"Buick about?"
"He's in the tack room," Verity said. "I would rather you did not do it today."
The man looked at her. He looked past her at the horse who had his nose in the tub and was making the wet, slow, patient sound of an old animal eating something warm. "It's not my order, miss."
"No," she said. "It is Mr. SK's order, and Mr. Ske has never seen the horse."
"That's very often the way of it," the man agreed without malice. He set the case down on the mounting block. "Now then, I'm not going to move you. I'm going to fetch Buick, and Buick will move you, and then we'll all be about our business."
He went across the yard, and that was when the sound came in under the arch. One horse walking, blown with the hollow ring that a shod hoof makes on wet cobbles in the cold.
Duro came in with his neck dark with sweat and his head low. The man on his back had been in the saddle since 10 the night before. He had ridden from London to Winderby by mail in 29 hours. He had taken his own horse from the inn at 4 in the morning. The last 12 miles he came in the dark. There was a paper in his breast pocket, and he did not want to carry it into his own house in daylight in front of servants. He pulled up in the middle of his own yard. He saw a woman standing in a stable doorway, corn dust on her sleeve, her chin up. She was blocking the way to a horse. He had not been able to make himself go and look at that horse in 3 years.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then the Duke said, "Move away from the door."
"No, your Grace," said Verity Thornburn.
Afterwards she could not have said how long they looked at one another. Long enough for Duro to stamp and swing his quarters round. Long enough for the man from Winderby to come out of the tack room with Ned behind him and then stop dead in the middle of the yard with his hat in his hand.
The Duke got down. He did it stiffly, and he held the saddle a moment before he trusted his legs, which was what 9 and 20 hours will do to any man. He was tall, and he wanted a shave, and there was road dirt to his knees. His hair was dark, with gray coming at the temples early, the way it comes to men who have had two bad years in a row. His eyes when he turned and she could see them properly in the gray light were hazel.
"Say that again."
He said, "No, your Grace."
"Do you know who I am?"
"You are the Duke of Glenn Moore," Verity said. "You came in under your own arch on your own horse, and that man has a pistol case on your mounting block."
Behind her in the box, Almeida went on eating. The wet, contented, grinding sound of it filled the whole yard because nothing else in the yard was making any sound at all. The Duke heard it. Verity watched him hear it. She watched his face do something she did not understand until much later. Not anger, not surprise, something closer to the look of a man who has been struck on an old bruise.
"That horse," he said, "cannot eat. He cannot eat hay."
"Barrett," he said.
"He can eat mash. He has eaten mash every morning since the 9th of December."
"Who gives it to him?"
"I do."
"On whose order?"
"On nobody's order," said Verity.
The Duke looked past her into the dark of the box. He did not come nearer. His hand was still on the saddle. "Buick," he said.
"Your grace."
"Is she telling me the truth?"