Then a voice came too hearty over the near rail, and the herd of the yard stiffened at once.
"Now there's a picture." Josiah Pell had ridden in on fair business, hat pushed back, all teeth. He leaned on the rail as a man leans who wants to be seen easy, and Mercy read the ease as she read a horse showing itself off for a buyer, head carried high and false, the body saying look how sound I am with nothing sound under it.
"Foal off a barren mare. There's a wonder. Barren, they told me, and the get sold as slink." He laughed, and his eyes went past her to the grey in the near paddock, and stayed a beat too long. "Your Grace should count his greys before the fair. A man loses track of what he's breeding." He tipped his hat. "Only a jest."
It was not a jest, and Mercy knew it, even as she half-doubted her own knowing: men are not easy with the things they mean. And at his shoulder, come up soft, headcollar over his arm, Simeon Vaux turned and looked at her. Full at her, for the first time since the carriage window; not past her, not through her, but the long steady look a man gives a thing he has decided he must now account for. She met it, and let the whistle die on her lips, and thought: there. Now you see me.
The corner of the tack-room where Kit's things still hung kept its own cold, and Gabriel Thorne stood in its doorway, his boots unable to carry him across the sill. Three years. The room had kept its own weather, and his brother's smell too, saddle-soap and neat's-foot oil. A snaffle on the hook where Kit had left it. A coat too small for anyone now. Sixteen years of a life on three pegs, dusted over, and Gabriel stood at the edge of it as he stood at the edge of the yard — the long way round, the leg he would not put weight on.
Mercy went in for him. She did it as she did everything in his house, without asking leave he could not have given, gentle as with a thing that would break at a wrong step. She lifted the snaffle off its hook and turned it in the light. No poor boy, no how sad, none of the words the county had worn smooth on Kit's grave; only the bit turned in her hand as a workwoman turns a tool.
"Come here," she said. "Give me your hand."
He did not want to, but came anyway, over the sill at last, into the cold that smelled of his brother, and she took his hand as she'd take a lad's to show him a thing, and laid his fingers down the foreleg of the saddle-horse in the crossties, along the cannon, into the warm groove behind the bone.
"There. That cord under your fingers. That's a tendon sound. Cool and tight and gives you nothing." She moved his hand up, patient. "A hurt one's hot and thick and flinches off you. You'd know the difference in the dark, once you'd felt both. Shut your eyes."
"I don't—"
"Shut your eyes. Your fingers know more than your grief will let them."
He shut his eyes. Her hand stayed over his against the horse's leg, and neither let go as fast as they should have. Gabriel stood in the room he could not enter with a stranger's hand warm over his own, and something in the frozen middle of him cracked and ran for the first time in three years.
"Kit could do this," he said. The words came up on their own, out of the crack. "Blind. He'd stand in the dark and run a hand down a leg and tell you which foreleg a horse had favored a week gone." He opened his eyes. "That I have never let myself say plainly, because it is not survivable. A boy who could read a horse in the dark does not get run away with by a fresh colt at a walk into water. Something took that horse from him."
She had gone still, her hand over his, and he understood she had known this a long time and only waited for him to bear the knowing.
"I buried it under the guilt," he said. "I killed him by inattention. I have said that a hundred times, and a wound I can live inside, because a wound is only pain. But if it was not inattention—" He stopped. "If someone did this, I did not fail my brother. I let his killer keep my stable three years and call me master. That is not a wound. That is a thing I would have to act on, and I have not had the constitution for it."
She turned his hand over and read the back of it as she read the colt, the freckle-map across his wrist, the old rein-callus; and the terror came on him quiet and total. The county, in a jest across a carriage window, had brought into his house the one creature who could ruin him twice. Once by proving him a fool; once, worse, by making him want to live long enough to be a fool forgiven.
"My father kept a day-book," she said, low, still holding his wrist. "A horse-leech's ledger — a horse-doctor's book — every beast he doctored, every deal he stood witness to. The season before he died he sold this house a grey mare's whole line, then lost her. Barren, they wrote her. He never believed it. He wrote in the margin, in his own hand, that a mare doesn't go barren the same year her price triples. He died certain something had been done, and none to hear it but a coper's daughter." She let his hand go. "I have the book."
Gabriel looked at her across the cold room where his brother's coat hung too small on its peg, and did not take his hand back, and was more afraid of her than of any horse in his stable. "Then we are neither of us mad," he said. "God help us both."