"Your father asked me one more thing," Raff said as they walked on. "He asked whether I hated him for the gravel."
"Do you?"
"I hated him for ten breaths," Raff said. "Then I hated the war that taught him to solve fear with someone else's knees. Then I hated my own readiness to leave you to make a clean story. Hate is crowded. I am trying to evict tenants."
Leonora leaned her head, once, against his shoulder. "Keep the cottage. Evict at leisure. I will bring Cowper and bad advice."
"Bring yourself," he said. "The rest is furniture."
XII.
November brought a hard frost that whitened the park as if the county had powdered itself for an uninvited ball. The pump in the yard wore a beard of ice each morning. Raff broke it with a short iron bar and cursed mildly in a language Leonora did not ask him to translate. Horses breathed clouds. The lime avenue cracked underfoot with a sound like distant musketry, or so Sir Ridley said once and then looked annoyed at himself for saying it.
On the third Sunday of the month the rector preached on debts, which Leonora took personally and Raff took with a blank face that fooled no one who sat near enough to see his hands. After the service Lady Mowbray of Tollerton—stout, shrewd, and the owner of opinions that traveled faster than the mail—stopped Sir Ridley on the porch.
"I hear you have made a sergeant's son into a kind of squire of your stables," she said. "How modern. How like a novel. Tell me, Ridley, do we applaud or send for a physician?"
"Neither," Sir Ridley said. "We mind our drains and let other houses mind theirs."
Lady Mowbray laughed. "Very good. I shall mind mine, then, and tell anyone who asks that Ashbrook has always been eccentric about horses. Eccentricity is forgiven in families with old brick. Vice is not. See that you know the difference."
She swept off. Sir Ridley stood a moment looking after her, then found Leonora at his elbow.
"Was that support?" Leonora asked.
"In Hampshire it may be as near as one gets," he said. "Come. The horses will not respect the Sabbath if we freeze on the porch discussing morality."
That afternoon Leonora found her father in the old nursery at the top of the house, a room kept closed since her childhood, where a wooden horse with a missing ear still stood under dust sheets. He had pulled the sheet back. He looked embarrassed to be found there, which made him, briefly, almost approachable.
"I used to ride this when I was five," Leonora said. "You told me it had been to Spain. I believed you."
"It had been to the attic," Sir Ridley said. "Spain was a lie for children. I am trying, late, not to tell so many." He rested a hand on the wooden neck. "Your mother wanted another child. After you. The fever took the chance and then took her the next winter. I have sometimes blamed the war for the shutness in me. It is convenient to blame a war. The truth is I practiced shutness because it felt like strength. Mathias Harrow opened a door I spent years boarding up. Seeing his mark on that boy's arm tore the boards off. I am not grateful for the pain. I am—accountable for what the pain shows."
Leonora sat on the dusty window seat. Outside, the frost held. "I do not need you to be a softened saint. I need you not to put people on gravel to soothe a neighbour's pride."