By midday Mr. Sayer arrived at Eastmere, a gray-haired veterinary surgeon whose manner was as careful as Eleanor's. He examined Blackthorn without rushing, then asked to see the saddle and girth exactly as they had been removed. The concealed metal strip, he said, was not ordinary wear. Someone had opened the stitching, placed it against the horse's side, and closed the leather in a way intended to hide the alteration. The wound was consistent with repeated pressure from the same place, and the horse's reaction was entirely understandable.
Vane listened from the far end of the tack room, his hands behind his back. "An unfortunate repair," he said. Mr. Sayer looked at him over his spectacles. "Then it was a particularly unfortunate repair, sir, because it serves no useful purpose and causes a painful injury." Alexander requested a written statement. The surgeon agreed, adding that a horse who recovered from the wound might well return to his former temperament if handled patiently and never forced through pain.
Young Thomas Reed, the stable boy who had been holding Blackthorn's bridle, shifted uneasily by the door. Eleanor noticed his reddened eyes and the way he kept glancing at Vane. Later, as she was placing clean water outside Blackthorn's stall, Thomas approached with his cap clutched against his chest. "Miss Hale," he whispered, "I changed the girth yesterday morning. Mr. Vane said the old one was worn and handed me that one himself. I did not look beneath it. I swear I did not know."
She believed his distress, but she did not let him leave with only her reassurance. "You must say that in front of Lord Harcourt and Mr. Sayer," she told him. Thomas glanced toward the stable yard, frightened of losing his place. "My mother depends on my wages." Eleanor put the water bucket down. "Then we shall make certain your words are heard as the truth, not turned into another weapon against someone with no protection."
Thomas's account changed the investigation. Vane had claimed the girth was an old piece of equipment frayed by constant use, yet a local saddler confirmed he had delivered two new girths to the estate only a week earlier. The one found on Blackthorn was not among them. Its leather carried the faint stamp of a workshop in Bath, the very city in which Sir Lionel March maintained his principal stables. A mark alone could prove little, but it gave Alexander a reason to examine every expense and every proposed sale more closely.
For two days Alexander and Eleanor worked with the estate's solicitor, Mr. Bell, comparing Edward Hale's notes against the official records. They sat at opposite ends of a long table in the library, while the afternoon light moved over ledgers that had once seemed as dull as stone. In several places, amounts had been entered and then written over. In others, the names of buyers changed between the original receipts and the final account. A repeated pattern emerged: horses sold for modest sums on paper had gone to a dealer associated with Sir Lionel, after which much larger payments passed through an agency controlled by Vane's cousin.