"Your father would have had it done a month ago."
"My father isn't here, sir."
It came out sharper than he intended. Sir Roland looked at him with the patient, measuring gravity Laurence had known all his life, the look that had once made him confess to breaking a window at the age of nine before anyone had asked. The old man's face was grey with the cold and something else. He looked, Laurence thought, as if he had not slept.
"No," Sir Roland said. "He is not. Forgive me. I have not come to talk about horses." He glanced at the lads, at the coachman, at the open doors of the boxes, and lowered his voice only a little. "I have come about my granddaughter."
Laurence kept his face still. He had had a great deal of practice.
"I didn't know you had one."
"I do not speak of her. Her mother was my daughter Clara, who married against my wishes and beneath her station, and who died of it, in the end, very much as I told her she would." He said it without self-pity, as a man reads out a sentence he has handed down and does not intend to revisit. "The girl came into my care this spring, on her father's death. She is not yet of age. Seven weeks ago she left my house in the night, with forty shillings out of my desk and a suit of clothes belonging to my stable boy."
From the feed room door, very faintly, came the scrape of a fork on stone.
"A carrier at Driffield market," Sir Roland went on, "remembers taking up a red-haired lad the week after Martinmas and setting him down at your crossroads. The lad asked particularly whether Brayford was hiring." He paused. "She has her mother's hair. There is no hiding it, not under any cap ever made."
The fog drifted between them. Laurence was aware of the clock above the arch, its slow tick; of the warmth of the cap still in his palm, though he had given it back; of the scar at his hairline, which ached in damp weather and ached now.
He thought of the girl's face when she said not for him.
"You think she's here," he said.
"I think it likely. I would like to ask you a plain question, Laurence, and I would like a plain answer, because I have been seven weeks on the roads of this Riding in November and I am tired." Sir Roland drew himself up. "Is my granddaughter in your stables? Tell me no and I will take your word, as I have always taken it, and drive on to Scarborough."