"You may say anything you like. I gather everyone does."
"The old Duke used to sit up with foaling mares," she said. "When he was young. Before the gout. He used to come in at dawn like you did, all over muck, and Mr. Hendry's father used to have fits." She set the jug down. "Your bath's getting cold. And Mr. Quarrendon has been in the library forty minutes, which I don't think has ever happened to him before. I'd let him have another twenty, if I were you. It'll do his complexion good."
* * *
Mr. Cyprian Quarrendon was a slender, silvering man of forty-five with excellent linen and the kind of patient, pleasant face that is very useful at vestry meetings. He rose when the Duke came in, at last, washed and shaved and in a plain blue coat that had evidently been made in Dublin by someone who did not think much of London, and bowed, and said all that was proper about the long journey and the sad occasion and the mare.
"Pridmore should not have troubled Your Grace with it," he said. "I had arranged for the farrier."
"For the farrier to do what?"
"Ah—Bathsheba is nineteen, Your Grace. Past breeding. It was felt she should not be put through it again, and the farrier was to see to it after Michaelmas. A kindness, I'm sure Your Grace will agree."
"She was in foal when it was felt," said the Duke. "And she's raised a colt this morning who'll be worth three hundred guineas in four years if he's worth a penny. Pridmore wrote to me. I'm glad he did." He did not sit down. "I've some questions about the wages, Quarrendon, and the abatement, and the seed corn. But first I want the petition I signed in June about the common. The whole of it. Not the précis."
Quarrendon's face did not change at all. That, the Duke thought afterwards, was the first thing that truly told him anything.
"Of course, Your Grace. It is with the parliamentary agents in London, but I have a fair copy in the estate office. Your Grace will remember that Sir Lionel Bastable is very forward in the matter, and the principal freeholders have all expressed—"
"Fetch it," said the Duke. "Please."
V.
The rectory at Wendlebury St. Giles was a square red house that had been built in the reign of the last Stuart queen by a rector with eleven children and was now inhabited by a rector with none, so that it always seemed to Kezia to be listening for something. She came in through the kitchen, where Dinah the maid of all work was blowing on a fire of wet coal with a face of black despair, and went up the back stairs, and changed her habit for a morning gown, and pinned up her hair with hands that would not quite be still. Then she went down to breakfast, because there was nothing else to do, and because she had learned long ago that if one was going to be mortified it was better to be mortified with tea.