He got into the carriage. She stood in the inn yard with the snow coming down and the letter in her hand and watched him go, and this time he did not say Home. He said, "Hessle, Hobbs, and take it gently," and the carriage went out under the arch into the white street.
The Hull Packet printed the whole of it on the Saturday, under the heading A PEER'S CONFESSION. The Tallants of York let it be known that they considered themselves fortunate. Three families in the Riding stopped calling at Brayford, and the Lord Lieutenant wrote a letter that the Earl read once and put on the fire. The Earl went on riding out every morning and came back looking tired. He did not ask her to ride with him again. She understood that he was waiting, and she was grateful, and she did not know yet what she would say.
Abel Thorne gave his notice on the last day of January. The Earl refused to accept it. Thorne gave it again. The Earl said that if Thorne must go, he would go with a pension and a character, and that was the end of the matter; and Thorne said that he did not want a pension, he wanted work, and that he had heard there was a small yard to let at Malton with eight boxes and a paddock, and a person who might need a head lad who knew his business and was past being proud.
X.
In April the fog came up off the Derwent most mornings and lay over Malton until nine, and the yard at the bottom of Castlegate was a small gold room inside a larger grey one, the way the end box at Brayford had been.
It was not much of a yard. Eight boxes, three of them with roofs that leaked; a tack room that had been a wash-house; a paddock that flooded at the bottom end. Thorne said the drains had been laid by a Methodist with a grudge. There were five horses in it: two hunters belonging to a corn merchant who had come to look at her out of curiosity and stayed because his bay mare stopped refusing gates; a cob for a doctor's wife; Tansy, eating her head off in honourable retirement; and Absalom, who was hers. She had paid the Earl sixty guineas for him out of her mother's portion, which was what a horse nobody else could handle was fairly worth and not a favour, and she had made him take it, and she had a receipt in her own name pinned above the tack-room door.
Harriet Wren, trainer. Nobody in Malton had ever seen the words written down before. Several people had told her they never would again. Two of the big yards on the Langton road had made it plain they would not have her lads in their alehouses. She had expected that. She had not expected the corn merchant, or the doctor's wife, or the farmer from Norton who had brought her a three-year-old nobody could catch and gone away with a three-year-old who came to the gate when she whistled. It was a beginning. It was not more than that.
On the mantel in the room above the tack room there was a letter from Hessle, in a stiff old hand, that had come on the twentieth of March. She had read it many times. She had not answered it. She had begun an answer four times, and had got as far as Dear Grandfather twice and as far as Sir once, and the fourth time she had written I went to see Mother's grave at Newmarket. I took snowdrops. I thought you might want to know, and had sat looking at it until the candle guttered. It was still on the mantel, beside his. She thought perhaps she would send it at midsummer. She thought perhaps she would take it.
She was in the yard with Absalom on a lunge rein that Thursday morning, the big horse moving round her in long easy circles through the thinning mist, when she heard hooves in Castlegate and knew the stride without turning.
He rode in under the arch on his tall bay and pulled up and sat watching. He did not call out. He did not interrupt. She brought Absalom down to a walk, and then to a halt, and walked up the line to him and made her two clicks, and the horse dropped his head and blew. Only then did she look round.
The Earl dismounted. He looked better than he had in January, less tired; the scar at his hairline was hidden under his hat. Thorne came out of the tack room, saw who it was, and went straight back in again with a great show of having remembered something.
"Miss Wren."