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

Chapter 8

The stable smelled wrong before I opened the door.

I caught it from ten feet out in the dark: sharp oil, smoke, and under those, fear — the low animal fear that runs through a barn the way water runs through a cellar. I had my hand on the latch when Cinder slammed the door of his stall, not in panic but in rage, a great flat crash of oak and iron that I felt in my teeth.

A small flame was crawling along the straw near the tack room, thin and yellow and businesslike, eating its way through the loose scatter of chaff that someone had laid in a line.

Someone had laid it in a line.

I did not stop to think about that. I grabbed the dipper from the water barrel by the door and threw it, then threw another, and shouted for Toby, who came stumbling down out of the loft half-dressed and swearing in three dialects.

Together we beat the fire out with sacks and water and boots and a wet horse blanket, and it took us eleven minutes, and when it was done the two of us stood in the dark, breathing hard, and looked at the tack room door.

It had been forced.

The lock was not broken — it was open, picked or unlocked with a key, and the hasp had been wrenched when whoever it was lost patience. Inside, saddles hung on their pegs in the rows like sleeping animals. Bridles, girths, martingales, the whole quiet treasury of a great stable.

One thing in that room was not sleeping.

The Duke’s old saddle lay on the bench where it had hung for two years, unused since the accident, and it had been cut apart. Panels ripped open, girth sliced through, stitching slit along the seat seam. Whoever did it had gone through it the way a starving dog goes through a bag of oats — fast, thorough, and without any idea what they were actually looking for.

Cinder’s thought came to me shaking with fury.

They look for papers under leather. Old saddle. Adeline hid things there. They did not find.

I turned cold from the inside out. “A-Adeline,” I said, too loud, and Toby looked at me.

“What?”

“Nothing. Wake his grace. Quietly.”

It was too late for quietly. The Duke came across the yard in his chair with his coat thrown over his nightclothes and his hair disordered, and he came fast, which meant that he had pushed the wheels himself over the gravel, and that his arms, at least, were stronger than anyone in that house believed.

Corbin was behind him.

He was the only person in that yard who looked as though he had slept. Hair combed, collar straight, boots clean, standing at the Duke’s shoulder with an expression of bright concern that had not one honest thread in it. He had been dressed before the fire was out. He had been dressed, I thought, before the fire began.

“What happened?” the Duke demanded.

“Small fire,” said Toby. “Tack room broken into. Someone’s been at your old saddle, your grace. Ruined.”

Corbin looked at the slashed leather with a slow, sympathetic horror that a theater manager would have paid for.

“How unfortunate. Perhaps a thief.”

Lemon, said Cinder, low and savage. Lemon in the room. Lemon on the door.

I smelled it too, then. Beneath the smoke and the lamp oil, thin but certain: lemon soap, clinging to the torn padding like a signature.

The Duke’s gaze met mine across the bench. Corbin saw the look — of course he saw it; that man saw everything that did not suit him — and his voice went soft and thoughtful.

“Miss Calloway. You seem remarkably present for every crisis.”

“It is a flaw, sir.”

“A habit. You rise when things burn.”

“I rise when things burn or when you light them.”

Toby stepped forward, loyal and slow. “She put it out, your grace. I heard her shout. She and me had it under in ten minutes.”

“After starting it?” Corbin asked, mildly.

The Duke’s voice cut across the stable like a whip through straw. “Enough.”

Corbin spread his hands. “Cousin, you must consider possibilities. A village horse trainer appears. She obtains private access to you. She hides behind curtains during business meetings. And now your tack room burns, and your saddle is destroyed. I raise the question because I must.”

“My tack room was searched,” said the Duke. “By whom? That is what I intend to discover.”

Corbin smiled sadly, the way one smiles at a difficult child. “You intend many things. Your condition makes execution difficult.”

Cinder bared his teeth at the stall door, and his suggestion arrived in my skull with the immediate, helpful clarity of a thrown brick.

Let me bite him. Small bite. Educational.

“No,” I muttered.

Everyone looked at me.

I coughed. “No one should stand in the smoke. It injures the lungs.”

Corbin’s suspicion deepened by one full degree, and he went back to the house with his clean boots and his clean conscience, and Toby went to fetch more lanterns because Toby understood, in the way of good grooms, when a conversation needed him to be elsewhere.

The Duke wheeled himself close to Cinder’s stall. The horse dropped his head over the door and breathed at him, once, long and steady, the way horses greet each other.

“Miss Calloway,” said the Duke quietly. “You said a name.”

I had hoped he had not heard. He hears everything. That was the whole trouble with him.

“Cinder said a name,” I said.

He went still. “Say it.”

“Adeline.”

The Duke closed his eyes. For a long moment, the only sound in that stable was horse breath and the tick of cooling ash.

“Adeline was my sister,” he said at last. “My elder sister. She died two years before my accident.”

I did not move.

“She lived in London for the last three years. She wrote to me — letters full of canal papers and ledgers and names, because I was the brother who read things. She told me she had found something in the Harrowmere accounts. Loans against Ravensmoor land, borrowed against my name, my signature, my authority, all of it while I was in the north country buying horses and knowing nothing. She said she had proof. She said she would bring it to me.”

His hand lay flat on the wheel of the chair.

“Her carriage overturned on the coastal road four miles from the London gates. The wheel came off. The coachman said the axle had failed. She was thrown clear and she lived three days and never woke properly, and I sat by her bed and she never once said a word to me.”

I wanted to touch him. I did not. That would have been a danger of a different kind, and the two of us were standing in enough danger as it was.

“She suspected my cousin,” he said. “She wrote it plainly. She said Corbin had forged my authority, that he and a man named Cawthorne had borrowed against Ravensmoor land to buy canal shares they could never have bought honestly. She had names, payments, and a witness. And then she had a wheel that came off.” He opened his eyes. “The proof was never found. In two years, no one has found anything. So I kept the saddle she had ridden, because I could not bear to cut into it, because it still smelled of her, and because I am a sentimental fool who would rather touch dead leather than hear a living truth.”

“It was foolish sentiment,” I said.

“Yes.”

“It may also have saved the letters,” I said, “if whoever searched tonight failed.”

The Duke looked at the ruined saddle — gutted, torn, worthless, lying on the bench like a dead thing. “Or destroyed them.”

Cinder shoved his nose hard against the stall door, and his thought arrived with the flat authority of a hammer on an anvil.

Not destroyed. Hidden deeper. I know my saddle. Humans make pockets badly. Under the left panel. Stitch smells like sister. Lavender ink. Salt. The one who searched tonight went under the leather, not between it.