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

Chapter 6

Market day at Welby, and I was riding Lady Ottoline’s gray mare because her ladyship had decided that morning that Empress required a professional opinion about a new bit, and that Ravensmoor Hall required a professional opinion about nothing at all.

“He sulks when I use the curb,” she announced, from the top of the front steps, feathers nodding in the wind. “You will ask him why.”

“I will consult the animal, my lady.”

“Consult,” she repeated, with immense approval, as though I had used a word she had been saving for years.

Empress was a gray of seventeen hands with the soul of a duchess and the opinions of a magistrate. She carried me down the ridge at a walk that managed to suggest the entire county was late for an appointment with her.

The bit is fine, she informed me before we had gone half a mile. The hands are not. Her ladyship pulls left when she is nervous, and she is nervous when the vicar is watching, because she believes he counts her feathers. He does. Men have no interior life worth naming.

“Noted,” I murmured into the wind.

Also there is a stone in my left hind shoe that I have been carrying since Tuesday as a form of protest. You may remove it at the market.

Welby market was a stew of geese, cheese, wet wool, and gossip. I bought liniment, two pounds of nails, and a new girth strap, and I took the stone out of Empress’s shoe while she stood in the square like a monument to patience, complaining continuously in my head about the quality of the paving.

Then, as I straightened, she said it.

The blonde man.

I went still with the hoof pick still in my hand.

The blonde man from your house, Empress said, with aristocratic boredom. He came through the low meadow to the old ice house in July. He gave coins to the red-faced man. Then both of them complained about mud, which is a thing men do instead of thinking. They met twice. The second time they argued. The red-faced man wanted more and the blonde man wanted less. It was tedious. I was being exercised on the long rein and had no choice but to observe.

“The ice house,” I said. “By the river?”

Where else would one keep ice? You are not a clever girl, but you are a warm one. It is a fair trade.

“Did you see the red-faced man again? Anywhere?”

At this very market, three weeks ago, said Empress, and yawned. Selling harness. Bad harness. Buckles that insult the eye. I remember because he had the impertinence to look at my head and call it a good gray.

I found him an hour later: a stall by the wool exchange, a red-faced man with a tray of buckles and straps, shouting about prices. I did not speak to him. I looked at his buckles, which were, as promised, an offense, and I remembered his face, and I rode home with my heart going like a drum.

That evening I went to the library with a message from the head groom about shoeing, and I gave the Duke the news standing beside his chair with a folded paper in my hand as though it contained farrier’s complaints.

“A red-faced harness seller,” he said. “That narrows the field to half the county and most of the unpleasant parts of London.”

“Empress was very clear about the buckles.”

“Of course she was. I will add insulting buckles to the warrant.”

“Do not mock the witness.”

“I would not dare.”

He looked tired. Firelight gilded the hard line of his cheek and put shadows under his eyes. A lock of dark hair had fallen across his forehead, which made him look less like a duke and more like a man who needed someone to tell him to go to bed.

“You walked too much last night,” I said.

“You sound like my physician.”

“Then your physician is occasionally right. Do not tell him. It would ruin him.”

I tried not to smile. I failed.

The library door opened without warning.

I stepped back so fast I nearly knocked over a globe. Corbin Vane stood in the doorway, freshly brushed, faintly lemon-scented, his eyes going from me to the Duke and back again with the calm arithmetic of a man adding up a column of figures.

“Am I interrupting?”

“Yes,” said the Duke.

Corbin blinked. He had expected politeness — it was touching, really, how much villains depend on manners.

“Miss Calloway,” the Duke went on, “was reporting that Cinder’s near foreleg needs new shoeing.”

“A horse trainer reports in a library now?”

“I enjoy variety.”

Corbin smiled at me. It was not a pleasant smile, and it was not meant to be.

“You have advanced quickly,” he said. “A village girl in a great house.”

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

The Duke coughed into his hand. Corbin’s eyes sharpened.

“You are amusing.”

“Not intentionally, to you.”

“Careful, girl. Ravensmoor Hall can be unkind to servants who forget their place.”

The room changed temperature. I felt it on my arms first, the way you feel a storm before the rain.

“Miss Calloway’s place,” said the Duke, without raising his voice at all, “is where I ask her to stand. At present, that is here.”

The fire crackled. Corbin inclined his head a fraction of an inch, the exact amount a man can bow while keeping his chin up.

“As you wish. I came only to say Lord Cawthorne arrives this evening. He wants to discuss the canal shares.” A pause, carefully placed. “You may wish me to handle the meeting. Negotiations are tiring, and with your condition—”

“My mind is not in my legs,” said the Duke.

Corbin’s jaw flexed once. “Of course not.”

When he was gone, I let out the breath I had been holding since the globe.

“Breakfast room by Christmas,” the Duke said. “A modest ambition.”

“I am a modest woman.”

“Aim higher. The music room is drafty but respectable. You will begin training tomorrow.”

I laughed — a small one, badly disguised as a cough. That sound had become dangerous, and I knew it. Not because it was grand, but because it was quiet and real and seemed to belong, in some measure, to him. I had come to Ravensmoor to earn wages, not to notice the way a man’s face changed when he forgot, for one minute, to be lonely.

I told myself that every night. Every night I believed it less.

Lord Cawthorne’s carriage came up the drive at seven, and it was large enough to house a family of smugglers. From the stable yard, I watched it stop, and I watched the man climb out — a heavy red-faced man with white whiskers, a waistcoat the color of a boiled plum, and the confidence of someone who has never once been chased by geese.

In the stable, Cinder lifted his head from his hay and gave his verdict before the carriage door had even closed.

Hide behind the curtains, he said. Humans always hide there and pretend curtains are walls.