III.
There is a particular silence that follows a dropped tray. Kezia had heard it at dinners: the instant in which everyone at the table has seen the soup on the carpet and no one has yet decided whether to notice. The stable yard had that silence now. The pump dripped into it. The barn cat on the mounting block began, with great deliberation, to wash one paw.
She looked at the man in the borrowed shirt. He looked back at her. He did not smile, which was something. He did not look away, which was something else.
"Thank you, Matthew," he said quietly, not taking his eyes off her. "Tell Mrs. Oddie I'll be in directly. And tell Mr. Quarrendon he may wait."
Matthew bowed again—a smaller bow this time, as if the first had used up most of his supply—and went back across the yard with the stiff, careful gait of a young man who very much wished to run and knew he must not.
"Your Grace," said Kezia.
It came out perfectly level. She was proud of that, later. Her face was burning from the collar of her habit to the roots of her hair, and her heart was going like Sibyl's at the end of a gallop, and she could hear in her head, with horrible clarity, every word she had said in the last half hour—unbearable, and raised by the horses, and a horse-coper's daughter at Horncastle fair, which was his grandmother, which was his grandmother—but her voice came out level, and she dropped him a curtsey as exact as any she had ever made in the assembly rooms at Huntingdon.
"Miss Thorley," he said. "I should have told you."
"Yes," she said. "You should."
"I'll not pretend I didn't know I should. I knew it the moment you said you'd come about the grey. I let it go by." He rubbed his face with one hand; she saw the knuckles were split, and that he had a half-healed rope burn across the palm. "And then you began talking, and I let that go by too."
"You asked me." Kezia heard her voice rise, and caught it, and brought it down. "You asked me what he was like. What you were like. You stood there with your arms folded and asked me to describe you, and listened, and said is he and how so, like a man feeding a dog bits of cheese to see if it will sit up and beg."
"That's fair," he said.
"Do not tell me it is fair. I know it is fair. I do not need you to stamp it." She took a breath. The cold air hurt. "Do you know what you have done? You have made me a story. By tonight it will be all over the servants' hall—Matthew Sowerby will not be able to help himself; he is a good boy but his face is a public notice—and by Sunday it will be all over the parish, and every person in Wendlebury St. Giles will know that the rector's niece stood in the Duke's own stable yard in her oldest habit and called him unbearable to his face and did not have the wit to see whose face it was."