CHAPTER SEVEN
“You’ll want to mind the grey, Your Grace. He bites strangers on principle, and he hasn’t yet decided you’re not one.”
Ellen stopped a little short of the stall and kept her hand at her side. “What is his name?”
“Sefton. After the course. The old duke liked his racing.”
“And you are the head groom, and you have not said so.”
“Hibbert, Your Grace.” He shifted the halter on his shoulder. “I was deciding whether you’d want a horse to look at or a horse to ride.”
“The second sort. You can stop deciding.”
She turned her shoulder to the door, let her gaze slide off the grey’s eye to the wall behind him, and made a low sound in her throat that went nowhere in particular.
“Now then,” she told the wall. “Nobody is asking you anything.”
The grey’s ears came up a quarter of an inch.
She let the back of her hand drift into the air near his shoulder without reaching for him, and after a long suspicious moment he brought his muzzle round and breathed hot over her knuckles.
“He has not done that for a stranger in nine years.” Hibbert had gone very still. “Took the top of my thumb off in the spring. Where does a duchess learn to stand like that at a stall?”
“In a stall. My father kept hunters.” Her hand fell away slowly, lingering for a moment without the slightest trace of abruptness. I was put up before anyone thought to tell me it was unsuitable, and I cleaned tack until they told me that was unsuitable too.”
“Then you’ll know what you’re looking at down the row. Come and see.”
He took her down the line, and she read the horses as she passed them, the way another woman might read faces at a ball.
“That bay is favouring his near fore.”
“Aye, and the farrier says I’m an old woman for fretting it.”
“May I see the leg?”
“You’d want to go in to him?”
“I would, if he is civil.”
“Civil enough. It’s only the grey that’s a heathen.”
She let herself into the box, ran her palm down the cannon from knee to fetlock, and pressed her thumb gently along the inside of the leg. “It is warm. Here, low down, and the pastern with it. Has he been standing in the wet?”
“The near boxes flood when the yard gutter blocks, and the gutter’s been blocked since Lady Day. I’ve asked twice.”
“Then ask me, and consider it answered.” She straightened and wiped her hand on her skirt without a thought for the skirt.
“Clear the gutter this week, stand him dry, and poultice the leg morning and night. If the heat is gone in seven days it was the standing, and we have saved the farrier a journey and the horse a fright.”
“That is the very thing I’d have said, Your Grace, if a soul in this yard had thought to ask the head groom.”
“I am asking him. Loudly, if it helps.”
He almost smiled, which she suspected was a rare event, and led her on to the last stall on the right, where a chestnut mare had put her head over the door.
“That one is yours.”
Ellen looked at him.
“Came up from a stud in Leicestershire ten days back, before ever you set foot here. His Grace wrote for a quiet mouth and a good temper, well up to a lady’s weight, and not a slug, and he said he would know the difference.
” He rubbed the mare’s nose. “Her name’s Heather.
She has stood here eating her head off a week and a half, waiting on you, and between us I think she has begun to take it personal. ”
The mare blew softly, and the warm breath of it stirred the loose hair at Ellen’s temple.
“Where did the name come from?”
“That I couldn’t say. Came up with her on the papers.” He scratched the white blaze. “Six years old. Foaled the spring the late duke went, if you trace it back, which the old duchess would have called an omen one way or the other.”
“You knew the duchess.”
“Forty years I’ve been in this yard, Your Grace.
I put her up the first morning she came here a bride, same as I’m like to put you up this afternoon.
” He said it plainly, with no weight on it, and the weight came anyway.
“There’s not been a lady’s saddle horse stood in these boxes since the day we buried her.
His Grace rode out with his mother every morning she was living, and not one morning after, not in eleven years, till he wrote me that letter about a quiet mouth. ”
Ellen put her hand flat on the long chestnut neck and felt the heat of the animal come up through her palm. “He bought me a horse.”
“He did, Your Grace.”
“He will not say good morning to me across his own breakfast table.” Her hand stayed where it was. “And he sat down in London and wrote a letter about a quiet mouth and a good temper, and threatened his own groom over the soundness of her near fore.”
“He did that as well.”
“I do not understand him at all, Hibbert.”
“No soul alive manages it, my lady, and I have spent nigh forty years trying to prove otherwise.” He gathered the halter off his shoulder.
“But I’ll tell you he asked me a question in that letter he’s never asked me before, which was whether the mare had a kind eye.
A man don’t fret over a kind eye for a horse he means to leave standing in a box. ”
She turned her face into the mare’s mane a moment, where no one could watch, and when she lifted it again her eyes were dry enough to pass. “I should like to ride her after luncheon, while the light holds. Will she take a side-saddle quietly the first time?”
“Quiet as you please. I’ll lunge her of a morning the first week regardless, and you’ll thank me the day the pheasants get up.”
“Thank you, Hibbert. For the leg, and all of your assistance.”
“Welcome to Wrenfield, Your Grace.” He touched his cap. “It is the first sensible quarter-hour this yard has had since the old duchess departed from this world.”
She went back to the house the long way, round by the garden wall, and that was how she came to the kitchen garden, and stopped at the gate.
A spade-bearded man straightened from his forking at the far end and came up the path wiping his hands. “Your Grace. You’ll forgive the state of it.”
“How long has it been let go?”
“Coyne, my lady. Head gardener. There’s been no mistress to set a hand to the kitchen garden nor the stillroom since the late duchess passed, and that is eleven years gone.”
“And whose task is it now?”
“Nobody’s, in honest truth. His Grace’s orders run to the park and the home farm. The inside, the preserving and the herbs, fell to Mrs. Selby, and Mrs. Selby has forty rooms to run and no hours left for a peach wall.”
Ellen walked down the central path, reading the ground as she went. “These herb borders have seeded themselves into one another. That is three years of nobody, not one.”
“Nearer four, my lady, if we’re being truthful in front of company.”
“And the beans were left on the vine until they went to bullets, which is a waste of the seed and the bed both.” She stopped at the south wall. “That pear’s limb is broken and hanging by the bark. It will canker the whole tree by Michaelmas if it stands.”
“It will, Your Grace. I’ve not had the leave nor the hands.”
“Then it comes off today, clean, and the wound dressed before the dew is down.” She turned to face him.
“Tomorrow you and I walk the whole of it with a slate and settle what is saved for the spring and what is torn out. I want the stillroom opened and a full inventory by Friday, and last quarter’s household accounts sent up to my sitting room before dinner. ”
Coyne looked at her the way Hibbert had looked at her at the grey’s stall, a man revising his sum. “Might I ask, my lady. Does His Grace know you mean to take it on?”
“No. And I shall not be asking him.”
“It’s only that I’d not want to be caught between Your Grace and His.”
“You will not be. If anyone is to be caught, it will be me, and I have been caught in worse places than a peach wall.” She looked down the long garden, the warm brick at her back.
“It is nobody’s task, you said. It is mine now.
A garden this size, kept properly, feeds a house of forty rooms through a whole winter and prevents a quite ruinous spending at the market stalls.
There is nothing grand in it. It is only sense, and I am tired of sitting in a drawing room while sense goes to seed outside the window.
Can you spare a boy this afternoon for the bolted beds? ”
“Two, Your Grace. And gladly.”
“Then we begin this afternoon.”
She rode out after luncheon, and Hibbert put her up himself and stood at the mare’s head a moment before he let go.
“She’ll feel the strangeness of you the first half-mile. Sit quiet and let her find you, and don’t go correcting what isn’t wrong yet.”
“I shall behave. Which way is kindest, the first time?”
“Up the south ride to the ridge, and home along the river. Good going, no holes, and you’ll see the whole of what you’ve wedded into from the top.”
“That is either a recommendation or a warning.”
“Bit of both, Your Grace.”
The mare felt the strangeness of her, and then she did not, and by the head of the south ride Heather had stopped asking questions and Ellen had stopped holding her breath.
She came out on the ridge into a wind off the river and pulled up to look, and the whole of the valley lay under her, the home farm and the grey roofs of Wrenford and the long shine of the water, and for a moment there was nobody to be a duchess in front of and nothing to manage, and it was the first such moment she had been given in three years.
At the foot of the ridge a woman was pegging washing at a cottage gate, and she straightened and bobbed as Ellen came down the lane.
“Your Grace.” Her eyes went over the mare with frank approval. “That’s the Leicester mare, then. We heard she’d come.”
“You heard of her before I did, I believe.”
“Oh, the whole parish heard, my lady. A lady’s horse stood in His Grace’s yard after all these years. My husband said the world must be ending.” She caught herself and flushed. “Begging your pardon.”
“Your husband may well be right. What is your name?”
“Mary Burton, Your Grace. My man holds the smallholding up the lane, what’s left of it.”