Something moved behind his eyes, and was put away. "Practice."
The stout woman from the yard came in with the meat, set it down hard, and gave Mercy the flat measuring look of before, grey at the temple, hands scalded red from a life of hot water and hotter ovens.
"Nan Sowerby," the duke said. "She has cooked in this house longer than I've been in it."
"And'll cook in it after," Nan said, unbothered, and to Mercy: "There's them here as measure a body by what it costs. Sold, bought, four pound, and suchlike." Her eyes flicked once to the door Vaux had stood by. "Don't let 'em teach it you." She set a hot brick wrapped in flannel by Mercy's feet without asking leave. "That black at the end's fed wrong. His bucket goes out heavier than any horse on the place and comes back with muck in the bottom no clean bran ever left. I've said it three year to them as won't hear it."
"Nan," said a voice from the passage, even, unhurried. Simeon Vaux stood in the doorway with the headcollar still over his arm. "The kitchen wants you."
Nan went. She did not hurry, but she went.
Vaux stayed in the passage. He addressed the duke, in the voice of a good servant who has carried a hard house on his back and asks no thanks for it. "Your Grace. If her ladyship is to bide here, she'll want the way of the stable. The grey mare's not to be handled, on your own order given after Master Kit, nor the black colt neither. It's no place for a lady, and less for one new to us." He inclined his head, courteous as a churchwarden. "For her own safety, I'd have it plain from the first."
"It is my order," Gabriel said, tired, not looking up. "Let it stand."
"Your Grace." And Vaux was gone, soft-footed, the one man in the house who never seemed to be listening because he was the thing the house listened for.
When they were alone the duke rose and walked her to the stair himself. To reach it he had taken the long way round the hall, past the cold parlour, rather than the short way along the wall that backed the yard. A man will go a hundred paces out of his road to keep off a leg that hurts.
"You'll want your rest," he said. "I keep to the east rooms. You'll not be troubled." A pause; the self-indictment again, quieter. "You married little enough. I'll not make it less by pretending you married more."
He left her at the stair. Mercy stood in the cold hall of a house that feared its own stable, and heard, from far off through the stone, the low murmur of the servants telling something to the dark: the boy that died used to whistle the grey daft, could bring her across a field with two notes, loved that mare better than his own kin.
Her father had taught her that whistle before she could plait her hair. She found she had shaped it, dry against her teeth, no breath behind it, standing alone at the foot of a duke's stair, in a house where the grey mare was forbidden her, the black colt forbidden her, and the one man who forbade them had never once looked her in the face. She let the breath stay unspent. There would be a morning for it.
Grey light came up over the moor, and it was into the frozen muck-yard, in her one good dress still, that Mercy Aldous walked at the dawn of her second day a duchess, because she had heard the lads shouting. She came round the corner of the foaling-box and saw what they had already given up on — a chestnut foal down in the freezing mud, wet-slicked and steaming, its dam nowhere near, three stable-lads standing off with the stillness of men waiting for the knacker's cord.
"Off a barren mare," one said, seeing her, as if that settled the beast's worth. "Come wrong, come weak. Master Vaux's give the word."
A foal off a mare the estate called barren. Mercy filed it, as her father had taught her to file a thing that did not sit square, and knelt. The mud took her skirts to the knee, cold as a grave, and she paid it no mind. The foal's eye rolled white, its breath shallow and quick, its ears pinned flat. She ran a hand down the wet neck and found the pulse: fast, but not the ragged flutter of a dying thing. Only the fast beat of a thing too long cold that had stopped trying.
"He's not come wrong," she said, low, to all of them. "He's come cold. There's a deal of difference, if any of you cared to learn it."
She got her arms under the sodden body, hauled it into her lap out of the wet, and began to rub, hard, bringing the blood back up from the heart outward. "Straw. And a dry sack. And whatever's warm."