"No." Mercy looked out to the far ridge, where a true grey stood in a stranger's barn and did not know she was still waited for. "He's been careful. He's brought the whole county to the horses, so they'll see the thing he means them to see." She folded the paper along Vaux's own crease. "We've only to make sure they see the other thing instead."
The frost had gone soft and treacherous by the time the yard emptied of lads Gabriel had sent off on invented errands, and in the grey unwatched quiet Mercy meant to prove the third thing where no man but the duke could see her do it.
The black colt stood loose-roped in the middle of the court, ears easy, a horse a fortnight of clean buckets had given back to himself. She had three men girth him in turn, Gabriel first, then Thady, then a broad honest lad off the home farm who knew nothing of it. Each came at the colt plain and right-handed, and the colt stood for each, shifting his weight, blowing once, no more troubled than a cart-horse at a trough.
"Sound," said Thady, low, watching. "Sound as any beast on the place."
"Watch," Mercy said. She came at the colt herself then, from his near side, her left hand raised to the roller and a low two-note chirrup in her throat, the sound a man makes soft to a horse he is about to hurt, so the hurting comes as a surprise.
The colt came apart. He went rigid all down his frame, the whites came up round his eye, the sweat broke dark as though wrung from the hide. He screamed the killing-box scream, the sound the whole county had buried a boy to, and flung himself sideways off her hand the length of the rope. He stood shaking, sheeted, guarding a near wall that was not there.
Mercy dropped her hand and stepped back. She stood right-handed and still, hummed low and even, and let him find it. Slow, the horse came back down into his own body. The shaking eased. The ears came off their pins.
"It's not the man," she said quietly, to Gabriel, whose face had gone the colour of tallow. "He didn't fright at me. He frighted at a left hand and that sound, coming to his roller. Any hand, any voice, he stands. That hand, that chirrup, and he's back in the morning it was done to him. A horse can't lie, your Grace. He can't be got at, or paid, or frightened into a story. He only remembers the exact shape of the thing that hurt him. And this is the shape of it."
"Left-handed," Gabriel said. "And Vaux—"
"Comes at everything left-handed. You've watched him a year and never seen it, because why would you." She gentled the colt with her right hand along his wet neck. "Now you'll not un-see it."
There was a movement at the tack-room door. Dob, who had drifted back against his orders, stood white in the gap with a barrow-handle forgotten in his fists. He had seen it all, and his mouth was working.
"That's it," he got out. "That's the very. He done it like that. Left, and that same little sound, low—" The stammer seized him. "The r-roller. That morning. I held him, mistress, like Master Vaux bid me, and he worked summat hot under the—"
And then the daylight, the yard, the knowledge of who might be within a wall of hearing closed over the boy, and he shut his mouth on it. "I can't," he whispered. "Not out loud. Not here."
He set the barrow down careful and went, not bolting this time, only going, a boy carrying a weight one honest inch further than before and no further.
"Let him be," Mercy said, when Gabriel moved. "He'll say it when the horse says it first. There's no shaming a body out of a fear a man spent three years teaching."
She went to Pell's alone that afternoon, and knew as she saddled the cob that she was breaking the one word she had given. Gabriel was away at the far paddock with Thady, believing her at her rest; she rode out under cover of fair-business, for no one fears a widow at a gate. She told herself the lie every oath-breaker tells — that it was safer done alone, that a duke caught reading a coper's ledger was a ruin she could spare him. It was true, and it was also a broken word, and she knew the difference, and rode on anyway.
Pell waved her to the office fire to warm herself, easy as ever, and went out to see to a horse, and left her the run of the room, because who fears a widow. The book lay open on the coping-desk where a busy man leaves it. She read it standing, quick, down the columns for the thing that did not sit square, and there it was, four years of it, entered plain because a man does not encode what he never dreams a duchess will read.
R. grey — service fee, again and again, spring after spring, sums that made her breath go short; against each the moving of a foal away and the splitting of the coin; and in the margin a mark she knew now better than her own name. S.V. Half to S.V.