He confronted Kettle himself once early on, riding into Aworth on a raw gray afternoon and finding the dealer at the smithy trading horses with a farmer from Sherburn.
Kettle had the good sense to take his hat off and the poor sense to smirk while he did it. "No offense meant to your Grace," he said in the tone of a man who meant every ounce of it. "But a girl don't earn a man's wages kneeling in the mud for nothing, and folk will say what they see fit to say. I lost a fair bargain when you took her off me. A man's entitled to his opinion on how he lost it."
"You lost nothing that was ever yours to have," Netherby had said, low and even. "And if I hear my groom's name in your mouth again in that tone, you will find losing a bargain the least of your troubles with me."
It had felt, riding away, like a victory. He understood within the week that it had done nothing at all to slow the story's spread. If anything, that a duke had ridden into the village to defend her only sharpened the tale's teeth, gave it the flavor of a thing worth repeating twice as fast.
His cousin made it worse without meaning it as an insult, which somehow made it land harder. Julian Ash, at Doncaster for the autumn meeting, had never fully forgiven Netherby for keeping the horse he had bred. And when he heard that his cousin had now handed the beast's training to some livery girl off the Aquith road, he said so loudly in the stand in front of half the men whose subscriptions kept Netherby's racing string afloat, that the Duke had made a groom of a gentlewoman and a scandal of a stable, and that no man of sense would put his colts under a roof run on those terms.
It was not meant—Netherby told himself afterward—as cruelty. It landed as cruelty regardless.
Two subscriptions were withdrawn within the week, quietly, with excellent manners and no explanation offered, and Netherby understood that the wider world had already tried the case and returned its verdict, and that the verdict had nothing to do with what he had actually watched happen at the edge of that meer.
He found Susanna in the training yard that same evening, working Vulcan on a long rein in the last gray light, apparently unmoved by the whole business. And it was only when he came close enough to see her hands that he understood the coolness was a performance and a costly one. Her knuckles were white on the rein in a way they had never been white on a stallion twice her weight and half again as strong.
"They are saying it in the market at Pontefract now," she said before he could find a way to raise it himself. "I heard a woman say it to my face this morning over the price of eggs as though I were not standing there to hear it. I have known what men say about a girl who breaks horses since I was 14, Your Grace. I had thought I was past minding it."
"You are not required to mind it," he said. "I will not have you turned off by whispers that have not one word of truth in them."
"It is not the whispers I mind," she said, and for the first time since the meer, he saw something in her composure crack just slightly at the edges. "It is that I know precisely what will happen to my wages and my position and my name the very day you tire of the trouble of defending them. I have watched my brother trade me once already for a debt he ran up at cards. I do not think I could bear watching a duke trade me for his own comfort, however kindly he meant to do it."
It struck him harder than Julian's insult at Doncaster had, harder than the withdrawn subscriptions, because it was true in a way he had not let himself examine: that every protection he had offered her still rested entirely on his own continuing willingness to offer it, and that she had understood this before he had troubled to think it through himself.
"Then I will have to prove myself a poorer bargain to abandon than to keep," he said, and meant it more than he had meant anything he had said to anyone in a very long time.
And she looked at him for a long moment in the fading light before she turned back to the horse. And neither of them said anything further, though something between them had shifted and would not shift back.
He was in London 3 weeks later, called down on business he could not in conscience postpone—a family trust matter, tedious and legal and entirely unavoidable.
When the thing he would spend a long time forgiving himself for happened in his absence, he pieced it together only afterward, and only by pieces, the way a man reconstructs a wreck from what different witnesses saw of the crash.
His steward's letter came first, clipped and defensive in the particular way of a man who knows he has done wrong and means to explain it before he can be asked to. Three days before the county race, the letter said, Vulcan had been found lamed in his box, the near foreleg swollen and hot, the meeting lost to him entirely. And Josiah Kettle, conveniently present at the stable that same night on some pretext of business with another groom, swore before witnesses that he had seen Susanna Reed at the stall door at midnight alone, with no lawful reason to be there.
The steward, with the Duke away and no one above him to overrule the accusation, had turned her off the estate within the hour, without a hearing, without so much as sending word to Netherby of what he had done, until the deed was 3 days old and past mending.
It was the stable boy, Davy Marsh, who gave Netherby the fuller and harder account of it much later, haltingly, unable to meet his master's eye, the words coming out of him in the low, miserable rush of a boy who has carried a lie about as long as he can bear the weight of it.
Susanna had not gone near the stall that night. She had been asleep in the loft above the tack room, where she had taken to sleeping since the whispers made the village unbearable. It was Kettle himself who had been at the stall door at midnight with a hoof pick and a grudge, and Davy himself who had seen him do it and said nothing out of fear of a man twice his size and half again as cruel, until the fear of what his silence had cost her finally outweighed the fear of Kettle himself.