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

Chapter 5

Breakfast at Ravensmoor Hall was a performance with food in it.

Lady Ottoline Thorne, the Duke’s aunt by marriage and widow of his late uncle, presided over the table with feathers in her hair large enough to influence weather, and she had decided that the proper way to mourn her nephew’s legs was out loud, repeatedly, over buttered toast.

“Poor Ambrose,” she said. “Poor, poor Ambrose. He was such an active boy. He rode to hounds at fourteen. Do you remember, Corbin? He rode to hounds at fourteen.”

“I remember, Aunt,” said the cousin.

That was the first time I saw Corbin Vane in daylight, and I understood at once why a horse would remember him by his hands. He was handsome in a damp sort of way — fair-haired, smooth-faced, always scented faintly of lemon soap, always standing a little too close to whoever was speaking, as if warmth were a resource he intended to intercept. He was also the kind of man who remembered everyone’s birthday and no one’s grief.

“Poor Ambrose,” Lady Ottoline said again, and ate one of his biscuits, which she had taken from the plate beside his chair. “Three months in that chair. It is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportion.”

“It is a tragedy of biscuits,” said the Duke. “You have eaten four of mine.”

“You see how he suffers,” she told the table.

I was not supposed to be at that table. I had been summoned to the breakfast room because a footman had been sent to the stable with the message that her ladyship wished to inspect the new horse girl, and at Ravensmoor Hall her ladyship’s wishes arrived with a timetable.

“You are very small,” Lady Ottoline informed me, “for a person who manages that dreadful animal.”

“Cinder, my lady, is mostly managed by agreement.”

“And what do you put in the agreement?”

“Carrots, and the promise not to insult his mother.”

She regarded me for a long moment, then nodded firmly, as though I had passed some examination she had invented on the spot. “Excellent. I distrust modern methods. The last girl used a whip and left in the night like a thief.”

“Left by the north lane,” said Corbin, gently.

The table went still in the way a pond goes still when a stone is about to be thrown.

“How interesting,” I said, “that everyone knows which lane.”

Corbin smiled at me. It was not a pleasant smile, but it was a well-made one.

“Miss Calloway,” he said, “you have advanced quickly. A village girl, taken into a duke’s stable.”

“Only from stable to breakfast room, sir. I hope to reach the music room by Christmas.”

The Duke coughed into his hand. Lady Ottoline turned to him with concern. Corbin’s eyes sharpened and then softened again, like a knife put back into a drawer.

The rest of the day belonged to Cinder, who had decided that I was his personal property and that Toby Rudd was an inferior servant who should apologize to onions. In the afternoon, the cousin came out to the yard and found the Duke sitting in his chair beside the paddock with the rug across his knees.

Corbin bent toward him, all solicitude.

“You must not overstrain yourself, cousin. Acceptance is the beginning of peace.”

Acceptance, said Cinder from the stable door, is what I practice when the oats are late. Push him into the manure. He is standing right there. One small shoulder. He would fit.

I was carrying a bucket, and the temptation was spiritual.

“Your wisdom comforts me,” said the Duke, with a thin smile. “As always.”

“I knew it would.”

He smells of lemon and rope, Cinder said. The rope was wet. River wet. Not rain. He came through the low meadow with the river in it and went up to the north lane and came back with mud on his boots and a face like a man at a funeral.

Corbin turned and looked at the horse. “That brute should be sold. He caused your injury.”

The yard went quiet. Toby stopped in the middle of a stride. The mare being led along the rail stopped because her handler stopped.

Cinder’s outrage hit my skull like a bucket of cold water. I saved him. Rope, blood, rain. I stayed.

My hands tightened on the handle.

“Cinder stays,” said the Duke.

The cousin spread his hands in the gesture of a man washing them without water. “Sentiment is dangerous.”

“So is standing behind that horse,” I said.

Corbin turned. “What?”

Cinder shifted one hind hoof, lazily, with the enormous unhurried decision of a door beginning to close. I smiled.

“He dislikes lemon,” I said.

For one half-second, before his face arranged itself, Corbin Vane looked at me the way a man looks at a loose thread on a coat he cannot afford to have unraveled. Then he stepped back, made a small joke about stable girls and superstition, and went inside.

The Duke watched every movement and said nothing at all.

That night the house went dark at eleven, the way great houses do — all at once, like a puppet show when the candles are put out and the puppets become furniture.

I went down the back stairs at midnight with my boots in my hand and the cold of the stones biting through my stockings.

The training ring lay silver and empty. I set two buckets beside the rail to mark the distance — six feet, then twelve — and waited.

He came at a quarter past. No wheels, no gravel, no warning. Just a tall shadow with a cane, moving slowly, breathing carefully, appearing out of the dark like a man stepping out of a wardrobe in a story.

“Miss Calloway.”

“Your grace.”

“Shall we begin?”

We began. Cinder stood lookout at the stable window, which he considered a great honor and a great burden and mentioned both at length.

Lift the left foot. No, the other left. That man should be labeled. The duke’s left foot is confused. Tell him.

“Your horse says your left foot is confused.”

“He may come and demonstrate.”

“He declines. He is busy being majestic.”

The Duke grunted and took another step. Sweat stood at his temples in the cold. I walked beside him with one hand ready under his elbow, keeping my mouth shut about the pain, because I had already learned that the pain did not want an audience, only a witness who would not flinch.

“You may mock me less,” he said.

“I could. But then you might think you are terrifying.”

“I am terrifying.”

“You are wearing a dressing gown and arguing with invisible commentary.”

His mouth curved: a temporary reduction in the terror of Ravensmoor Hall.

He improved by inches. Each night, three more steps than the night before. Each morning, he returned to the chair white with exhaustion and sealed inside his lie, and I began to understand what the lie cost him — not the ache in his back, but the way people spoke over his head, discussed his future, sold his canal shares, married off his lands, all while he sat politely with a rug on his knees, listening, storing, waiting.

Then, on the fourth evening, at dinner, Corbin said it.

“Lord Cawthorne arrives tomorrow,” he said. “He wishes to discuss the canal shares. He has been very patient with you, cousin. I have told him he may rely on me to handle the meeting.”

The fork in my hand stopped moving.

Bad man, said Cinder, from the stable, half a house away, his thought arriving as clearly as if he had put his head through the dining-room window. Rope and river. Bad buckles. Bad man.