She looked up and her eyes brown, unremarkable, and steadier than any he had met in 20 years, held his without the smallest apology. If I were laughing at you, Your Grace, you would know. I am doing something you will like a great deal less. I am declining to be embarrassed. Ambrose stared at her.
I do not embarrass easily, Tabitha Ren went on, dipping her pen. I was a governess for six years and a bailiff's clerk for four and I have been shouted at by better men than you and worse ones and I have found that the shouting is never really about me. Now you have come about the stud. You have driven forty miles in the rain. You have ruined a very good pair of boots and I do not think you want a horse at all.
Shall we save each other's afternoon? Why are you here? My sister, Ambrose said before he had decided to say anything, is dying. The pen stopped. He had not meant to say it.
He had not said it aloud to anyone. Not to his steward, not to his physician, not to Cecily herself. It had sat in his chest for five months like a stone in a shoe. Tabitha Ren set the pen down. I am sorry, she said.
Nothing else. No fluttering, no exclaiming, no small hot rush of pity. She simply put down the pen and said it and let it be true. She is nine-and-twenty. Ambrose heard himself say she has a wasting of the lungs and the doctors give her a year and are lying and she has one thing left that she wants which is a gray mare.
She had a gray mare when she was 15. It was sold when my father died along with a good deal else and she has never said one word of reproach to me about it in 14 years. His jaw was tight. There is a gray at Renfield out of Sorrow by Lucifer. She saw it in a catalog.
So, I have come to buy it, and I do not care what it costs, and I have been abominably rude to you, madam, and I find I have no defense to offer except that I have not slept properly since June. The rain went on against the windows. Tabitha Ren rose and went to the door, and said to somebody outside, The brandy, and the good glasses, and tell Hobbes to put his grace's team up for the night, and send to the ford for the carriage. Then she came back and sat down and folded her hands. Her name is Silverwood.