"His heart's going like a hunted hare." She said it low, for him, her shoulder still under his hand and neither marking it. "Put your fingers here, under the jaw, when he'll let you. That's not rage, your Grace. Rage tires. This has run at that speed for three years. A horse poisoned by inches, and kept just short of dying of it."
His hand did not leave her shoulder. "Poisoned."
"Fed something that frights the body and clears slow, topped up before it clears. A vicious horse you cannot cure. A drugged one you can. Take away the drug and wait. If I'm wrong he stays a devil and you've lost a week's bran. If I'm right he comes gentle, and the coming-gentle names the hand that did it."
She turned and found old Thady Muir at the edge of the household, sixty years of horses in his hands and none let near this box in three. "You've kept horses longer than I've breathed, Master Muir. Come lay your hand where I said. I'll not have it be my word they weigh."
The old man came. It cost him to cross to that door, but he came, waited out a lull, laid two knotted fingers under the black jaw, and stood a long moment with his eyes shut like a man at prayer.
"Sixty year," Thady said at last, hoarse. "I never felt a heart do that in a horse as weren't dying. And he en't dying." He drew his hand back slow. "This colt's been done to."
The word went round the servants like cold water. Mercy watched their faces change, not toward her but toward the box and the thing that had lived among them under the wrong name. To Gabriel alone, under the murmur, she said the rest plain.
"Three things, and I'll stake my name on each. He's drugged, not mad. The dose is kept up, or he'd have cleared long since. And it's done from the left. Whoever tends this box comes at him left-handed, and the horse has learned all its fear from one hand."
Thady's grey face had gone greyer. "There's but one man goes in that box," he said. "One, these three year. On the duke's own order."
Behind them all, easy, the headcollar over his arm, Simeon Vaux said, "That's a deal of learning, my lady, for four pound." He smiled, and it did not reach past his mouth. "I'd not wager the duke's stable on a coper's guesswork. But then I only keep the beasts. I don't price them."
Nobody laughed. That, more than anything, was the shift: that in this yard, this once, nobody laughed with him.
By noon the cold had burned off, the home paddock a shining slick, and it was there, where the whole household could see, that the barren mare's foal stood up on four legs of his own and would not be told he was a wrong 'un. Three days of Nan's warmed mash, a dry corner, Mercy's hands night and morning; and the chestnut given up in the muck now butted his hard head against her hip for milk hard enough to drive her back a step.
"Greedy," she told him, and there was something in her face when she said it that the lads had not seen before. She did not mean to whistle. It rose the way a thing long held rises when the guard is down, two notes, low, her father's call, the one she had shaped dry against her teeth the night she first came. She was not calling anything. She was only letting it go.
Three heads came up along the far fence. The weanlings she had handled these two mornings, hand-raised orphans the yard had let run ragged, lifted off the grass as one and came to her at the trot, ears pricked forward. Sixpence swung to face them, and for a moment four young horses were gathered to one woman in a yard that had not seen a horse come to hope in three years.
Gabriel Thorne stood at the corner of the tack-room and watched it. She marked him without turning. He had come the long way round again, she knew his roads now, but he had come. He stood with his hand on the cold stone and watched his dreaded yard fill with soft eyes and forward ears at two notes off his wife's mouth. The thing in him that had held its shape around a pain for three years shifted its weight, once, and did not know it had.
"They come to her," he said, to Thady, low, as if he needed another man to say it before he could believe it.
The old groom had come to the rail. He watched the weanlings mob her, and took his hat off to a coper's widow sold for four pound. "I've kept horses sixty year, your Grace," Thady said. He did not lower his voice, and the lads were near enough, and Nan in the kitchen door, and that was the point of it. "Man and boy, under three dukes. I never saw a hand like it, nor a truer eye. Whatever she come here as," and he looked at her, level, "she's a horsewoman. I'll say it where any may hear."
It went round the servants the way the other word had gone round the box, but warm this time, the herd turning toward a thing instead of away. Nan, in the doorway, wiped her hands on her apron and did not trouble to hide her face. Mercy said nothing. She had learned young that to answer a thing like that was to make it smaller, so she only laid her hand flat on Sixpence's neck and let the old man's word stand, and did not tell them her chest had gone tight.