county expected and more ridiculous than either of us feared.

He insisted on proper walks, which became improper, because on the long walks he sometimes needed to sit halfway, and when he sat, I sat beside him on the ground, which caused Lady Ottoline to announce at dinner that the two of us were communing with mushrooms, and that she intended to put it in a letter to her cousin in Bath.

He sent flowers. Cinder ate the note and part of the wrapping, and the Duke sent a second note, in which he had written only: He is a thief. You are a horse consultant of two hundred pounds a year. I remain, humbly, etc.

I sent him a peppermint in return, wrapped in a page from a veterinary manual, and he put it in the left-hand pocket of his coat, and Cinder tried to steal it within eleven minutes, which led to a long and complicated war of strategy that Rowan won only because he had thumbs.

At dinner, Lady Ottoline asked me whether horses commented on hats.

“Constantly, my lady.”

She touched her feathers. “What does Cinder think of mine?”

I looked through the window. Cinder was standing in the yard, perfectly visible, because her ladyship had that morning demanded that he be made available for consultation.

Nest for dramatic birds, said Cinder.

“His grace’s horse finds it memorable,” I said.

Lady Ottoline beamed. “I knew it.”

Rowan nearly dropped his wine.

There were difficult days too, and I want to be honest about them, because a story that ends in spring should not pretend the winter did not happen.

His pain came back in storms. Some mornings he could not stand at all, and the shame would try to creep into his face — the shame of a man who has learned to walk being seated again in front of the woman he loves — and I had to learn, slowly and badly, not to cheer him through it like a parade. Usually there was nothing to say. Usually the best thing was to sit nearby and mend a strap and let the silence be ordinary.

“You make room for ugly feelings,” he said to me once, on one of those mornings, with the snow against the window and the fire low. “Nobody else does. Everyone else tries to make me feel better, and it is exhausting.”

“Horses have many,” I said. “I have practice.”

My feelings are muscular, Cinder announced from the yard, where he had no business hearing anything. Not ugly.

“He objects to the adjective.”

“Of course he does.”

By February, the east wing rooms had been papered and the solicitor’s paper had been signed, and the county had mostly stopped calling me a witch, except for one parish that I considered a lost cause.

And one evening in the last week of February, I was in the stable checking Empress’s bridle, and Cinder began behaving strangely.

He pawed the straw. He tossed his head. And then he fixed his eye on the Duke’s coat pocket with such intensity that I stopped what I was doing and stared at him.

Do it now, Cinder said. Now, before she finds it and thinks it is a sugar lump and eats it.