The county had heard the switch, at the cost of one whistle. There was no arguing a mare that came to her own name across a yard; only the sound of it, still hanging in the cold air, and a hundred people who had heard it.
Sir Ambrose Kingsley stirred at the front. "A switched mare is theft," the magistrate said, slow. "Grave theft. But your title, madam, speaks of a boy's death. Where is the boy in a stolen horse?"
"Here," Mercy said, and put her hand on the black colt's neck. She had three men girth him in the open court where all could see — Thady, the honest home-farm lad, and Mr. Reeve himself, that none could cry collusion — and to each the colt stood, shifting his weight, blowing, no more troubled than a horse at a trough.
"Now," Mercy said, "let the man who kept this box these three years girth his own horse." She looked at Vaux across the yard. "Come to him as you've always come. I'll not touch him. Only girth him."
Vaux did not move.
"Your Grace bids you," Gabriel said, from beside his wife, the first he had spoken, very quiet, and it carried to the walls.
Vaux came. He had no road left but forward, and perhaps he thought the horse would fail her; perhaps a man who has managed a thing so long cannot believe it will not still answer his hand. He came at the colt's near side, his left hand rose to the roller, and low in his throat came the two-note chirrup he made to a horse he was about to hurt.
The colt came apart. He went rigid to the tail, the whites came up round his eye, the sweat broke black on him in a single breath. He screamed, the killing-box scream, the sound the whole county had buried a boy to, torn out of him fresh at that hand and that sound alone. He flung himself the length of the rope and stood shaking, sheeted, guarding a wall that was three years gone.
Into that scream a boy's voice broke. "I held his head!" Dob Hartley was through the crowd, white and shaking and past all stammering, the way of it come up out of him too deep now to catch on his teeth. "That morning, the steeplechase, Master Vaux bid me hold the black's head, and he worked summat under the roller, hot, I smelt it hot, and he says it's liniment, and after, when the boy was dead, he says I'd hang if ever I told, that they'd say 'twere me held him—" He was weeping and did not stop. "It's the same hand. It's the same little sound. I've heard it three year in my sleep. He killed Master Kit, and let the horse take it, and me hold my tongue or hang." He turned to the county, his voice breaking clean across. "The horse can't lie for him. Nor can't I, no more."
The horse's terror and the boy's confession landed in the same breath, and there was no unhearing either. Mr. Reeve crossed to the shaking colt, ran a hand down its near side, and lifted the edge of the roller.
"Here is where it was done," he said, and turned the beast so the county could see the old scar along the girth-place, a hand's-breadth of hide gone white and hairless. "A blistering agent laid on bare skin would burn a horse so, and set it frantic to be girthed, and send it bolting the moment a rider's weight came down — worked into the hide, this, not the feed, the morning the boy died." His eye went to Vaux's left hand where it hung, and the county's followed, to the same old white ruin blistered across the palm. "And a man who lays that on bare-handed pays for it in his own hide. There is his receipt."
It was Gabriel who read the arithmetic into the record, in the flat plain voice, because it was owed to Kit that his own brother say it. From Pell's own coping-book: four years of private stud fees for "R. grey," foals moved, coin split, the initials S.V. against each. And from her father's day-book, dated to the very season the true Damson was cried barren: a coper's plain record that the grey he'd sold this house sound and in foal was "lost" within the twelvemonth to a barrenness he set down, in the margin, he did not believe.
Vaux made his last cast, and it was not greed but the true root of the man, and it came up ugly. "Thirty years I gave this house," he said, his voice iron now, all pretense of grief gone. "Kept its beasts, kept its silence when the old duke bred it near to ruin. I was to have the head-groom's cottage and a pension, and he died with it unwrit, and this one" — he flung a hand at Gabriel — "never thought to ask what was owed a man who'd bled thirty years while dukes grieved. So I took my wage out of the grey, since none would give it me honest. And I'd do it again." He heard the confession in it too late, and lunged back to the lie. "But not the boy. Never the boy. You'll hang an honest servant on the word of a coper's barren widow, sold for four pound, bred no better than a mule, who's played her horse-tricks to snare a grieving man and rob his stable from his own bed. She invented these scars. She invented—"
"She did not invent them," said Sir Ambrose Kingsley. The magistrate had the old stud book open in his two hands, the dead duke's own marks under his thumb. "Set down fifteen years since," he said, and looked up, and his voice went across the court. "Fifteen years, Master Vaux, before this lady was ever in the county, before she was widowed, before your Pell ever heard her name. She did not invent these scars. She read them, and a dead duke's pen agrees with her, word for word."
He shut the book, had Nan Sowerby and the boy give their account upon oath before the whole county, and set their names in his pocket-book. Then he turned to the parish constable at the gate. "You have heard them sworn. Take him in charge."
The constable had Vaux by both arms before the man had done drawing breath, and Sir Ambrose committed him then and there to the county gaol, to answer the whole of it at the summer assizes. At the gate Josiah Pell, who had come to buy and stood too long to watch, found the way barred. The buyers drew their custom away in a body. Vaux went across the yard he had ruled so long, past the box he had kept three years, and did not look at the horse. The horse, quiet now, watched him go.
And then it was only the crowning left. The settlement was long since made — signed and witnessed the week she came to this house, and put past his own hand into the trustees' keeping. Gabriel had the solicitor who drew it bring the recorded copy forward now, the Colt Hallow cottage and its income vested to her sole and separate use, and held it up so any who cared to could see her name.
"My wife came to this house sold for four pounds," he said, "and I have heard men in this yard, this morning, call her a coper's widow bred no better than a mule." He did not raise his voice, and every soul there leaned to catch it. "She is the reason my brother's name will be re-cut on his stone without the word reckless. She is the reason a poisoned horse grazes loose in my yard and an honest boy holds his head up. I'll not have any man think she stays for a duke's roof over her head." He held the paper high for them all to see. "This was signed and sealed and put past my own hand the week she came to this house. The cottage and its income are hers in law, her own and separate, whether she bides under my roof or lives a hundred miles from it. She is free of me entire, and was before ever this morning came. No cottage held over her, no price, no debt. Whatever she does now, she does by her own choosing."