"Your grace."
"How much?"
"Two quarts of bran, a quart of the crushed oats, and the beet from the crock."
He made the mash himself that morning badly with too much water and carried it in and stood at the horse's shoulder for the whole 40 minutes while it was eaten. He did not talk to her. When it was finished, he took the tub out to the pump and washed it himself, which no duke in the history of England has ever done twice, and then he went in to breakfast with his cuffs wet.
The next morning he was there again. By the end of the month it had become a custom of the house, unremarked, invariable, and impossible to stop without an argument nobody wanted. Verity made the mash. The Duke carried it in. Ned Buick stood in the doorway with his ruined hands in his pockets and said what he thought about the weather. They talked in the end because two people cannot stand in a stable for 40 minutes a day for 6 weeks and say nothing. But they talked about the things that were in front of them, which is the only way some men will talk at all.
He learned that her father had bound for his father, and that she had been in the house at 10 years old, holding the ledger, while Isaac Thornburn measured a spine. She learned that Duro had been bought in Lisbon out of a lot of remounts for 14 Guineas. The man who sold him had sworn on his mother that the horse was five. The horse had been 10 if he was a day. He learned that she had a brother who could do a column of figures in his head. He learned that there was a man in Winderby who took boys on articles for 200 Guineas as some she said in the same flat voice she used for the price of bran. She learned that he had gone into the army at 19 with his father's curse on him. He had come home at 8 and 20 to 3 weeks of a dying man who had never once in that time asked him what the war had been like. Neither of them said one word about Michaelmas.
The boy came on Tuesdays and Fridays for the skim milk with a can nearly as big as himself. By the middle of May, he had discovered that if he came half an hour early, there was a horse to be looked at. Kit Gower was 8. He was small for it, with his mother's coloring, and a way of standing perfectly still when grown people spoke, which is a thing that children learn in houses where money is short.
On the last Friday in May, he was in the box with Almeida, standing on the edge of the manger with one hand flat on the old horse's neck. The Duke came round the corner of the coach house and stopped dead. Verity saw the whole of it from the loft door above. She saw the Duke stand there for the length of four breaths, looking at a small boy on the edge of a manger. She saw him take one step back as a man does when the ground has moved and turn and walk out under the arch away the lime road without a hat at 8:00 in the morning. He left his breakfast standing on the table.
Ned came out of the tack room and looked after him. "That's Tom Gower's lad," he said.
"I know it. I... well." Ned rubbed his jaw. "You'll not have heard the whole of it then."
He told her standing in the doorway of the harness room in about 200 words because that was as much as he was going to say about it in daylight. Sergeant Thomas Gower of Nether Old Tarn had gone out to Spain with the Duke with the Honorable Mr. Carbry as he was then in the spring of 1809. He had been the Duke's own man for 3 years. In the retreat out of Burgos in the wet October of 1812, an order had to be carried back 7 mi in the dark over bad ground. There was one horse in the troop that would go in the dark over bad ground. It was Almeida. So the Duke had given his sergeant his own horse and sent him. The horse came in at first light, with the reins broken, and the near stirrup gone, and Tom Gower's blanket still rolled behind the saddle. Nobody ever learned any more than that. There were 400 men lost in that week, and no ground held afterwards to look for them on, and the war went on for another two years.
"He wrote to Bess himself," Ned said, "off his own hand from Spain. And there's been £8 a year paid to her out of the estate ever since through Sket regular." He looked at the boy in the box. "And he's not been down to that cottage. Not once in 4 year. Bess would tell you herself. There's no blame in her about it. She says a man does what he can carry."
The confession when it came was not made in a drawing room and it was not made to a friend. It was made in the harness room on the 10th of June at 10 at night. The storm had brought the gutter down again at the east end. Verity had been up a ladder in the rain with a bucket at 8:00 and had come down soaked through to find that the Duke had been on the other end of the same ladder. They stood in the harness room with the lantern and the smell of wet wool and neat's-foot oil waiting for the rain to slacken.
There were nine saddles on the racks along the wall. Eight of them were dressed and hung square in their order, the way a good stableman keeps them. The ninth was at the dark end under a sack with the leather gone gray and blooming. She had asked Ned about it in her first week and had been told, "Leave that one."
The Duke was looking at it now. "He was 29," he said.
Verity said nothing. There is a kind of quiet that is not an absence of speech, but a room made for it.
"He had a wife in the village and a boy he had never seen. He had one great fault, which was that he could not be told anything. If you gave Gower an order he had already decided against, he would carry it out perfectly, and then explain to you for a fortnight why you had been wrong." The Duke's voice did not change at all. "I sent for him at 8 at night. I said, 'I want this back at the colonel's hands before 4.' He said, 'On that horse, sir, or on mine.' And I said, 'On mine.' And I held the stirrup before him myself, and that is the last thing that ever passed between us."
The rain came on hard against the door.
"I have been to Warrington twice this year," the Duke said. "I have been to London five times since Christmas. I have sat in a room in Lombard Street for 4 hours with a man who wanted to know what my land would fetch, and I have not walked half a mile down that lane to say to Bess Gower that her husband was the best man I ever had under me. I have paid her £8 a year instead."
"Why?" said Verity. She asked it plainly without softening it. Because she had learned in the stable that he could not bear to be handled.
"Because she will forgive me," he said. "And I have no idea in the world what to do with that."
Verity looked at the gray saddle under its sack. "Then take her something that wants doing," she said. "Not money. Her roof or her boy's schooling or the thorn hedge behind that cottage which is down in three places and lets the sheep in on her garden. Go about that and let her forgive you while your back is turned and your hands are full. It is the only way anybody ever takes it."
The Duke turned his head and looked at her for a long moment in the lantern light. "Is that how you took it?" he said.
"I have never been forgiven for anything," said Verity. "I have not had the leisure." And she heard him laugh once, low, surprised out of him, the first time in her hearing, and very nearly the last that summer.
The 1st of June came and went, and nothing was said about the end of her engagement. And on the 4th of June, Mrs. Mossup moved her out of the still room passage into a proper room on the north side with a window and a table. By then the wall in the third bay was drying. The shelves were off it and stacked in the chapel passage, and the gutter had been mended twice.