And the animal followed her the way Netherby had never once in three years of owning him seen him follow any man alive.
That was the Duke of Netherby walking down the bank toward her with his ruined boots and his ruined coat entirely forgotten. "Is that my horse?"
She looked up at him, mud-streaked, drenched, entirely unimpressed by his tone—which he noted with some private surprise was not a reaction he was accustomed to—and said, "Then you want a better groom, sir, because whoever had him last near drowned him, and six men after that near hanged him with rope."
It was not by any measure the correct way to address a duke. Netherby, found standing there in the rain with mud to his ankles and his finest horse leaning bodily against a stranger in a torn apron, found that he did not much mind.
He had been addressed over the years by mothers with unmarried daughters and daughters with rehearsed laughter, by men who wanted his signature on subscriptions, and men who wanted his name on committees. And every one of them had spoken to him as though he were a door to be got through rather than a man standing in front of them.
This girl had looked straight past the title to the mud on his boots and the horse trembling at her shoulder, and had scolded him faintly for the state of his own stable. And something in Netherby's chest that had gone quiet and careful a long time ago sat up and took a closer interest than he had any intention of admitting to.
He studied her properly for the first time as they stood there. Not a beauty by the measure the ballrooms of London used: her hair dark with rain and coming loose from its pins; her hands raw from cold and rope burn; a plain wool cloak soaked through at the shoulders and clinging to a frame too thin for the work she plainly did.
But there was a steadiness in her that he had rarely seen in men twice her age and never once in a drawing room. And when Vulcan shifted and blew uneasily at the sight of a stranger, it was Netherby's voice that made the horse startle and her low murmur unbroken that settled him again inside a breath.
It was, he thought, an uncomfortable thing to learn about oneself in a ditch in the rain: that a duke's presence meant less to a frightened animal than a livery girl's voice, and that he found he did not resent the horse for it in the least.
He learned her name before he learned much else about her: Susanna Reed, of the Aworth livery. And he learned, watching her walk his stallion in slow circles with a competence he had paid grooms three times her age handsomely not to possess, that whatever this girl's circumstances were, they had wasted a gift the size of a county on her.
He asked her, before the men from the livery had finished gawking, to bring the horse on to Netherby Hall herself, since Vulcan would clearly permit no one else's hands near him for the present. And she agreed with the same flat practicality with which she had told six grown men to drop their ropes.
And it was in the three-mile walk that followed—the Duke of Netherby on foot beside a livery girl, and a stallion worth more than her cottage, none of them saying very much, all of them soaked to the bone—that he began, for reasons he could not have named to himself that evening, to think that he had come north for a horse and found something he had not known he was looking for.
The offer he made her two days later, once Vulcan was dry and stalled and the surgeon had confirmed no lasting harm, was one no woman in the county had ever been made: the training of his finest stallion and wages to match a man's for the work, paid direct to her and not through her brother's hands.
It was by every rule Netherby had been raised to observe an outrageous arrangement. He made it anyway, watching her face for the moment she would refuse it out of pride or fear of what it would cost her in whispers.
And when she did not refuse it, when she simply asked with the same steadiness whether the wages would come to her or to Thomas, he understood that she had already done the arithmetic of her own survival many times over, and that this offer was to her not charity, but the first fair bargain anyone had ever put in front of her.
Josiah Kettle did not take the loss of his bargain quietly. A wife with wages of her own was no wife worth having in his reckoning. And a wife who had spent two hours on her knees in the mud in full view of half the parish at the personal request of a duke was worse than no bargain at all.
It was Kettle, decided aloud in every taproom between Aworth and Pontefract, an insult, and insults of that kind were best answered with a story ugly enough to make the injured party look the fool instead. By the second week, the story he had settled on had teeth: that Susanna Reed was no groom to the Duke of Netherby, whatever polite word was being used for it, and that a girl did not earn wages like that on her back, kneeling in mud.
Thomas Reed offered a guinea for his silence and two more for his confirmation, and gave both without much struggle.
Netherby heard the first whisper of it from his own steward, delivered with the particular delicacy of a man who did not wish to be the one to say the word aloud to his employer, and felt something in his chest go cold and still in a way he recognized distantly as the exact temperature of every reason he had spent a decade avoiding entanglement.
He did not doubt her. That surprised him too, how instantly and completely he did not doubt her. But he understood, watching the story spread through his own household in the space of a week, precisely how little that would matter to anyone else.