The frost had welded the coach door shut, so they took her out through the window. Josiah Pell went first, boots ringing on the cobbles of a yard she did not yet know, and then he reached back and drew her through the carriage window by the wrist, the way a man lifts down a bolt of cloth he has already paid for. "Four pound, or the widow," he called to the mounted man across the yard, cheerful as a fair-day. "Take the widow. She eats less than a horse and breeds no better."
Mercy Aldous came down onto the stones of Ravensmoor in her one good dress. She did not fall. She did not thank him. She had known the words were coming since the debt was reckoned in Colt Hallow, and a thing you have foreseen cannot be made to hurt you fresh. Horses taught that lesson before men ever did.
The mounted man did not answer the jest. He sat a tall grey some distance off, wrapped against the cold, and looked at her the way a man looks at a bill he cannot pay and cannot dispute. That would be the duke. Gabriel Thorne, sixth of that name, who had let his brother be buried and his stable shut and his grief harden over the both of them like ice over a well.
"Nay, take her back," one groom muttered to another, not low enough. "House buys itself a coper's leavings now. That's what we're come to."
None of them asked why a horse-leech's daughter had let herself be handed over to this house for the last four pound of her dead husband's horse-debt — a bargain she had offered and not been forced to — or what she already knew that they did not.
She was still learning the place, a great shuttered seat with half its windows blind, when the sound came from the dark end of the stable. A scream. High, and torn, and rising. Every man in the yard went stiff with it, and a look passed between two of the lads that she knew at once. They thought the sound was murder in a horse, the settled madness of a beast that had killed and would kill again.
She heard it otherwise. A frightened thing and a vicious thing do not sound alike, and that noise from the killing-box at the black end of the row was fear. Old fear, worn smooth. A horse afraid of a thing that came to it again and again, and not one soul here had troubled to learn the difference. She kept her face still.
One man in the yard did not look at her at all. Pell haggled, the grooms gaped, the duke sat his grey like a monument to a battle already lost. This one stood by the tack-room door with a headcollar over his arm and gave the scream no more mind than the wind, a man who had heard it every day for three years and knew to the hour when it would come and cease. She marked him, and did not yet know his name was Simeon Vaux.
Off past the kitchen a stout woman crossed with a churn on her hip, stopped, took the measure of Mercy in a hard glance, and went on. Slower, though.
"Well," said Pell, pocketing something, well pleased. "There's your four pound settled, the fair eight weeks off, and no more owing between us." He tipped his hat to the duke, and to Mercy not at all. "She's a quiet one. You'll get no trouble of her."
He was wrong, though it would be spring before any of them knew how wrong.
The duke gathered his reins. He had not spoken one word to her, nor she to him, and the horse at the dark end screamed again into the cold, and Mercy Aldous, given over for the last four pounds of a dead man's debt, looked down that shuttered row toward the sound no one else could read, and thought: I know why I am here. Not one of you does.
The cold had followed her indoors, and by suppertime it had settled in the great house as though it paid no rent anywhere else. They gave her a wedding of sorts before they gave her a meal — a curate with a running nose, an archbishop's special licence bought express so a duke might wed within his own walls, two words in a chapel that smelled of cold stone and mice, and the register signed and dated before two witnesses fetched in from the kitchen. Mercy Aldous became a duchess in the time it took to boil an egg.
What the county took for a grieving man's whim had a colder root. His father's will bound the whole estate to his marrying before the spring fair, else Ravensmoor and every horse in it passed to the next man in the entail; so a paper wife had been sought through Pell — the coper, the horse-dealer, who brokered such matters as he brokered beasts — separate rooms, an independent settlement promised her in her own right, nothing more asked of either side. Pell held the note of Mercy's dead husband against the last four pound of the debt, and when she learned the terms the duke wanted, she made herself the answer before another candidate could be found.
Supper was two of them at the end of a table meant for twenty, the candles guttering, the house listening. That was the thing she marked first. A great house should have the settle and tick of a thing lived in, but this one held itself watchful and half-turned from its own stable, in the wary stillness of a badly handled horse that will not trust the space behind its own shoulder — not peace but management.
"You should know what you have married," Gabriel Thorne said, when the soup had come and gone untouched by either of them.
She waited.
"My brother died on a horse of this house. Kit. Sixteen." He turned his glass a quarter-turn on the cloth and did not drink from it. "The county calls the colt a killer. They are right to. I kept the beast; I let the boy ride in that yard; I looked at nothing and asked nothing, and so I killed him as surely as if I had thrown him myself." He said it flat, the way a man reads a charge he has already pleaded guilty to. "You have married that man."
Mercy looked at him a long moment. A horse run too long on a bad leg favors the sound side without knowing, its whole body organized around a pain it will not name. He sat his chair exactly so. She said only, "You've had three years to say that of yourself. You say it very smooth."