Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)(14)

“I’ve seen a great many horses,” the man offered.

Ned waited. Plum spent so much time around animals—from the horses in the stables to Berkswift’s small kennel of dogs—that he sometimes forgot that ordinary human conversation had an ebb and flow to it, a certain natural order of statement and response. Plum seemed to think all conversations had only one side, which he provided. But if left unprompted, he usually recollected himself and continued.

“This one, he’s not the worst I’ve seen. Not the best, neither. Conformation leaves a lot to be desired, and even after we’ve put some flesh on his bones, he’ll likely always be weak-chested. But his temperament… He’s as wary as if the devil himself were pissing in his grain. I don’t trust him near my mares.”

Technically, they were Ned’s mares, but Ned wasn’t about to correct the man. He’d hoped this morning’s equine tantrum had been nothing more than an aftereffect of Champion’s earlier mistreatment.

“That sounds bad.”

“Hmm.” Mr. Plum seemed to think that bare mono-syllable constituted sufficient answer, because he put his hands in his pockets and looked at Ned. “An animal needs to know some kindness in its first years of life, Mr. Carhart. If your, ah, your horse—” Ned noticed that Plum carefully eschewed the name of Champion “—has never known good from people, that’s the end of it. It can’t be fixed, not with a day of work. Or a week. Or a year. And if that’s the case, there’s nothing to be done for it.”

“When you say ‘nothing,’” Ned ventured gently, “you don’t literally mean nothing can be done. Do you?”

“Of course not.” Plum shook his head. “Always something to be done, eh? In this case, you load the pistol and pull the trigger. It’s a mercy, doing away with a one such as that. What an animal doesn’t learn when young, it can’t find in maturity.”

Ned turned away, his hands clenching. His stomach felt queasy. He hadn’t saved Champion only to have him put down out of some sense of wrong-headed mercy. An image flashed through his head: a pistol, tooled in silver, the sun glinting off it from every direction.

No.

He’d not wish that end on anyone, not even a scraggly, weak-chested horse.

“How far gone is he?”

Mr. Plum shrugged. “No way to know, unless someone gives it a try. Have to make the decision out of rational thought, sir. Me? I doubt the animal’s worth the effort.”

He paused again, another one of those too-long halts. Ned began to drum his fingers against the leg of his trousers, an impatient ditty born out of an excess of energy. Another bad sign.

“Very little use in him, sir.”

“Use.” Ned pressed his palms together. “No need for an animal to be useful, is there?”

Plum met his gaze. “Use is what animals are for, Mr. Carhart. Useless animals have no place.”

Ned knew what it was like to feel useless. He had been the expendable grandchild, the non-heir. He’d been the fool, the idiot, the one who could be counted on to muck up anything worth doing. His grandfather had expected nothing of Ned, and Ned, young idiot that he had been, had delivered spectacularly. But he had learned. He had changed himself, and it had not been too late.

“Where have you put him?”

“Old sheep corral. It’s empty, this time of autumn, what with the sheep all brought to the lower fields.”

“He’ll come around.”

“Hmm.” It was a versatile syllable, that. Plum might have delivered an essay on his disbelief with that single sound. “In all those heart-felt do-gooding stories, some child rescues an animal and it then proceeds to take the cup at the Ascot. And the knock-kneed beast does so, just because it’s fed a decent measure of corn and lavished with kind words. But be realistic, Mr. Carhart. This is a barrel-chested animal that’s down on its strength. Even if you do somehow calm the thing enough to toss a harness on it, and convince it to pull in tandem with another animal, it’ll be skittish all its life.”

“Skittish,” Ned said, “I can live with.”

Plum stared at him a moment, before giving his head a dismissive shake. “Hope so, then. There’s still hay out in that field,” he finally said. “We’d been planning to bring it in soon, before the rains come. I’ll pull a pair of men from the home farm this afternoon and see to it.”

“Don’t bother,” Ned volunteered. “I’ll do it.”

This was met with a longer pause.

“You’ll do it,” Plum finally repeated, looking off at a speck of dirt on the ground. He said the words as if Ned had just announced that not only did he plan to save a useless horse, he had five heads.

And no wonder. Gentlemen offered to pitch hay approximately as often as they sported five heads. And a marquess’s heir was no common day-laborer to dirty himself with a pitchfork. But then, Ned wasn’t precisely a common marquess’s heir, either. He needed to do some thing to bleed off the excess energy he felt. It was beginning to come out in fidgets; if he didn’t do something about it, it would never dissipate.

Instead, it would go careening off at the first opportune moment. Or, more like, the first inopportune one, as he’d learned by experience.

“This is a joke?” Plum asked, bewildered. “You always were one for jokes, when you were a child.”