Something moved at the corner of his mouth.
"I wouldn't dream of standing in your way, Miss Thorley," he said. "Let me wash my hands, and I'll help you with the girth."
II.
He was useful with a saddle; she gave him that. He did not fuss, and he did not try to lift her into it as if she were a parcel; he simply held Sibyl's head while Kezia went up from the block, and then he stood back and watched her settle with his hands in his pockets and his eyes narrowed, the way a man looks at a horse he is thinking of buying.
"You've a good seat," he said.
"I have a good mare," said Kezia. "Everything else is practice."
She took Sibyl out over the park in the mist and down along the edge of Coldwell Common, where the geese were already out and complaining and the turf was so wet that every stride threw up water. She let the mare go along the old drove road for a mile, and the cold air took the breath out of her and put it back in again, and for twenty minutes she did not think about Monday, or London, or her aunt, or the price of bread. When she turned for home the sun had got a little way up behind the cloud and lit the whole sky the colour of pewter.
He was at the pump when she came back into the yard. He had found a clean shirt somewhere—a coarse one, too short in the sleeve, plainly borrowed from one of the lads—and was working the handle with one hand and splashing his face with the other. The water came out so cold it smoked.
"Well?" he said, without turning round.
"She is the best horse in the county," Kezia said, sliding down. "And on Monday she will go to some fat young man from Leicestershire who will ride her at a bullfinch she cannot see over and break both their necks. I hope your master is pleased."
"My master," the man said.
"The Duke. Or have they not told you whose horses you are taking?"
He straightened, shook the water from his hair, and took Sibyl's rein from her. He began, without asking, to run the stirrups up. "I've heard about him," he said. "What's he like? From here, I mean. I've only heard London talk."