Chapter 10

She began to talk the way ice goes off a pond: not all at once, and never in the middle. On the fifth morning, with her back to him, cleaning the gray mare's clouded eye with a cloth and warm water:"They think it went in the fever, my wits." A pause while she wrung the cloth. "It was only the ear, but the village decided long before I could hear out of the left one, and there is no answer to a thing like that. You cannot argue a village out of a word. You can only stop giving it new ones."Edmund said nothing, because he promised not to, and because for once in his life, he had nothing worth putting in the space."Nine years is not so long," she said. "It gets quiet, and then it gets comfortable. That is the part I would not tell anyone." She hung the cloth on the nail and turned around and looked at him, and the look said: And now you know a thing about me that the whole county does not.On the sixth morning, she said before anything else, "You may talk today." And then she told him about Corvus, and it undid him."He was foaled here," she said, "in the far box, the eighth of May. And it rained for three days after, and my uncle said he would not make an hour." She said it easily, coiling the rope over her elbow. "I was twelve. I slept in the straw with him for eleven nights because he would not take the mare, and somebody had to warm the milk and hold the bottle every two hours." She smoothed the rope. "He knew my hands before he knew anything else in the world."Edmund stood very still. "And then?""And then a gentleman came down from the great house in June and paid forty guineas for him where he stood, and left him at the yard until he was strong enough to travel. They took him away in October. I took the fever in August and never saw him go." She shrugged one shoulder, a movement of no importance at all. "That is the whole of it.""What gentleman?"She looked up. "Your brother," she said.The rain stopped sometime in the night before, and Edmund only noticed it now in the silence that came after."He gave me sixpence," she said. "And he said that if the colt ever came back through this yard, he would want the girl who kept him alive brought out to see him first." She began to coil the rope again, though it was already coiled. "I expect he forgot. Gentlemen do."

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