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

Chapter 7

I spent ten excellent minutes that evening as a woman behind a curtain with a coal scuttle and no dignity whatsoever.

Cinder had been right, as he never tired of pointing out afterward. The drawing room had a long window and heavy drapes, and the fire needed tending, and nobody questions a maid with coal. So I became a maid carrying coal. Then I became a maid adjusting the fire screen. Then I became a woman standing very still behind the deepest fold of the curtain, holding my breath and my scuttle, while the fate of the Northern Canal shares was discussed four feet away from my left ear.

Lord Cawthorne’s voice filled the room the way water fills a boot.

“Your cousin assures me the shares may be transferred despite your sad incapacity.”

The Duke’s answer came cool and unhurried. “My sad incapacity has not signed anything.”

Corbin chuckled, warm and easy. “Ambrose, we have discussed this. Cawthorne can manage the canal works far better than you can from a chair.”

“Have we discussed it? I recall you discussing it near me. That is a different thing.”

Behind the curtain, I grinned into the dark.

“I cannot delay,” said Cawthorne. “The investors dislike weakness.”

“Then they must avoid mirrors.”

The huff became a wheeze. Papers rustled — a folder being opened, the sound of a man who has brought his own version of the truth and intends to leave it on the table like an unpaid bill.

Then Cinder’s thought punched through stone, courtyard, and window glass, faint but perfectly clear.

Lemon man smells of rope. Cawthorne too. Rope and river mud. Bad buckles. Bad man.

I went rigid.

I found the gap in the curtain with my fingers and looked through it, and there he was: Cawthorne leaning over the Duke’s chair, one hand braced on the arm of it, his cuff riding up his wrist. On that wrist was a red cord bracelet, cheap and bright, tied with a small brass buckle shaped like a hook.

Insulting buckle, said Empress, from the stable, in a tone of profound vindication.

The coal scuttle betrayed me with a clang.

Silence. The kind of silence that has its coat on and is waiting at the door.

Corbin crossed the room in four strides and yanked the curtain aside, and there I stood with my scuttle raised like a weapon, wearing the expression of a woman who had recently become interior decoration.

“Miss Calloway,” said Corbin, softly. “How curious.”

“I asked her to tend the fire,” said the Duke.

“Behind the curtain?”

“Draft,” I said.

Lord Cawthorne stared at me with small pale eyes set in a large red face. “Ambitious draft.”

The Duke made the smallest sound. Corbin heard it — I saw him hear it, saw the flush climb his neck — and something in his face gave up playing host and put on its working clothes.

“Leave,” he ordered.

I looked at the Duke. He nodded once.

His eyes told me he had understood enough. So I left with my cold scuttle and my heart going faster than any horse I have ever trained, and behind me the door closed with the soft finality of a coffin lid being tried for size.

I did not sleep. I sat on the edge of my narrow bed in the attic with the shawl around my shoulders, cataloguing sounds the way I catalogue a strange horse: the wind in the eaves, the tick of the clock, the creak of a settling house, the distant clatter of a pan in the kitchen. At midnight I heard nothing from the ring. No cane on gravel. No shadow with a dressing gown and a temper.

He did not come. Corbin had seen to that — some new errand, some cousinly concern, some lock quietly turned.

I was still awake at one when the hooves started in my head.

Not a lecture. Not an insult. Fear — pure and jagged and unmistakable, thrown at me from across the yard.

Danger. Stable. Now.