Chapter 25

Mowbray's laugh went up the whole length of the field.The black stallion, foaled in the far box at Harrow's yard on the eighth of May, who would not take the mare's milk, who threw three men that summer and stood still for one girl on the first day of the season, put his nose down into her shoulder and left a long, gray smear of dust across the brown wool.She reached up without looking and rubbed the white hair above his off eye. "Good boy," she said.The colt came in the far box at Harrow's yard on the eighth of May, out of a bay mare that came down from the Selby stud the summer before, and it rained for three days after. He was black to the hoof. Silas Harrow stood in the doorway at two o'clock in the morning with a lantern and said what he always said, which was that the thing would not make an hour. Then he went and boiled the milk anyway, because his niece was kneeling in the straw in her shift and a borrowed coat, and she did not look up when he spoke to her.The Duke of Ravensmere held the lantern for eleven nights. He did not say anything useful; he did not know how. He warmed the bottle against his own chest between feeds, because she told him once that cold milk turns a foal off it, and he learned to hand it over without being asked. On the fourth night, he fell asleep sitting against the wall with his boots in the straw, and the Duchess of Ravensmere let him stay there until six o'clock.On the twelfth morning, the colt left her side and crossed the box on his own and went looking for the door."There," she said.The visitors' book at Ravensmere goes back to the second Duke, and there are two entries in the same hand near the middle of it, five months apart.The first one reads:Beatrice Anne Harrow, Ravensmere. Born here, same as the horse.The second one is in the column the family signs, and it is shorter, and Augusta Vane read it once, put on her spectacles, and read it again:B. Ravensmere. Born here, still here.

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