"Then they'll know you said what you thought," he said, "which is more than most people here have done for me since May."
"Oh, do not," said Kezia. "Do not make it a compliment. I will not be flattered out of this. You could have said one word. Three words: I am Carrick."
"I did tell you I'd come about the horses."
"In a manner of speaking," she said, in a fair imitation of his voice—a flat, northern sort of voice, with Ireland lying over it in places like a wash of colour—and saw him wince, and was glad, and then was immediately ashamed of being glad.
They stood in the yard. From the end box came the small soft sounds of the foal butting at his mother, and the mare shifting her weight, and the straw.
"I'll say this," the Duke of Wendlebury said at last, "and then I'll let you go, because I can see you want to, and I've kept you long enough on false terms. I let you talk because it was the first honest account of myself I'd heard since I came into this. Everyone else either bows or writes. You didn't do either. That's one reason. The other is that I liked hearing you talk, and I didn't want it to stop. Both reasons were for my own benefit, and neither of them excuses it. I'm sorry."
It was a good apology. Kezia had heard a great many apologies in her life, most of them her uncle's to her aunt, and she knew a good one when she heard it. That was precisely what made it intolerable. She had been prepared for him to laugh, or to bluster, or to pull rank—to become, in short, the man she had been describing. Instead he stood there in a stable lad's shirt with blood still under his fingernails and told her the truth, and it left her nowhere to put her anger down.
"I said you were unbearable," she said. "I find I was imprecise."
And she turned and walked out of the yard, not quickly, with her back as straight as a pew, across the wet park toward the rectory, and did not once look round, though it cost her more than the gallop had.
IV.
Matthew Sowerby went into the house by the servants' door and stood for a full minute in the stone passage outside the still-room with his back against the wall and his eyes shut.
He had done it right. He knew he had done it right. Mr. Hendry had drilled him on the bow every evening for a fortnight, ever since the letter had come saying the Duke would arrive on the thirtieth, and Mrs. Oddie had told him, when the stable boy came running up at half past five to say the Duke was already here, had ridden in alone on a hired hack at midnight and gone straight to Bathsheba's box and was there yet: "You'll know him, Matthew. He'll be the one with the mare on his shirt. Go down and bow to him as if he were the King, and don't you dare look surprised, whatever he's wearing."
So he had not looked surprised. He had looked straight past Miss Thorley as if she were a gatepost and given the Duke the best bow of his life. And then he had seen her face.