She did not. So he did it for her. He reached out and pulled the dark olive cap from her head, and the pins she had driven into the knot at her nape that morning gave way all at once, and the whole mass of her hair came down: red, unmistakably and ruinously red, tumbling over the shoulders of her grey waistcoat to the middle of her back.
Somebody in the feed room door said, "Christ," and was hushed.
Harriet did not reach for the cap. She did not reach for her hair. She kept her eyes on his.
"Why?"
"Because I dislike being deceived."
"Then dismiss half your household."
He was very near. She could see a small white scar at the edge of his hairline, half-hidden by a dark curl, and a muscle working in his jaw. She could see that he was angry, and that underneath the anger something else had happened in his face, something that looked absurdly like recognition, as if he had been searching a long while for the shape of a question and had just been handed it. Her own heart was going hard and fast, and not only from fear. That was the worst of it. She was furious with him, and her body did not seem to know the difference.
"Who are you?" he said, softly, so softly that only she could have heard it.
She opened her mouth. She did not know what she would have said.
Then the sound came out of the fog: hooves, the heavy double beat of a pair in harness, and under it the grind of iron-rimmed wheels on the gravel of the drive. Every head in the yard turned. A shape thickened in the whiteness beyond the arch. Two black horses, their breath smoking. A coachman hunched in a caped greatcoat, his top hat beaded silver with wet. Behind them a closed carriage, black and gleaming, with a crest on the door that she would have known in the dark.
The carriage drew up under the arch. The coachman climbed down, unfolded the step, and opened the door.
An old man stepped out. He was past sixty but tall still, and broad in a heavy dark overcoat, with a white cravat tied high and severe at his throat and white hair cropped close to a skull that looked carved rather than grown. His face was weathered as a gatepost, cut deep from nose to hard mouth. He stood a moment with one gloved hand on the carriage door, surveying the yard as he might have surveyed a courtroom, unhurried, missing nothing.
All the defiance went out of Harriet in a single breath. She felt it go; she felt her spine turn to water. Her fingers, still wound in Absalom's reins, went numb.