Letitia opened her mouth, which earned her a nudge from Isadora, and promptly closed it. Her expression did the full inventory of its objection in silence, which was, Cecily had noticed, what her expressions did when she knew the argument was over and hadn’t quite accepted it yet.
“It isn’t fair,” she complained, which was different from a proper argument and they all knew it.
“No,” William agreed, without irony. “It isn’t.”
Letitia looked momentarily thrown by this, as though she had aimed at a target that had moved. William had already turned his attention back to the path.
Cecily watched the whole exchange with the quiet attention she had been giving him since breakfast three days ago—the way his refusals were never careless, the way he always had a reason, theway the reason was always, underneath the firmness of it, about keeping them safe.
“If the concern is the ground, and you know the path, why not come with us?” she suggested.
He looked at her.
“You know where the ditch is,” she said simply. “You know the soft ground. It seems like the problem is solved if you’re there.”
A pause. Not a long one. He looked ahead at the path, then at Letitia, who had gone very still in the way of someone trying not to appear to want something too much, and then back at Cecily.
“Very well,” he relented.
Letitia made a sound that was not quite a word.
“At a sensible pace,” he added.
“Obviously,” Letitia said, already turning toward the stables.
The horses were brought out, and they mounted them. Within ten minutes, they were past the formal gardens and on the open path, the estate falling away behind them and the sky opening up in that particular way it did when one cleared the tree line and suddenly had more of it than one remembered existed.
It was a cool morning, bright without being harsh, the year briefly admitting that it could still be pleasant before it committed to something worse.
William rode slightly ahead, which Cecily had initially taken for indifference and had since revised. He was watching the ground. His gaze moved in a constant, unhurried sweep—the path, his sisters, the verge, back to the path. When Letitia’s mare drifted toward the soft edge of the track, he said her name once, quietly, and she corrected her path without being told twice.
“Shoulders back,” he instructed, a few minutes later.
“They are back.”
“Further.”
“William, if my shoulders go any further back, I will be looking at the sky.”
“You’d see more that way than you do looking at your horse’s ears.”
Letitia straightened mutinously, and Cecily caught the slight twitch at the corner of William’s mouth that came and went before it became anything.
They rode on. The elm came into view, and William took the lead past it, guiding them along the firmer ground to the left of the drainage ditch—invisible in the long grass exactly as he’d said.Riding past it, Cecily understood why he had been firm. To the right, the ground looked perfectly navigable. Without knowing, you would ride directly into it.
He knows every inch of thisland.He has ridden it enough times to know where the ground is soft and where it holds.
She was still thinking about this when her mare faltered.
It was nothing—a bird from the hedgerow, the sudden noise of wings—but her mare sharply stepped sideways. Cecily, caught off-balance, grabbed the reins on instinct and pulled.
The mare tossed her head and backed up.
And then William was there.
She hadn’t heard him move towards her. One moment, he was two feet ahead; the next, he was beside her, his horse steady as furniture, his hand closing over hers on the reins before she had fully processed that she needed help.
“Easy,” he soothed.
