The frost held past midnight, and it was into the loft over the quieted box that Mercy climbed, because she had seen the duke go up and not come down, and a man who does not come down has stopped being able to bear his own thoughts alone. He sat with his back to a beam and his brother's snaffle in his hands, turning it as he turned his glass at supper. Below them the black colt shifted in the straw, at ease now, a horse breathing slow through the boards like a thing mending.
"You'll take a chill," she said, and sat down across from him in the hay, near enough, not too near.
"I have taken worse." He set the bit down. "You did not climb a ladder in the dark to warn me of chills."
"No." She had meant to come to it slantwise, and found she could not, so she did what her father did with a thing that had to be said. Laid it down plain and let it be looked at. "I climbed it to tell you all of it, and how I come to be in it, because you've let me carry half your grief up here, and it is not honest to let you think the county dropped me here by chance."
He went very still.
"You did not buy me, your Grace. I let myself be bought." She kept her voice level, the voice she used on a frightened thing. "My father sold this house that grey's line, lost her to a barrenness he never believed, and died certain something had been done. When Pell came to reckon my husband's debt in horses, and I saw the last four pound was to be paid at Ravensmoor, I made myself the four pound. A widow sold is a widow inside the gate, and I meant to be inside this gate above any house in England. I came for your horses, for the truth of what was done to that mare and that colt." She held his eyes. "I stayed for the truth of your brother. That part I did not plan. That part is only true."
She braced for the cold to come down, for she had married a man who turned formal when he was cut.
"You engineered your own sale," he said at last, "to reach a stable you were then forbidden."
"I did."
"To right a wrong done a dead horse-leech, and a boy you never met."
"And to see justice done, if it could be. Yes."
Something in his face she had not seen before, not anger. A kind of ruin. "I have spent three years handled by everyone here as a man too broken to be told the truth. And the one person who came on purpose, by her own hard will, came to tell it me." He said it as if it astonished him past bearing. "May I—"
He did not finish it. It was a question, plain as any she had asked of him, and she answered it by crossing the little space of hay between them. The kiss was brief, and grave, his asking and her choosing both. It held three years of a shut house and a fortnight of two ruined strangers learning they were not, after all, alone. Then she drew back before it could become a thing they must be careful of, and rested her forehead a moment against his, and that was all, and it was enough.
"Then I'll ask you one thing," he said, low, against the quiet. "One only." And the blunt voice broke on it, just at the edge. "Take no step in this without me. Not to Pell's, not into that box, not to the far paddock alone. I let one person I loved go into that yard by himself, and looked at nothing, and it cost me my life entire. I've not the constitution to do it twice." He did not order it; he asked it, and the asking cost him. "Whatever we do, we do it where I can stand beside you."
"Beside," she said, trying the word as he had tried ours at the rail, and found it, too, would bear. "Yes."
They came down before the house woke, separately, which was its own small ache. And in the grey of it, on the breakfast tray Nan carried up herself, there was a folded paper in a hand Mercy had learned to know, Vaux's, even, unhurried. A proposal, laid before the duke as loyalty: that the famous Ravensmoor grey and her get be sold at last at the Colt Hallow spring fair, in the duke's own yard, before the assembled county, five weeks off, every buyer in the shire come to watch.
Mercy read it twice and set it down, and felt it turn over and lock into place like a bolt drawn home. "He means to sell her before they can know she's a stranger," she said. "In your own yard. Before everyone."
"Then he has been a fool," Gabriel said, reading it over her shoulder, "for the first time in six years."