Nobody moved but one. He came from the back of the little knot of them, a boy of maybe fifteen, a stammer already working before a word was out. He brought his own coat off his back into the cold, knelt in the muck beside her, and pressed it round the foal without being asked twice.
"D-Dob," he managed, when she looked at him. "Dob Hartley, m-mistress."
"Rub there, Dob. Where I'm not." And he did, fierce and clumsy and glad of the work.
Behind them the other lads began to fetch straw, shamed into it. It was Nan who came with the hot mash, wading across the yard with a steaming bucket and her mouth set. "Give it here." She got a little warmed gruel into the foal off her own thick finger, and as she did she said, not lowering her voice, "You'll mind, my lady, whose word it were to knacker a live foal at dawn quiet, afore the house is up. Same word keeps that black's bucket going out heavy and coming back fouled. I've said it three year, and been told to mind my churns." She wiped her finger. "There. He'll suck now."
And he did. The small head came up, the ears came off their pins, and he butted blind for warmth against Mercy's ruined bodice, and something in her kept as shuttered as this house gave way for a breath.
"Nobody ever asked what I was worth to something living," she said, quiet, looking down at the wet head under her hand. "Only what I cost."
Dob had gone very still beside her, watching her face and not the foal. Then the yard changed. She felt it before she heard it, the lads stiffening, the herd catching the scent of the thing it feared. Simeon Vaux came across the muck unhurried and began, mild as milk, to take his lads off the job.
"Leave it. You've orders." His hand came to the nearest boy's shoulder to steer him, his left hand, the palm of it slick and hairless with some old scald she marked and thought nothing of; and Dob, still kneeling, flinched whole-bodied — a flinch with nothing to do with being touched, for the hand never reached him. A flinch learned. The very flinch, she thought, that the black colt gave at the dark end of the row. She did not yet know why boy and horse should share it.
Vaux looked at her directly then, for the first time. "A mort of trouble, my lady, over a wrong 'un."
"He's not wrong," Mercy said, rising, the foal steady on his feet and pushing at her hip. Sixpence, she thought. For what a widow was reckoned worth, near enough. "He'll stand. I'll have him." And she carried the truth of the fouled bucket and the flinching boy out of that yard folded small inside her, and let them think it was only a foal she had saved.
She asked for the killing-box opened while the light was still low, and the whole stable held its breath, a herd gone still near what it has learned to fear.
"That's not to be done," said the head lad, low. "Master Vaux—"
"Is the master here the duke, or the horse-keeper?" Mercy said, mild, and it was not a question.
Gabriel Thorne, who had come down to the yard because his wife had walked to the dark end of his stable and he could not make himself stay away, said, "Open it."
The colt came off the back wall as the bolt drew, a near-black beast sheeted in old sweat gone to a rime of salt, wall-eyed, the smell off him nothing like a horse worked hard. Mercy stood in the doorway, not going in, not flinching, and read him — the flanks going too fast and too shallow, the sweat where no work had raised it, the eye that rolled not at her but at the near wall, the side a left hand would come from.
"He's not mad," she said. "A mad horse fights the thing in front of it. This one's guarding a side."
The colt screamed and struck the boards and lunged. She was already stepping, flat-handed, toward the swing of his head when a grip closed hard on her shoulder and hauled her back out of the arc of it. Gabriel's hand. She let it move her, turned under it, and found his face close and stricken.
"Don't."