CHAPTER EIGHT
“Hibbert sends word, Your Grace. The duchess has taken the mare out alone, and she has been gone above the hour.”
Theodore set down his quill.
Across the table, Crewe looked from the estate map to the unfinished notes, his finger still resting near the marked ditches. “We have not settled the Hartside drainage, Your Grace.”
“We will finish the drainage tomorrow.”
“It is only that the Hartside ditches will not wait much longer on the weather,” Crewe said carefully, as if long service had taught him the difference between objection and self-preservation.
Theodore reached for his gloves. “They have waited eleven years. They will wait until tomorrow.”
Crewe’s brows rose by the smallest degree. “Of course, Your Grace.”
Theodore did not wait for a boy to saddle the gelding.
He had the tack brought and put his own hand to the girth, because standing about while another man fumbled with buckles would only invite thoughts he had no intention of hosting.
The duchess was a stranger to this stretch of country.
The country was full of rabbit holes, soft banks, sudden ditches, and wet ground that a Leicestershire mare would not know.
There was nothing excessive in riding after her.
Nothing at all.
He went up the south ride at a pace he told himself was sensible.
He found her on the ridge above the river, halted with the reins loose on the mare’s neck, looking out over the valley as if she had come upon a kingdom and was considering whether to approve it. The mare stood easily under her, one hind hoof cocked, ears moving with lazy interest.
Ellen heard the gelding and turned in the saddle.
Her face changed.
Theodore could not have named the expression. It was not pleasure, which would have been too simple, and it was not the old withdrawal, which he had begun to dislike more than was useful. Whatever it was, she waited for him to come up rather than gathering the mare and riding away.
That was extraordinary indeed.
“You ride well,” he said, drawing alongside her.
Her gloved hand moved once over the mare’s mane. “You came out to see whether I would fall off.”
“I came out to see whether the mare suited you.”
“That is a very ducal distinction.”
“It is also the accurate one.”
“Naturally,” Ellen said, glancing at him sideways. “I have noticed Your Grace is devoted to accuracy whenever it allows him to avoid warmth.”
Theodore looked toward the river to conceal the faint movement at the corner of his mouth. “And I have noticed Your Grace has a talent for making observations under the guise of obedience.”
“Then we are both improving our studies.”
“I was not aware we were studying one another.”
The words escaped before he could stop them.
Ellen blinked.
For a moment they both seemed surprised he had said it.
Then her mouth curved. “No?”
“No,” Theodore said evenly.
“That is unfortunate. I had begun taking notes.”
A sudden impulse to laugh rose within him, which he was forced to stifle with all haste.
“Have you?”
“Several pages.”
“And what conclusions have you reached?”
“That Your Grace is kinder than he wishes people to know.”
Theodore looked away first.
The mare shifted one step, and Ellen settled her with a light touch of the reins.
“She suits me,” Ellen said, her voice softening as she ran her hand down the chestnut neck. “She has a turn of speed you would not credit from the look of her. I gave her her head along the bottom and had to remember I was a duchess before she remembered she was a lady’s hack.”
“Hibbert lunges her of a morning so she will not offer you that turn of speed before you have asked for it.”
“I know. He told me.” Ellen’s mouth curved a little. “He tells me a great deal.”
“Hibbert has reached the age at which silence would be viewed by him as a personal defeat.”
“He is the first person at Wrenfield who looked at me as though I were a person and not a sum to be carried.”
Theodore’s fingers tightened once on the reins. “He has been in that yard forty years. He has earned the right to look at people however he pleases, and he spends it freely.”
“He spends it kindly.”
“Do not tell him so. He will become impossible.”
“I suspect he already is.”
“He is indispensable, which is worse.”
Ellen smiled toward the valley, and the sight of it made the wind seem briefly less cold. “She is a beautiful animal.”
“I am glad you find her so.”
“You chose her?”
“I described what was required.”
“Very thoroughly, I imagine.”
“Thoroughness is seldom a vice.”
“That must be a comfort to you.”
This time he did look at her. She was still facing the valley, though the curve at her mouth told him she knew precisely what she had done.
“I begin to suspect,” Theodore said, “that country air improves your courage.”
“I begin to suspect that Your Grace prefers me timid.”
“I prefer you safe.”
The answer came before he could decide whether to say it.
Both of them seemed to hear more in it than he had intended.
The warmth left her smile by a degree. She looked down at the mare’s mane, smoothing one dark strand into place with her thumb.
“Safe is not quite the same as free,” she said.
“No,” Theodore replied, after a moment. “It is not.”
He did not ask her anything further. He let the gelding stand, and the two horses blew, shifted, and settled.
The wind came up off the river, carrying the damp scent of water and late grass.
They sat side by side and watched the valley without either of them rushing to fill the quiet, which was a thing Theodore had not done with another living soul since his mother’s demise.
“My father used to take me up to a ridge such as this,” Ellen said at last, speaking to the valley rather than to him. “Before the money went.”
Theodore turned his head. “Did he?”
“He said one could not know a country until one had seen it from the one place it could not hide itself.”
“He was right.”
“He was right about horses and country and very little else, which I have decided is a respectable proportion for a man.” She smiled at the water, a small, private smile that had not been made for him, though he was close enough to receive some of it.
“He bought a hunter once that three counties had given up as a man-killer. Paid ten pounds out of pure contrariness and had him taking apples from my hand inside the month.”
“How?”
“He said there were no bad horses, only men in a hurry.”
Theodore watched the river move between the fields. “And was he in a hurry?”
“Never with a horse.” Ellen’s fingers stilled on the reins. “Only with money, at the end. Money was the one thing he could not gentle, however slow he went.”
The quiet between them changed. It did not break. It merely became a place where one might set something down if one were foolish enough to trust it.
Theodore looked at the ridge ahead, at the track bending through the grass, and heard himself speak before caution could make itself useful.
“I rode this ridge as a boy. Before my parents passed on.”
The words came out three words longer than he had intended, and none of them were dressed for company. They landed in the open air between them, plain and exposed, and he could not call them back.
Ellen turned her head a little toward him, and there was something in her face he had not put there, a recognition that ran ahead of his words.
She knew more of the shape of it than he had told her.
The stable, he thought. Hibbert was an old gossip with a long memory, and she had clearly been listening in that yard to a good deal more than the care of a mare.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“It was a long time ago.”
“That is what people say,” she replied gently. “I have never found it makes the thing any shorter.”
He had used that very sentence himself for years to close exactly that very same door. She had extended her hand to prevent its closure, and he was surprised to discover that he harbored far less objection than propriety demanded.
“Do you ride it still?” she asked.
“The ridge?”
“In the mornings.”
“No.”
“Hibbert says you used to. With your mother. Every morning she was living.”
A longer pause passed between them, with only the sound of the horses breathing and the river moving below.
“Hibbert remembers a great deal that is no longer true,” Theodore said.
“Is it not true that you rode with her?”
“It is true that I rode with her.”
“Then what has changed?”
His hand gathered the reins by a fraction, which was neither retreat nor answer. “It is not true that I am still the boy who did.”
Ellen looked at him for another moment. There was no pity in her face, and for reasons he did not care to examine, that made it easier to bear.
“No,” she said softly. “I am inclined to believe that none of us can long remain the same being who first held an affection for a place.”
In another mouth the sentence would have been too much. From hers it settled quietly enough to be permitted.
Theodore turned the gelding a little. “We should turn for home. The light goes early off the ridge.”
“That sounds very practical.”
“It is practical.”
“And not at all an attempt to escape the conversation?”
He glanced at her. “Those are often the same thing.”
Her smile returned, faint and unwilling. “I shall remember that, Your Grace.”
They turned the horses down off the high ground and rode along the riverside, the track soft beneath the hooves and the valley dimming by degrees around them.
For a while the only sound was the steady rhythm of the horses, but the silence no longer felt like a wall built between them.
It had altered into something less hostile, something one might cross if one chose the right moment and did not look too eager.
As the home farm came into view, Ellen gathered the mare more neatly beneath her.
“You need not escort me. I shall not fall off between here and the stable.”
“Escort is too grand a word for two horses traveling the same track.”
“That is the most that can be said for a great many matrimonies, I am given to understand.”
Theodore glanced at her. “You have been talking to my aunt.”