The steward's letter, when Netherby finally sat with it properly in his London rooms rather than skimming it standing in a doorway between appointments, filled him with a rage so cold and complete that his man of business, arriving 10 minutes later about the trust papers, took one look at his face and quietly rescheduled the meeting.
He read the account three times, searching for some detail that would let him doubt it, and found instead only the small, damning particulars that made it worse: that she had been given no chance to speak in her own defense, that her belongings had been put out onto the drive within the hour, that no one on his own staff, not one, had thought to send word to him before it was done rather than after.
He was in his carriage north within the day, trust papers unsigned, and cursed the same ruded turnpike that had first brought him to her the entire way.
None of that was known yet in the days after Susanna walked off Netherby land with what she could carry, and nowhere in the parish left that would have her. She was too proud. Everyone who saw her go agreed afterward to send word after the Duke in London and beg to be heard.
She had built her whole life on needing no one's charity, and would not start now, dismissed like a thief, by asking the very man whose name had ruined her to come home and rescue her reputation along with it.
She walked to Thirsk, where an aunt on her mother's side kept a small house and asked no questions, and took what work a woman with cracked hands and no character reference could find, which was work at the washhouse, over steaming coppers and lye strong enough to eat the skin from a person's knuckles within a fortnight.
Netherby returned to a stable in disgrace: a lamed horse he could not race, subscriptions bleeding away, and the girl who had gentled his finest animal out of a bog gone from his land as though she had never set foot on it.
He dismissed his steward within the hour of setting foot in the hall, without pension and without a character reference—a severity that startled his own household into a silence that lasted the better part of a fortnight—and set every man on the estate to the single task of finding out precisely what had happened at that stable door at midnight.
He did not, in the days that followed, sleep especially well. He rode to Thirsk twice in that first week on nothing more than the rumor of where she had gone, and turned back both times at the edge of the town, understanding with a bitterness he had not expected that a duke arriving in a hired room to declare himself before the truth of Kettle's lie was even proven would look to anyone watching exactly like another man come to press his advantage over a girl with nowhere left to turn.
He would not have her wonder even for a moment whether he had come to finish what Kettle started. He would come with the truth in his hand or not at all.
She never learned in that fortnight how close he had ridden. She rose before 5:00 each morning at her aunt's narrow house to walk to the washhouse, where the coppers were already steaming by the time she arrived, and the lye ate a little further into the cracks in her hands each day she worked it.
And she did not speak of Aworth or of horses or of dukes to anyone in Thirsk who asked, because there was nothing in the telling of it that would not sound to a stranger like exactly the story Kettle had put about. She had decided somewhere on the long walk north with her one box that she would rather be thought a plain washhouse girl with no history worth mentioning than spend the rest of her days being pitied for a scandal that was not even true.
It was Davy Marsh's confession, rung loose at last by a guilt no 15-year-old is built to carry alone, that broke the whole affair open.
Netherby found the boy in the tack room one evening, unable to meet his eye over a bridle he had been pretending to clean for the better part of an hour, and simply waited, saying nothing until the boy's nerve gave out entirely, and the whole account came tumbling loose: Kettle at the stall door with a hoof pick in the small hours, the low, ugly satisfaction on his face at the sound the horse made, and Davy himself frozen in the loft doorway, too frightened to call out and too ashamed afterward to admit what his silence had caused.
Netherby had the boy repeat every word of it before witnesses the following morning, his own hands steady on the boy's shoulder the whole while so that the fear would not swallow the truth a second time. Then he rode himself to the magistrate at Pontefract and laid the account before him personally.
Within the fortnight, Josiah Kettle stood bound over at the assizes to answer for the lamed horse and the false accusation, both his trade in the district finished before the case was even heard in full. No dealer from Thirsk to Doncaster would take a horse from his hands again once the tale of the hoof pick had made its rounds, and Netherby found he could summon no pity whatsoever for a man undone at last by the very kind of talk he had spent months spreading about someone else.
Thomas Reed, questioned separately and found to have taken money for a lie he had never troubled to verify, stood before Netherby in the estate office with his hat turning over and over in his hands, and could not in the end meet his sister's name with anything but silence.
He was sent from the county with 20 pounds—more mercy than Netherby felt inclined to show him, and offered only because Susanna, when he finally found her, would have wanted it so—and a warning never to return, that Netherby delivered himself quietly, in a voice that left no doubt of what would follow if the warning were tested.
He found her at Thirsk on a gray morning much like the one on which he had first seen her: standing over a copper of scalding water with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, and her hands, when he took them in his own without asking leave, red and cracked and burning from the lye in a way that made something in his chest tighten past bearing.
She had heard nothing of Kettle, nothing of the confession, nothing of the pounds, only that a duke's carriage had come up the lane, and that she would rather scald her hands to the bone than run to a window to see whose it was.