"If he sees me," she whispered, "I am finished."
II.
Laurence Ashcombe had been Earl of Brayford for three years, and in that time he had learned that most of the work consisted of deciding, very quickly, what to say to people who arrived in carriages.
He did not turn round. He did not need to. He saw the carriage in her eyes, saw the black shape of it swell in those amber irises as if in two small mirrors, and he watched the colour leave her face, and he understood two things at once. That she was not acting. And that the man stepping down under his arch, his godfather, his father's oldest friend, the man who had stood beside him at his father's grave and gripped his shoulder hard enough to bruise, was the thing she was afraid of.
He did not think of it afterward as a decision. He pushed the cap into her hands.
"Put it up," he said, under his breath. "Now."
She was already moving. She twisted the red mass of her hair into a rope, wound it, jammed the cap down over it, and ducked her head so that the brim shadowed her face. Laurence stepped half a pace to his left, so that his shoulders stood between her and the arch, and raised his voice to the pitch his father had used across a hunting field.
"Thorne! Have this brute taken in before he breaks a leg. The end box. And somebody find Sir Roland's horses a dry stall."
Thorne came off the wall of the coach-house without hurry. He did not look at the girl. He looked at Laurence for one long moment, an old man's look, grey and level, and Laurence understood with a small shock that his head groom was not surprised by anything he had seen in the last two minutes. Then Thorne jerked his chin at the lad, and the lad led the brown horse away down the row, and the fog closed behind them.
Laurence crossed the yard.
"Sir Roland. You've driven through this?"
"From Beverley, since before light." Sir Roland Ferrers drew off his gloves one finger at a time. "Hobbs swears he has been steering by the sound of the beck. I am inclined to believe him; I could not see the horses' ears." His eyes followed the empty space where Absalom had been. "Was that the Wren horse? I understood you meant to have him shot."
"I did mean to. I've changed my mind."