She wanted to throw the can at him. She wanted to weep. She did neither. She sat with the tea going cold in her hands and looked at the old man's bowed grey head, and she found that what she felt was not one thing but several, knotted together and pulling different ways, and that none of them was the clean, hot certainty she had carried north in November.
"Will you say it again?" she asked. "Not to me. In front of a coroner. Will you say what you've just said?"
Thorne opened his mouth.
"He will," said a voice from the doorway, "and so will I."
The Earl was standing at the half-door with his hands on the top of it. She did not know how long he had been there. His face was white in the lantern light, and when he spoke again his voice was not steady.
"I've been trying all afternoon. Walking the Wold road. Standing at the pit. Nothing." He drew a breath. "Then Thorne said peppermint, and I had it. Not much. A voice in the fog, very close, and a smell of peppermint, and a hand on my wrist. Give it here, my lord. Give it here and walk. Follow the wall, it'll bring you to the gate. I'll fetch the horse." He shut his eyes. "I gave it to him. I remember the weight going out of my hand. And then I walked."
VI.
She went to him herself in the morning. She had decided it in the night, lying in the straw beside Absalom with her coat over her, listening to the horse breathe. She would not be fetched. She would not be found. She had been hiding for seven weeks and she was done with it.
The frost had come down hard before dawn and the fog had frozen on every surface it touched, so that the yard when she stepped out into it was furred white: the pump handle, the mounting block, the iron rings in the wall, the ivy on the clock tower. The sun was up behind the house and the towers stood black against a sky the colour of a pale yellow rose. She had no gown. She wore the olive waistcoat and the breeches and the boots, because they were what she had, but she did not put on the cap. She had brushed her hair with a dandy brush borrowed from the tack room until it crackled, and plaited it, and let the plait hang down her back.
Every lad in the yard stopped work to watch her walk to the arch.
Sir Roland was standing by his carriage. Hobbs had the pair poled up and blanketed; the old man had meant, she understood, to leave. He turned at the sound of her boots on the frozen cobbles, and saw her, and for a moment his face did something she had never seen it do. It opened. Then it closed again, and he was the magistrate.
"Harriet."
"Grandfather."