The rain had been falling on the west writing since before dawn, a fine gray needling that soaked through wool and patients alike, and the Duke of Netherby had spent the better part of the morning wishing he had never left London.
His carriage had been crawling the Aquith turnpike since first light, mired twice already in ruts the autumn had carved deep as trenches, and he had begun somewhere around the second mile to compose in his head the letter he meant to write his steward about the state of a road that ran directly past his own land, and yet seemed to belong to no one's care at all.
He was 31 years old, unmarried, and had long since made a private peace with the fact that he would likely die that way. Netherby was a name that opened doors and closed them again just as fast, once the mothers behind those doors understood that he had not come to be managed.
He had watched too many friends walk into marriages built like ledgers: love entered as a column and settled like a debt, and he had decided somewhere in his middle 20s that he would rather be thought than be caught.
It was not a comfortable decision. It had simply proved over the years a survivable one.
He was traveling north that October to see a horse.
The stallion had come to him as a colt three years before, out of his own cousin Julian Ash's best mare, and Netherby had watched him grow into the finest animal his stables had ever held: black as wet slate, deep through the chest, with a stride that made grown men go quiet at the rail.
He had named him Vulcan, half in jest, because the beast had a temper like a forge fire and no patience whatsoever for a hand he did not trust. Julian had bred him and always privately believed he ought to have been given the riding of him.
Netherby, who paid the bills, had kept the horse for himself, and the small, unspoken resentment between the cousins had never quite been resolved. It did not much occupy his thoughts that morning.
What occupied his thoughts was the ache behind his eyes and the growing certainty that his carriage wheel had found the one truly bottomless rut on the entire turnpike.
It had. The axle gave with a crack that startled the horses. The carriage tipped hard into the ditch, and Netherby climbed out into the rain with his hat in his hand and his temper for once entirely spent.
His coachman was already down assessing the wreck and shaking his head in the particular manner of a man calculating hours rather than minutes. There was nothing for it but to walk.
And so the Duke of Netherby set off on foot along a Yorkshire turnpike in the mud, a mile and more from anywhere, in a coat that had cost more than most of the cottages he was passing.
What he did not yet know—what he would only piece together afterward in fragments from men who had no particular reason to be kind to her in the telling of it—was that a mile ahead of him, on the common land below the road, a groom's worst morning and a girl's future were already colliding in the peat.
Susanna Reed had been breaking colts for the Aworth livery since she was 14 years old, a trade her father had taught her in the years before a fall from a green gelding put him in the churchyard, and one the neighborhood had elected by unspoken and universal agreement not to notice too closely.
A girl who could gentle a horse no man could sit was a useful thing to have about a stable yard and an awkward thing to have at a christening. Aworth had settled the contradiction the way small places always did: by employing her hands and pretending not to see them.
Her brother Thomas had inherited their father's temper without his patience, and had spent three years drinking through what little the livery paid and what less the cottage brought in rent, until the debts had grown large enough that he had done the one thing left to a man in his position. He had pledged his sister in marriage to Josiah Kettle, a horse dealer twice her age with cold hands and a reputation for driving bargains the way he drove horses: hard and without much regard for what was left standing after.
Susanna had not yet said yes. She had also not yet found a way to say no that her brother could not simply overrule, and she had been turning the problem in her mind for a fortnight the way she turned a difficult colt: patiently, watching for the opening.
That was when the black stallion came off the turnpike a half-mile above her, riderless and half-mad with fright, having thrown the groom sent to walk him gently south to meet his master.
Kettle had come to the cottage himself the week before to look her over the way he might have looked over a mare he was thinking of buying, walking a slow circle around her in the low kitchen while Thomas stood by the fire, not quite meeting her eye. He had remarked, not unkindly and therefore somehow worse, that she was thin but sound, and that a woman who could break a colt could doubtless be broken to harness herself in time.