"My lord. Have you come about a horse?"
"I've come," he said, "because the last of the debt was paid on the fourteenth of January, and I've waited three months since so that you'd know I wasn't in a hurry. I'm still learning patience. I thought I'd ask how I was doing."
She looked at him for a long moment, the lunge rein coiled in her hand, the mist going gold around them both.
"Remove your hat," she said.
He blinked. Then, slowly, something came into his face that she had not seen there before, not in the yard or the box or at the lip of the lime pit: he began to smile. He took off his hat and held it against his chest.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because I dislike being deceived," said Harriet, "and I want to see your face properly when I tell you that I have no time for callers, and I am not going to be anybody's countess this year or very likely next, and if you want to come on Thursdays you may, but you'll muck out the end box like anybody else."
"Every Thursday?"
"We'll see about every."
He laughed then, aloud, startling the bay. Absalom put his ears forward and considered him, and did not pin them back.
"Then I'll need a pitchfork," said the Earl of Brayford.
"Thorne will find you one," said Harriet, and turned back to her horse, so that he would not see that she was smiling too. Not yet. There was time. The fog was lifting off the river, and there was a great deal of work to do.