VII.
The coroner, Mr. Septimus Greaves, was a thin and careful attorney who had been elected by the freeholders of the East Riding eleven years before and had not, in all that time, received a sworn statement from a peer confessing to drunkenness. He read it twice in his chambers at Beverley, while the Earl sat across from him and Thorne stood by the door turning his hat, and then he took off his spectacles and said, "My lord, you understand what you are asking me to set in motion."
"I do."
"The King's Bench does not quash an inquisition lightly. It will take weeks. Perhaps months. And it will be talked of."
"I imagine it will."
Mr. Greaves looked at him for a long time. Then he put his spectacles back on and reached for a fresh sheet of paper.
It took six weeks. They were the strangest weeks of Harriet's life.
She could not go on sleeping in the loft; the whole yard knew, and the whole village by Sunday, exactly as her grandfather had said. Mrs. Pollitt, the housekeeper, a broad, silent widow from Bridlington who had known Samuel Wren for four years and liked him, came down to the yard on the second evening, looked Harriet up and down, and said, "You'll have the room off mine, and you'll have my niece's grey stuff gown till we can do better, and you'll not argue." Harriet did not argue. She wore the grey gown to the servants' hall at meals and to chapel on Sunday, where the whole parish turned to look at her. She wore breeches in the yard, because there were horses to be worked and nobody else could do anything with Absalom, and after the first week Thorne stopped pretending not to see.
She did not take wages. The Earl offered them, through Thorne, and she sent back word that she would not be paid by a man who was a witness in her father's cause. He did not offer again. But on the Monday of the second week a bundle came down to Mrs. Pollitt's room from the house: her father's things, which had been packed in a box in an attic since November. His good coat. His Bible. His rasps and his hoof knife in their roll of oilcloth. A paper of peppermints, hardened into one sweet grey lump.
She sat on Mrs. Pollitt's bed with the paper of peppermints in her lap and wept for the first time since the spring.
In the third week the Earl asked if she would ride out with him to the lime pit. He asked it formally, at the door of the end box, with his hat in his hand.
They went on a clear cold afternoon, she on Absalom, he on his tall bay, Kit trotting behind on Tansy because Mrs. Pollitt had said that if her ladyship-who-was-not-a-ladyship was going to ride out with his lordship she was going to have somebody with her, if it was only a boy on a fat mare. The Wold road ran high and straight between thorn hedges. Rooks went up out of the stubble. The pit, when they came to it, was smaller than she had imagined: a raw white bite out of the hillside, thirty feet deep, with brambles at the bottom and a fringe of grass at the lip where a tired mare might well have stopped to crop.