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She nodded.

He tipped his hat, and drove on.

Cassie waited until his carriage disappeared between the hedgerows, then she crossed the old plank over the ditch at the side of the road and slipped into the copse. She needed to walk. She had some serious thinking to do.

Chapter Ten

By the time she reached Verwood, Cassie’s hems were muddied, and her foot throbbed mercilessly, but she went directly to the stables. As she expected, Snell and John Coachman and the stable boys were at their Sunday meal. She closed her eyes a minute to take in the smells of the place and the sounds of horses stirring. She smelled the clover in the hay, the neatsfoot oil on the tack, the whiff of manure, and above all the sweet smell of horseflesh. When she opened her eyes again, she grabbed a handful of oats from the feed room and made her way down the aisle of stalls to Hermes.

Her passage through the stable raised a few nickers from the curious, and when she reached him, Hermes stood in the shadowy stall, ears up, alert, his nostrils aquiver.

“You’re not a brute, are you, boy? No matter what people think.”

He snorted and swished his tail, but did not come to her.

“We could try again, you and I. I brought you some oats.” She held out her hand and opened her palm. It was a pitiful gesture. His trust was worth having and therefore not easily won. She waited, but he remained unmoving.

“The accident was not your fault.” She watched his ears catch her voice. “The fault was mine. Snell warned me that you were too young to know your limits.”

She pulled back her hand and spread the oats along the top of the stall door crosspiece. “I’ll come again,” she told him.

She was almost to the end of the aisle when she heard the distinctive low rumble of his nicker, a sound that came from deep in his belly.

*

Cassie’s attempt to enter the house unnoticed failed. Cook, catching sight of her as she crept through the kitchen, muddy shoes in hand, offered a quick scold, but set water warming and told Cassie a bath would be ready in no time.

Cassie had a long soak and time to reflect on her situation in the glaring light cast on it by the remarks of Sir Adrian and Mr. Kydd. Neither gentleman had the least suspicion of saying anything to shake her, but that had been the result.

After her bath she dressed in one of the old gowns she had been content to wear forever, but now she heard Mr. Kydd’s teasing voice describing her clothes as castoffs. She had made no push to change her situation until the numbers in the Verwood ledgers had gone so against her. A tenant had seemed the perfect way to make Verwood pay for itself, and Sir Adrian seemed, if not the perfect tenant, the richest. Now she saw that his staying at Verwood very much depended on the affections of Lord Ramsbury’s daughter. Cassie had been idle too long.

As she pulled a stocking over her misshapen foot, she resolved to speak to her grandmother no matter how unbending Grandmama could be. The silk snagged as it always did, and she gently pulled it past the scar. Over the years, she had invented a dozen ways of describing the lump on the top of her foot. Doctor Ormond had put names to her broken bones. The cuneiforms and the metatarsals, he called them. Whatever their names, what Cassie saw was a mound, like the dirt pushed up by a mad vole as it tunneled through the garden. The low ridge of fused bone angled across her foot, and the shortened foot cocked inward.

It wasn’t pretty, but the point was that the bones had healed. Neither she nor Hermes needed to be perfect to carry on. She slipped her foot into one of the loose slippers she wore at home and descended for evening tea.

Her grandmama’s sharp stare met her as she entered the sitting room, freshly painted in deep gold, a reminder of their dependence on Sir Adrian’s rent.

“And where did you get to, my headstrong girl?” Grandmama sat stiffly upright in a slightly thread-worn, crimson velvet armchair, a relic from the big house.

“I walked home.” Cassie crossed to the tea table and took her seat. The fire in the limestone fireplace gave a glow to the deep gold walls. A hint of fading light in the sky caught the silver of the teapot. A glance from Honoria warned Cassie that her grandmother was in a mood. She could no more rush a conversation about Hermes than she could hurry the tea. She lifted the lid on the pot. Nearly ready. Thankfully, Cook had prepared Grandmama’s favorite orange-water rout cakes.

“Sir Adrian didn’t take you up?” Grandmama began.

“He did not.”

“But you and he were speaking when we pulled away.” Cassie heard the aggrieved tone, but didn’t understand the reason for it, except that Grandmama apparently wanted to provoke a quarrel.

“Only briefly. His new neighbors claimed him.”

“He should have made his excuses and taken you up.”

“Did you ask him to bring me home, Grandmama?” Cassie frowned. Her grandmother had as much as admitted that she had left Cassie behind deliberately.

“I should not have to ask.” Her grandmother looked away. “Sir Adrian should know what is fitting, what is due to me as his landlady.”

“I should think that civility to his neighbors was fitting behavior for the tenant of Verwood,” Cassie said.

“Hah,” said her grandmother. “He may be civil to ’em, but trust me, a man like that will not marry one of their daughters, no matter how many courses and removes those hopeful mama’s put before him. He’s got ambitions.”