She had rehearsed it, in the nights in the loft above the coach-house, lying awake among the snoring lads with her hair pinned so tight her scalp ached. She had imagined saying it to him across a desk, or on the gravel in front of the house with half the servants watching, or never. She had not imagined saying it sitting on a bucket in a box with the man standing over her and the horse between them pulling hay.
She stood up. It mattered to her, absurdly, to be standing.
"My name is Harriet Wren," she said. "My father was Samuel Wren. He trained horses for your father, and then for you, for four years. He trained this one." She put her hand on Absalom's flank. "He died last November, on the night of the eleventh, at the bottom of the old lime pit on the Wold road. The coroner's jury said he rode into it drunk. My father had not touched spirits since the year my mother died. That was twelve years. He used to chew peppermint instead. He said a man who smelled of drink had no business asking a horse to trust him."
The Earl had gone very still. In the lantern light his face was hard to read, but she saw his hand move, once, toward the scar at his hairline, and stop.
"Wren," he said. "I knew there was something. The way you stood. The noise you make with your tongue." He drew a breath. "He used to do that. I'd forgotten I'd seen it."
"He wrote to me every Sunday for four years. He wrote about you." She heard the edge come into her voice and did not try to stop it. "He said you had good hands and no patience and that you'd make a horseman if anyone ever told you no. He said you were kind to the boys. In his last letter but one he said you'd been dealt a hard knock over a lady in York and were taking it badly. I never got his last letter. My grandfather kept it."
"Kept it?"
"In the drawer of his desk at Hessle, with the depositions from the inquiry. He took the depositions himself. He's a magistrate; you know that. The coroner sat on the Friday and heard what Sir Roland had written down and was home by dinner." She swallowed. "I found the drawer in October. I was looking for that letter, because I knew it existed; the carrier's book showed it. I found the letter, and the papers, and wrapped in a handkerchief underneath them I found a silver flask. With a heron engraved on it and three wheatsheaves."
She watched it land. She had wondered for seven weeks what she would see in the face of the Earl of Brayford when she said those words, and she had prepared herself for contempt, or guile, or the smooth blankness of a man who has always been able to buy his way out of a room. She had not prepared herself for this. He looked as if she had struck him. He looked, for one unguarded moment, like a boy.
"That's mine," he said.
"I know it is."
"I lost it. That night. I didn't know where. I thought —" He stopped. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes, and when he took it away his voice had changed. "Miss Wren, I'm going to tell you something I have never said aloud to anyone. On the night of the eleventh of last November I was drunk. I had been drunk since four in the afternoon, when a letter came from York ending an engagement I had been fool enough to think mattered more than it did. I remember the dining room. I remember the decanter. I remember deciding I wanted air. After that I remember nothing at all until I woke in my own bed two days later with eleven stitches in my head and Dr. Carrow telling me I had been found at the home-farm gate, and that I was lucky, and that I should not ask questions while the swelling went down." His mouth twisted. "So I didn't. Sir Roland came. He sat by my bed and said there had been an accident on the Wold road the same night, that one of the stable people had been killed, that it was all in hand and I was not to trouble myself. And I didn't trouble myself. I was ashamed of that night. I didn't want to know what I'd done in it. I let him handle it." He looked at her. "I let it be handled."
The horse shifted. Straw rustled. Outside, somewhere, a pail clanked against the pump.