"You sound," Sir Roland said at last, "very like Wren."
He did not say it as a compliment. Laurence found that he did not hear it as an insult, either.
V.
Thorne found her before she could go looking for him.
It was past four, and the light was going, the fog coming back in off the fields as the day cooled. She had spent the afternoon in the end box because there was nowhere else to be, mending a girth strap she did not need to mend, listening to the yard. She had heard the lads talking in lowered voices about the master's temper and the old gentleman's carriage, and a laugh, quickly stifled, and the word lass. She had heard Kit say, "Leave off, he's — she's all right," and a cuff, and silence. Nobody came near the end box. Then the half-door opened and it was Thorne, with a lantern in one hand and a can of tea in the other, and he set both down on the corn bin and looked at her.
"You'd best drink that," he said. "You've had nowt since five."
"Did he send you?"
"Nobody sent me." He lowered himself onto the edge of the corn bin with a grunt; his knees were bad in the wet. "I've known since your second day. You put a saddle on that chestnut filly like you'd been doing it since you could walk, and you set the girth one hole looser than any lad in England would, and then you went back after ten minutes and took it up. There's only one man ever taught it that way." He looked at her hands where they lay in her lap, the strap across them. "You've his hands. Long in the finger. I knew the first morning."
"Then why didn't you say?"
"Because I'm a coward," said Abel Thorne simply, "and I've been one since the twelfth of November last year, and I thought if I kept my mouth shut you'd find whatever you'd come for and go away, and I'd not have to."
The tea was strong and stewed and sweetened with treacle, and she held the can in both hands and did not drink it.
"Tell me," she said.
He told her. He did it slowly, with long pauses, looking not at her but at the brown horse, who stood with one hind foot cocked and his eyes half-closed, as if he too were listening.