Verity did not look up. "When?"
"Ski has it in a letter. Before Lady Day and with company after Easter." Mrs. Mossup set the tray down on the corner of the table away from the paste.
"The Warrington people."
"Yes," Verity said. "I saw the paper."
Mrs. Mossup's mouth did something small. She'd been 34 years in the house. "£80,000," she said. "Is what they say in Winderby. And they say it in the kitchen, too, which I don't allow, and they say it anyway."
"It is not our business, Mrs. Mossup."
"No," said Mrs. Mossup. "It is not." She stood a moment longer, looking at the third bay, where the empty shelves showed the marks of the books that had stood there. "£60," she said in a flat voice, and went out.
The order about the old horse came on the 28th of February in Mr. SK's hand on the estate's paper pinned to the door of the harness room where such things had been pinned for a hundred years. It was headed 'Economies at Oldtown Lady Day'. There were nine items. The seventh was this:
"The gelding Almida, aged, unfit for work or sale, is to be destroyed on or before Lady Day, the cost of his keep being no longer supportable. Buick to arrange with the man from Winderby."
Verity read it at 6:00 in the morning with the scoop in her hand. Ned came out of the tack room behind her and stood and read it too and said nothing for a long time.
"He's not wrong," Ned said at last. "In the money of it, he eats better than the gray mare does, that horse. Six shillings a week in bran, near enough, and he'll not pull a cart, and he'll not carry a man, and there's nobody living would buy him."
"I know what he costs," Verity said. "I have it written down."
"You would." Ned looked at the paper as if it might be different if he waited. "12 year I've had him in that box since he come off the boat."
"Does the Duke know?"
"The Duke," Ned said, "signs what Ski sends. And Ski sends it in a bundle as thick as your wrist and somewhere in the middle of it there's a horse."
Verity folded the corner of the paper back to read the ninth item which was about the reduction of the garden ground and let it fall flat. "There is a boy," she said, "who comes for the skim milk. Besaw's boy. Kit. He was in the box with that horse on Sunday standing on the manger telling him about a fox. Does the Duke know that as well?"
Ned did not answer. There was no answer that was any use.
She went up the ladder and filled the scoop. She came down, made the mash, carried it in. The old horse came round in the box to meet her, his ears going forward the way they always went. Not a great deal. He was 22, but further than they went for anybody else. She stood with her hand under his jaw while he ate. His whiskers were white to the muzzle. There was a scar on his near shoulder, 7 in long, silver. That hair had never grown back on.
"26 days," she said to him.
She did not tell Ned what she meant to do because she did not entirely know, and because a thing said out loud at Oldtown was in Winderby by Friday. She simply went on feeding him. That is not a small thing. It cost her the bran which was in the bin which was the estates. It cost her the 20 minutes and it cost her the six months work and the character that went with it, if anybody chose to make it cost her that.
She thought about it a good deal in the second week of March, standing in the dark with the scoop. She had a brother. Matthew was 16 and lodged with their mother's cousin in Winderby. He was clever with figures in a way that had frightened their father. The boy could do a column in his head faster than Isaac could do it on paper. Lately he had taken to walking out to the new cut where the engineers were setting the line for the branch to the lime kilns. There was a man in Winderby, Mr. Atwood the stationer, who said the engineer would take a boy on articles for a premium of 200 guineas.
200 guineas. Verity had £30 coming to her in June, of which eight was already spoken for. So she knew exactly what she was risking and for what, and she went on doing it. That was her way of deciding things. Other people decided and then did. Verity found that she had been doing a thing for a fortnight and then admitted that she had decided.
The man from Winderby came on the 20th of March at 7 in the morning because he had another job at Kirkstead at 9. Verity heard the cart in the arch while she was in the box with the tub. She knew what it was. Ned had told her the day before in four words, looking at the wall. "Thursday, the Winderby man."
She did not run. She set the tub down where the horse could reach it and went to the door of the box and stood in it with her back to the animal and her hands at her sides. The man got down. He was not a monster. He was a quiet, red-faced person in a good coat with a pistol case under his arm. And he had done this 300 times and he took his hat off to her.
"Morning miss."
"Good morning."