"Two hundred pounds is—" Kezia did the sum, because she had done it so often in the cottages that it came to her without trying. "At this year's prices, two hundred pounds is very nearly a thousand bushels of seed wheat. Or bread for forty families from now until Lady Day, if it were managed properly." She found that her eyes were stinging, and that she did not care. "You said yourself you cannot eat a hunter. Let her go."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded to Pridmore, and Pridmore nodded to Toby, and Toby led the grey mare out under the stopped clock and into the lane, and Kezia stood and listened to her hooves go away down the road toward London until there was nothing more to hear but the geese.
"Well," said the Duke quietly. "You're bearing that better than I would."
"I am not bearing it at all," said Kezia. "I am merely standing upright while it happens. It is a different thing." She turned away from the gate. "Come. You promised me the geese."
* * *
They walked. She had thought he would want a horse, and he had thought she would, and in the end they both discovered that they would rather go on foot, because on foot the common was not a view but a place, with mud in it.
Coldwell Common lay to the north of the village, two hundred and sixty acres of rough grass and gorse and sedge, with a slow brown brook winding through it and a scatter of cottages along its southern edge like crumbs along a table. It was not beautiful in the way the park was beautiful. It was beautiful in the way a kitchen is beautiful: everything in it was for something. By the pond several hundred geese set up a furious hissing at the Duke's approach, as if they had been warned about him.
"They know a stranger," said Kezia.
"They know a landlord," said Widow Gotobed, from her doorway.
She was eighty-three. She had been born on the common in the year the old King came to the throne and had never slept a night off it, and she sat on a stool at her cottage door with a goose under each arm like a pair of bellows and looked the Duke of Wendlebury up and down with eyes like two currants.
"You've got his ears," she said.
"Whose ears, ma'am?"
"Your grandfather's. Mr. Robert. The one that ran off with the Horncastle girl." She sniffed. "He used to ride across here when I was a maid, on a black horse with no saddle, and the old Duke used to have the keepers out after him. Handsomest young man in the county. Couldn't keep his hands off a horse or a pretty face. You don't look much like him, except the ears."