Ned Buick was 71 years old and had been at Old T since he was nine and had put this man on his first pony in the paddock behind the church. He said, "She is, your grace. Twice a day since December. She makes it up herself in the loft and she carries it in and she stands with him while he takes it. Because he'll leave it if he's alone."
"Why?"
Ned looked at Verity. Verity looked at the Duke. "Because he's hungry," she said.
There is a kind of silence that has weight in it. That one had.
"Miss Thornburn." The Duke's voice had nothing in it at all. That was how he had learned to keep it. "You are the person my agent engaged to see to the library."
"I am."
"You are aware that the corn in that loft is mine."
"I am. I have the account of it." She put her hand in her apron pocket and brought out a small ruled book with a marbled cover and held it out to him across the four ft of cobbles between them. "Every feed since the 9th of December. Bran at nine shillings the hundredweight, oats at the Winderby price, and the beet from the home farm at what the farm charges the house. It comes to £2 4s 6d. I have £3 coming to me in June. I would have offered it sooner, but there was nobody here to offer it to."
The Duke looked at the little book in her hand. He did not take it. He turned to the man from Winderby instead. "What are you paid for coming out?"
"Seven and six, your grace, and the same again for the carcass."
"You will be paid the 15 shillings. Go home."
The man was not a fool. He put his hat on, picked up his case, said, "Your grace," and had his cart under the arch inside a minute.
Then the Duke stood in the middle of his yard with his horse's reins over his arm, and he looked at the door of the last box on the north side, and he did not go to it. Verity saw that, too.
"Feed him," the Duke said at last to nobody in particular. "Put it on the house account, not the stables. Buick, take this horse."
He went across the yard to the door under the clock. At the door he stopped with his hand on it and spoke without turning round. "How much does he cost me a week?"
"Six shillings and twopence," said Verity.
"And what is in the last of the 400 books you cannot mend for £60?"
She had not expected that. It took her a moment. "I do not know yet, your grace," she said. "I am at the 62nd."
The Duke went in, the door shut. Somewhere above, a shutter was opened by somebody who had heard a horse. Ned Buick let his breath out slowly and said in a voice that was not quite steady, "Well."
He came to the library on the second day at 4:00 in the afternoon when the light was going. Verity heard him at the far end at the door by the chapel passage, which was the door nobody used. She did not stand up at once. She had a leaf of a Bible of 1611 floating in the tin bath. And a leaf of a Bible of 1611 is not a thing you leave to see who has come in. She lifted it on the sheet of white blotting, tilted it to run the water off the corner, laid it on the felt, and then rose and made her curtsy.
"Your grace."
He had stopped at the third bay. She let him look. It was worth looking at in the way a wreck is. Three tall bays of shelving, the two outer ones full, the middle one empty from the floor to the height of a man. The shadows of the books were still on the wood where the damp had come through them.
"My grandfather bought that whole bay in one week," he said. "In Rome. He wrote to my grandmother that he had ruined them for a hundred years and did not repent of it. He bought well."
"Verity said the Roman books took the water worst. Vellum boards. They cockle."
"They what?"