"I have thought." Kezia pulled her gloves through her hand. "I will take the post. On terms."
"I thought you might have terms."
"Eighty pounds is too much for the work at first, and too little for it later, and I will not be paid for work I have not done. Sixty for this year. Eighty when the calendar of the rolls is finished. A desk in the estate office, not in the library, because I will not be a lady with a hobby. And the right," she said, "to tell you, whenever I think it, that you are wrong. In front of Mr. Pridmore, if necessary."
"Pridmore tells me I'm wrong twice a day already. He'll be glad of the help." His mouth moved. "Done. All of it."
They stood. The colt had found the milk. The snow had begun again, very lightly, drifting down through the lantern light outside the box like ash.
"He wants a name," said the Duke. "Pridmore says the old Duke always let the first person who saw a foal by daylight name it. That was you."
Kezia considered the colt. He looked back at her over his mother's flank, with milk on his whiskers and the white snip on his nose and a perfect, unshakeable conviction that the world had been arranged for his convenience.
"Horncastle," she said.
There was a short silence. Then the Duke of Wendlebury laughed—not the short, unwilling laugh that she had got out of him in the stable yard three weeks before, but a long, helpless one, so that he had to put his forehead down on his arms on the half-door, and Bathsheba laid back her ears at him.
"My grandmother," he said at last, when he could, "would have liked you very much."
"I said a great many things about your grandmother on that cobbled spot behind you," said Kezia, "and I should like to have something better on the record."
The yard gate creaked.