The Arrangement Read Online Free PDF Page A

peaceful.
    The stable door banged as someone opened it, and I turned to see Grove coming in the door. He closed it quickly against the blowing snow.
    “Lord, Mrs. Saunders,” he said. “I would have seen to the horses for you! There wasn’t no call for you to be out here before the sun is even up!”
    “I feed my horses every morning at this hour, Grove,” I said calmly. “It was no trouble to drop some hay to your animals as well as mine.”
    “Well, I thank ye, Mrs. Saunders.” He gave me a smile. Grove’s hair was grizzled but the slight space between his two front teeth made him look oddly boyish. “Dare I hope ye might have some extra grain for my boys, too?”
    “Of course I do,” I replied. “First, however, I was going to see to the water buckets.”
    “Have they iced over?”
    “Probably,” I said with resignation.
    He went into the stall that contained the earl’s good-looking right leader. “How are you this morning, Rusty my boy?” he asked in the soft voice of a true horse lover. He patted the chestnut’s arched neck, then bent to check the water bucket.
    “He’s drunk two-thirds of it,” he reported with satisfaction. “The rest is frozen, though.”
    He came out of the stall. “If you’ll show me where the pump is, Mrs. Saunders, I’ll refill all of the buckets.”
    I accepted his offer with gratitude. The one thing above all else I hated about the winter was having to cope with frozen water buckets. Once you got your gloves wet, your hands froze unmercifully.
    While Grove took care of the water, I measured out appropriate amounts of grain into each horse’s manger. There was a bit of a ruckus as Polly tried to eat Fancy’s grain as well as her own, but I soon got the ponies sorted out.
    By now the brazier had warmed the barn to a more pleasant temperature.
    I sat down on the bench next to the brazier and undid the buttons on Tommy’s old coat.
    The door opened and Grove came in with the last bucket of water.
    “Aren’t your hands freezing, Grove?” I asked sympathetically. “Come and hold them in front of the brazier.”
    “Thank ye, Mrs. Saunders,” he replied. “They are a mite chilled at that.”
    I leaned my shoulders against the wall and watched as Savile’s coachman stripped off his gloves and held his bare, reddened fingers out to the glowing charcoal.
    I said, “Was that the earl’s coach you arrived in yesterday. Grove?”
    “It was not,” he replied emphatically. “You don’t think his lordship would own such an old-fashioned rig as that?”
    I shrugged and said noncommittally, “One never knows.”
    It had been quite a few years since the old-time coach had been replaced by the lower-slung, more comfortable chaise. Chaises were not driven by coachmen, either, but by postillions, who directed the horses by riding them.
    Grove obviously felt it was incumbent upon him to explain to me how the fashionable Earl of Savile had come to be riding in so dated a carriage. “We started out in his lordship’s chaise, but we had not gone above two miles from Devane Hall when a linchpin broke,” he said. “We knew the snow was coming, ye see, and his lordship decided to take Lord Devane’s old coach rather than wait to have his own vehicle repaired.”
    I took off my wool hat and ran my fingers through my short hair, fluffing it up. “I take it, then, that you are not employed as his lordship’s coachman?”
    Grove lifted his chin with pride. “I’m his groom, my lady, as I was his father’s groom before him. Taught his lordship to ride his first pony, I did.”
    I could find nothing satisfactory to reply to this momentous information, and silence fell.
    I broke it at last by saying gloomily, “The snow doesn’t show any signs of letting up, does it?”
    “Afraid not, Mrs. Saunders. From the looks of it, we’re going to be laid up here for another day at least.”
    With difficulty I refrained from groaning. I sighed instead and stood up. “Ordinarily I