"You will catch your death, dressed like that."
"I've been dressed like this since October. I've not caught it yet."
Behind her she heard the house door, and footsteps on the gravel, and knew without looking that it was the Earl. He stopped some distance away. She was grateful for that. Thorne had come to the coach-house arch, as he had two mornings ago, and stood there with his cap in his hands.
"I am told," said Sir Roland, "that you have been sleeping in a hayloft among a dozen grooms."
"Eleven. And a boy. They snore, mostly. Nobody laid a finger on me, if that's what you're asking."
"It is not what I am asking. It is what the county will be asking, by Sunday." He drew a breath. "I have a chaise and a respectable woman waiting at the inn at Driffield. You will come with me now. You will go home to Hessle. We will say you have been staying with friends in the north. In time this will be forgotten."
"And my father?"
"Your father is dead, child."
"He was sober." She heard her voice ring off the frozen walls and did not lower it. "He was sober and he went out into the fog after a man who wasn't, and took the drink out of his hand, and sent him home, and went after his horse so nobody else would be hurt, and he died of it. And you knew. You had the flask in your drawer. You knew it was full. And you let twelve farmers in a back room call him a drunkard so that nobody would ask what the Earl of Brayford was doing on the Wold road that night. You did that, and then you sat across the table from me every evening for six months and passed me the salt."
The yard was utterly still. Somewhere a horse stamped, and the sound was enormous.
Sir Roland's face had gone the colour of the frost.
"Your mother," he said, very low, "died at thirty-one, in two rooms over a saddler's shop, coughing her lungs out. I offered to bring her home a dozen times. She would not come. Your father would not let her come."