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

Chapter 4

“Do you have a cousin named Corbin?”

The Duke went very still. It was not the stillness of a man surprised. It was the stillness of a man who has spent three months learning exactly how much he may move without giving himself away, and who has just heard something that makes restraint expensive.

“Yes,” he said.

I stepped back. His arm was still across my shoulders, and so we ended up caught in a ridiculous embrace under the moon, with scandal on one side of us and horse testimony on the other.

“Does he use lemon soap?”

His eyes changed. Grey eyes, guarded like a winter scene seen through glass — and now something behind the glass moving.

“How do you know that?”

“Your horse knows things,” I said.

He did not laugh. “Explain.”

So I told him the truth, because some lies are smaller than the danger standing around us, and because I had been carrying that truth alone since I was six years old, and my arms were tired.

“I hear them,” I said. “Animals. Horses, mostly. Horses clearly. Cows are the most philosophical, if you are curious. Goats are impossible — every goat I have ever met is a lawyer. Chickens are interested only in murder and crumbs, so I ignore chickens.” He was staring at me. I kept going, because stopping would have been worse. “I have heard them since I was a child. I learned to hide it before I learned to read, because people call it witchcraft, and witchcraft in this county mostly means knowing which man stole the oats and which woman’s mule has opinions about her gin.”

I finished. The rain tapped the fence rail between us. Somewhere in the stable, Cinder shifted his weight and let out a long breath that sounded like a man settling into a chair.

The Duke looked toward the stall window. Then back at me.

“He called me a liar,” he said. “Several times. Anything else?”

“He criticized your walking.”

“Naturally.”

“He mentioned your peppermints.”

The Duke closed his eyes. “Traitor.”

“He says if you share them, he is willing to negotiate.”

The laugh broke out of him before he could stop it — rough, surprised, and gone almost at once, swallowed by the pain that lived in his back like a tenant who never paid rent. But it had been real. Real and undignified and entirely at the expense of a horse’s opinion of his coat pocket. It was the first honest sound I had heard in Ravensmoor Hall, and I have never forgotten it.

Then his right leg failed.

I caught him. Again. My third catch of the night, and by then my shoulder had learned the shape of his weight.

“This is becoming a habit,” I said.

“A humiliating one.”

“Good. Humility improves the upper classes.”

He leaned on me, breathing hard. When he spoke again, the amusement was gone.

“Miss Calloway. I need help.”

“You have grooms. You have a physician. You have an aunt who calls you poor Ambrose ten times an hour.”

“My physician cannot come at midnight without raising questions. My grooms are loyal and cannot keep their faces quiet. My aunt believes a firm mattress and prayer will mend a spine.” He looked at the fence rail, at his own useless feet, at the dark house on the ridge with its tall windows and its quiet corridors. “I need someone to walk beside me. And I need someone who can hear what the horses know. There is an animal in this county that has seen something I need, and I cannot interrogate a stable.”

I should have said no. Any sensible woman would have said no. I was hired to brush a stallion, not to hold up a duke in the rain, not to keep secrets that could get a stable girl buried in an unmarked grave beside a north lane. My mother raised me to keep my head down and my hands gentle and my mouth shut.

“All right,” I said.

That was how I became, secretly and unofficially, the Duke of Ravensmoor’s horse interpreter. It would ruin my sleep, my knees, and any remaining belief I had that great houses were full of sensible people. I do not regret a single night of it.

At the edge of the yard, where the gravel gave way to the path, he stopped and said, “One more thing, Miss Calloway. If my cousin ever asks you what we discuss at night, tell him I complain about my legs.”

“Why would he ask?”

The rain had thinned to a mist. He looked at the house, and I looked with him.

“Because he asked the last one,” he said.

And there, at the dark window on the second floor, a curtain moved.