Kezia should have stopped there. She knew it afterwards and she half knew it at the time. But she had been awake since five, and she had just galloped two miles in the cold, and she had been carrying the thing about inside her for four months with no one to say it to but her aunt, who agreed with everything and therefore was no use at all.
"He is unbearable," she said.
The man undid the girth. "Is he?"
"Entirely. I have never met him, so I may say so with perfect freedom; it is only acquaintance that obliges one to be fair." She pulled off her gloves finger by finger. "He is a cousin of some kind—third or fourth; the old Duke had to have the heralds look it up. His grandfather was the younger son who married a horse-coper's daughter at Horncastle fair and was turned out of doors for it, and the family have been buying and selling horses in odd corners of the kingdom ever since. Ireland, I believe, lately. Which would be nothing against him—my own father was a hosier and died owing money to half of Leicester—except that he behaves as though he had been raised by the horses and not the dealers."
"How so?"
"He did not come to the funeral. His own cousin—the man who left him all this—buried in the family vault with the whole county in black, and the new Duke could not trouble to cross the Irish Sea. He has not set foot here in four months. He has done everything by letter through Mr. Quarrendon, the agent, and every letter has been worse than the last. First he would not open the house, and the servants have been living like mice in a cathedral. Then he refused the Lord Lieutenant's dinner. Then he sold the hounds. Then he cancelled the audit dinner at Michaelmas—do you know what that is, in a place like this? It is the one day in the year that half the cottagers in this parish eat beef. My godfather never missed it in forty years. He used to carve. And now"—she lifted her chin at the long row of loose boxes—"he is selling the hunters, before the turf has settled on the old man's grave, and the whole parish knows why."
The man had stopped with the saddle in his arms. "Why?"
"Because he means to shut up the house and live in London on the rents, and spend them at Tattersall's, where I am told he knocked down Lord Fennimore in the yard in front of fifty people at the end of June. And because he has put his name to a petition to enclose Coldwell Common." She heard her voice change on that and could not help it. "Which is the only reason I am not sorrier for Sibyl than I am. A horse can be sold and go on being a horse. Forty families on that common cannot be sold. They will only be turned off it, and told they ought to be grateful for the improvement."
The foal creaked again in the end box. Bathsheba answered it with a low, private sound.
"Forty families," the man said, after a moment. "I'd heard it was eleven."
"Then you heard it from Mr. Quarrendon. Eleven is the number of cottages with a right of common written in the leases. The other thirty have kept a cow or a pig or a dozen geese out there since the time of King Charles, and paid the hayward his penny, and nobody ever asked them for a lease, because nobody ever needed to." She looked at him. "You seem very interested, for a man who has come for the horses."
"I'm interested in most things," he said, and went into the tack room with the saddle, and came out again without it. "And you've told the Duke's people all this? Quarrendon, or the lawyers?"
"I wrote to the Duke himself in July. I had a reply from Mr. Quarrendon thanking me for my interest and assuring me that His Grace had the welfare of all his people at heart. It is in the kitchen fire at the rectory now. It burned very well. Better than the coal, which is wet." Kezia drew a breath. "I beg your pardon. You did not ask for a sermon. My uncle preaches two on a Sunday and I fear I have caught the habit."