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

Chapter 9

We waited for the lantern.

Toby came back with two more and set them on the bench, and the Duke sent him to bed with the kind of order that expects to be obeyed, and Toby obeyed it, yawning, loyal, and improved by silence. When the stable door closed, there were three of us in that room: a duke in a chair, a horse trainer with burnt fingers, and a black stallion standing watch at the door of his stall like a soldier who had been told the war was not over.

“Under the left panel,” the Duke said.

“He says between the layers. Not under. Between.”

“Can you do it without destroying what is left?”

“I can do it without destroying anything.”

I took the saddle onto my knees and turned it over, and I worked by lantern light with a small knife and a smaller hook, the way my mother had taught me to pick a splinter out of a hoof. The Duke sat beside me and said nothing, but I could hear his breathing change when my blade touched a seam, and I understood that every sound of that leather opening was two years of grief splitting along a stitch line.

The lining was horsehair and linen, old work, a saddle made by a man in Barrowfield forty years ago and repaired twice. The searcher had gone through the padding from underneath, ripping the panels open, hunting a flat packet where a flat packet would ordinarily hide.

But this was not an ordinary saddle, and Adeline Thorne had not been an ordinary woman.

Stitch by stitch, I opened the left panel along the seam — and my hook caught on something that was not horsehair.

“Here,” I breathed.

The Duke leaned forward. Under the linen lining, between it and the outer leather, folded flat and sewn shut along the edge in small precise stitches as even as a row of teeth, lay a packet wrapped in oilskin. The person who had torn the saddle apart had gone at it from the wrong side and stopped an eighth of an inch short of it.

“She sewed it herself,” said the Duke. His voice had gone strange. “Look at the stitching. She did that. She used to mend her own gloves because the London seamstress pulled too tight.”

“Then she wanted it found by someone who would look properly,” I said.

“Or by someone who knows horses.”

I slid the little knife along the last six stitches, and the packet came free into my hands, warm from being under lantern light, and heavier than paper has any right to be.

The Duke reached for it and then did not. His hand stayed where it was, hovering over mine, the way a man’s hand hovers over a horse he is afraid to spook.

“Open it,” he said.

I opened it.

Inside the oilskin were three letters folded into quarters, a single page torn from a ledger, and something small and hard that rolled into the hollow of my palm — a brass token, no bigger than a shilling, stamped on one face with a wheel and a wave, and around the rim, in raised letters: HARROWMERE CANAL COMPANY.

The Duke picked up the token as if it were alive. He turned it over twice, and his mouth went flat and hard.

“That is not a coin,” he said. “That is a shareholder’s token. They were minted in the spring, for the men who bought in early. They exist in a set of forty, each with a number, and they were never sold to the public — only handed to the original subscribers, in London, in a room at the Harrowmere offices on the twenty-second of March.”

“And how would Corbin’s name be on the register?”

“It would not be.” He looked up at me. “It would be on my name, with my signature, and I was in Northumberland that month buying a pair of carriage horses from a man who can prove it.”

He unfolded the first letter.

Adeline’s handwriting slanted across the page, hurried and fine, the ink a little uneven where the pen had pressed hard. He read it in silence, and I watched his face in the lantern light, and I watched it go from grief to something colder and harder than grief.

Then he read it aloud, because I think he needed a witness.

Dear Rowan — if this reaches you, do not trust Corbin with any document that touches the Northern Canal. He and Cawthorne have borrowed against Ravensmoor land using your forged authority, and they have done it twice, and I believe they mean to do it a third time before the year is out. I have names, I have payments, and I have a witness — a harness maker from Welby who was paid to sign a false valuation, and who is frightened enough to talk if he is handled carefully. I am coming home in nine days. Keep this to yourself. Do not confront them until I am in the house. I fear they know that I have found it out.

He stopped. The paper shook slightly in his hand, and then he pressed it flat against his knee until the shaking stopped, because he was a duke, and dukes are taught to hold their grief the way they hold their wine — without spilling a drop in public.

“They killed her,” he said.

“Can you prove it?”

“Not with this. This proves fraud. This proves they borrowed against my name, and it proves my sister knew. It does not prove a wheel came off on purpose.” He folded the letter back along its creases, carefully, the way you fold a map of a country you cannot return to. “But it proves enough to block the transfer. It proves enough to make them frightened. And frightened men make mistakes.”

“They also make fires,” I said.

“Yes.”

Cinder’s thought came softly, from the stall door, and it was quieter than anything he had said to me before.

Sister smelled of apples. She came here one summer and put her hand on my nose and told me I was a good horse. Only one person has ever told me that. I bit the others.

I looked at the Duke. “He says Adeline smelled of apples.”

The Duke bowed his head, and for a while there was no sound in that stable but a horse breathing and a man not weeping, which is a different thing, and takes more strength.

When he raised his head, his eyes were dry and his voice had settled into something I had not heard from him before — the voice of a man who has stopped performing.

“We need one more thing,” he said. “A confession. Or a trap.”

I looked at the wheelchair he did not need to be sitting in, and the torn saddle, and the smoke stains on the whitewashed wall, and the three letters that had waited two years in the dark between layers of leather for someone to open them properly.

“Your grace,” I said. “I have a terrible idea.”

“How terrible?”

“It involves Cinder, Lord Cawthorne, your cousin, the tenants’ race in September, and me pretending to be far stupider than I am.”

In the stall, Cinder gave his approval at once.

I approve. Begin with carrots.