"I read books. You might try it. There is one in the harness cupboard behind the oil—do not look so alarmed; I put it there myself. Cowper. You said you liked the sound of gardens you had never seen."
"I said that once," Raff muttered. "You remember too much."
"I remember what I choose." She stopped an arm's length from him. The mist pressed at the window. Somewhere in the yard Hobb the coachman shouted at a lad about a buckled trace. Leonora lowered her voice. "Raff. If I am sent to Pewsey, I will not see you again. Not like this. Not as a person who may shut a door. He will have me watched. My father will call it for my good. I am nineteen. I have no fortune of my own worth speaking of. All I have is the habit of wanting what I want, and even that they mean to break."
He did not touch her. He had never touched her, not once, though she had stood this close a dozen times and felt the wanting of it like heat off a stove. His restraint was part of what she loved and part of what made her furious.
"I am a stable boy," he said, very quietly. "Your father pays me fourteen pounds a year and a loft over the feed room. If I put a hand on you, he will have me transported. If I put a name to what is between us, he will call it your ruin and my crime. I will not be the instrument of either."
"Then what are we doing?" she whispered.
"Surviving Thursdays," he said. "And whatever day comes after."
A boot scraped outside. Both of them went still. The scrape passed. Leonora breathed again.
"I must go in," she said. "Mrs. Glynn will send Deane to look for me if I am longer. Raff—"
"Yes."
"The crown on your arm. You never told me what it was."
His hand moved, almost involuntarily, to cover the mark. For an instant something closed in his face—old, careful, not the look of a boy who cleaned tack.
"It was my father's," he said. "He put it on me before he died. He said a man who bore it was owed something by someone, and that I was not to spend the debt cheaply. That is all I know that I can say."
"And the someone?"
"I came here to find out if the someone still breathed." His eyes held hers. "I found you instead. I did not plan that. Plans are for men with spare lives."
She wanted to ask more. She wanted to put her palm over the little crown and feel whether ink could be warm. She did neither. She opened the door on the mist and the cobbles and the brown mare's soft complaint, and she walked back toward the house with her chin up and her hands empty, as if she had been nowhere of consequence at all.
Behind her, in the tack room, Raff Harrow picked up the bridle again and rubbed the bit until the metal shone, because work was the only prayer he trusted.
II.
Sir Ridley Ashbrook learned of his daughter's visits from Mr. Alaric Pewsey, which was the sort of irony the morning seemed to enjoy.