He looked at her across the cold rail, his wife of a fortnight, holding his dead father's book like a thing she meant to give back whole; and the ground of the marriage tilted under them both and settled at a new angle, and neither named it. "Ours," he said, trying the weight of the word, and found it would bear.
Behind them the ringer cropped the frozen grass, deaf to a dead boy's whistle, and far off over the ridge the true grey stood in a stranger's barn, not knowing she was still waited for.
On the eighth day the frost gave over to a grey thaw, and the killer horse lipped a carrot off a boy's flat palm and did not scream. They had done it Nan's way, the only way. Every bucket she measured herself now, dry bran through her own fingers into her own scoured pail, and logged what she found in the bottom, a mark for clean, a cross for fouled. Eight days of marks. Not a cross among them.
Vaux could not stop it without naming the reason he could not, so he held off his hand and let the colt eat clean rather than insist on tending a horse the whole yard now watched him tend. Mercy had counted on that. A man who has hidden a thing in the dark cannot fight for it in the light without pointing at it. So they came, the eighth morning, to a box that no longer stank of old fear.
The colt stood off the wall, flanks moving slow and deep, the whites gone from round his eye. When Mercy drew the bolt he swung his head to the sound of it, not to guard the near wall, not to fling himself at the boards, but to look, plain and curious, at the people in his door.
"Steady," she said, to the horse and the man behind her both. Dob had a carrot. She had closed his stammering fingers over it, back in the passage, because it was owed to him and no one else. He came into the doorway white to the lips, the coat he'd given a foal now given back and hanging off him, and held it out flat on a shaking palm as she had shown him.
The black colt reached and lipped it, soft as any horse in any honest stable, took it off the boy's hand, and stood chewing with his ears loose and forward.
Dob made a sound Mercy had heard men make over graves. "He took it," the boy said. The stammer had gone clean out of him, the way it does when a thing comes up from too deep to catch on the teeth. "Mistress, he took it off my hand." He was weeping, unashamed, the tears cutting the muck on his face, one hand still flat under the colt's soft mouth. "He don't hate me. All this while I thought. He never hated me."
Gabriel had come to the box door behind them, and Mercy felt him go still, felt the words land where Kit's death lived, and neither said anything, because some weeping is a man's own and to name it is to steal it.
Later the colt was turned out quiet in a bare yard, two lads crossing themselves to see the killing-box empty and its devil grazing. And later still the tack-room, one lamp, the long day's work gone down into the quiet that comes after. She had a bridle across her knees, mending a rein, and he stood over her with the day-book she'd fetched him, unread.
When she looked up he was looking at her. "You were right in every particular," he said. Blunt, as always; and then not blunt at all. "I do not know what to do with a person who is right about me."
"Nothing. You do nothing with them. You let them stand near."
She had risen without meaning to. Her hand had come to his sleeve, to steady the book, she'd have said if asked, and it would have been a lie. He had stopped breathing, and she had stopped. The lamp threw the two of them up huge and trembling on the whitewashed wall, his mouth a breath from hers, neither a hand's width from a thing that could not be taken back—
The door. Dob stood in it, wild-eyed, gulping, the mending-light catching a face that had wept itself out an hour past and was not weeping now but something worse.
"Mistress—" He stopped. Started. The stammer was back and fighting him for every sound. "That m-morning. The s-steeplechase. Master Vaux had me hold the black's head, hold him hard, while he worked summat under the roller, hot it were, I s-smelt it hot, and he says it's l-liniment for a cold back, he says—"
He heard himself. Mercy watched it cross the boy's face, the words out in the air now, unswallowable, and the terror take him, three years of a man's threat closing over his head at once.
"He says I'd hang," Dob whispered. "He says if ever I—"
And he was gone, bolted into the dark yard, the door swinging on the cold, and the colt he had made gentle lifting its head somewhere in the night to the sound of the boy it did not hate running away.