And Susanna had said nothing at all, because there had been nothing yet to say that would not simply harden her brother's resolve.
Thomas would not look at her afterward. He had never quite managed to look at her since their father died, as though her competence in the one trade left to the family were an accusation he could not answer, and the debts he had run up at the card tables in Pontefract had made him desperate enough to stop trying.
He went straight down the bank onto the common and straight into the meer.
The bog below Aworth Common was not deep in the way of a true fen, but it was deep enough: black peat and standing water under a crust of reed and rush that looked to a frightened animal like solid ground until it was not. Vulcan went in to the knee, then to the hock, thrashing to free himself and driving himself deeper with every effort, until he stood chest-high in mud with his eyes rolled white and his sides heaving like a bellows.
Six men from the livery and the nearby farms had ropes on him within the half-hour, hauling and shouting and driving him in their haste to be seen to be helping, further and further into the black.
Susanna had come down at a run at the first cry of it, and stood on the firmer ground at the meer's edge, watching the ropes tighten and the horse fight, and understood with the particular cold clarity she had for these things that the six men were going to kill him.
"Let him go," she said.
And when they did not, she said it again, sharper, and walked out onto the wet ground herself, until Silas Marrow, who had known her father, dropped his rope out of sheer old habit of doing what a Reed told him with a horse.
The others followed, grumbling, certain the girl had lost her wits, certain the beast would have her under before the church clock struck the hour.
"He'll have your arm off, girl, or drown the pair of you," Silas Marrow told her, not unkindly, when she first walked past him toward the meer's edge, and one of the younger men laughed the particular nervous laugh of someone glad it was not his own arm in question.
She did not answer him. She had learned young that arguing with frightened men wasted breath better spent on frightened horses, and she went on past the hedge to the black water's edge with her skirts already soaked through to the knee.
She did not go near him at first. She knelt at the edge where the ground still held in the freezing rain, and began to talk—not words with any particular meaning in them, just the low, steady stream of sound she had always used on frightened animals. And she stayed there, kneeling in the mud, while the men drifted off to stand under the hedge and mutter that she would catch her death for nothing.
She did not move again for the better part of two hours. She let the horse scream and plunge and exhaust himself, let him learn the slow, hard way that no rope could teach him: that the voice at the edge of the meer was not going anywhere and meant him no harm.
Twice more in that first hour he threw himself against the suck of the peat with a violence that sent the watching men flinching back under the hedge, certain each time that she would be caught beneath him when he came down. And twice more she did not so much as lean away, only lowered her voice further and let the rain run down her collar and waited.
Her knees went first numb, then burning, then numb again in the cold mud, and she did not once shift her weight to ease them, because a moved shadow at the meer's edge might undo an hour's patient work in a single startled lunge.
The rain thinned toward midday to a fine mist that softened every sound, save for the horse's ragged breathing and her own low murmur, steady as a millwheel. And somewhere past the second hour, the stallion's thrashing slowed and slowed again, and he stood trembling and blowing with his ears finally faintly turned toward her.
It was at the third hour, soaked to the skin himself and walking the last stretch of turnpike with his boots full of water, that the Duke of Netherby came over the rise above the common and saw a girl in a ruined apron kneeling at the edge of a bog with her hand out to the finest horse he owned.
He stopped walking. He did not entirely understand in the first moment what he was looking at: a stranger, mud to the elbows, murmuring to Vulcan as though the animal were no more dangerous than a hound by a hearth, while six grown men stood well back under a hedge and let her do it.
Then the horse took one step toward her, and another, testing the ground she had somehow judged safe, and heaved himself free of the meer in a single lunging scramble that sent black water in every direction. He stood there shuddering and blowing beside her, and put his great scarred head down against her shoulder like a colt seeking its dam.
She did not pin over it. She did not even seem to notice, particularly, that she had done anything remarkable at all. She simply straightened, wincing at whatever her knees had suffered in two hours of kneeling in cold mud, took a soft hold of the halter someone had at last thought to bring her, and began walking the horse in a slow circle to warm his blood, speaking to him still in that same low, unbroken murmur.