One needn’t start at all, he thought. “There’s no farrier near where I live and you were highly recommended to me. I hope it’s all right that I’ve brought my horse. I think he needs re-shoeing.” Was that a word? he wondered as he inclined his head in the horse trailer’s direction.

“Okay, let’s have a look.” She put down her tools and they went outside. “I’m not really a blacksmith, you know. But I’ve had enough training that I can shoe a horse.”

“That’s more training than I’ve had.” Melrose opened the box and Aggrieved turned his head.

“What’s his name?”

“Aggrieved.”

She laughed. “I like that. Aggrieved.” She appeared to be speaking not to Melrose but to the horse. “Come on, Aggrieved.” Sydney placed her hand on the horse’s rump and he moved toward the open door. Melrose was surprised at the horse’s willingness.

“Come on.” She patted his rump and Aggrieved moved slowly all the way out.

“My word. How do you do that? We had a real fight to get him in.”

“‘Fight’ might have been the problem. The resistance goes back and forth, just as it does with people. I think it’s better, you know, with animals to play it as it lays.”

He did not understand the meaning of that negotiation, but it certainly seemed to work for her. “But you do occasionally have the horse that won’t respond to that easy treatment?”

As she took hold of Aggrieved’s halter (with one finger, he noticed), she shrugged and said, “Once or twice.”

“What do you do then?”

“Walk away.” As if to demonstrate, she and Aggrieved walked away from Melrose.

This irritated Melrose, as if he himself were the recalcitrant one in the crowd. “I don’t see how that would work.”

“Are there really any situations you’ve come up against that you can’t walk away from?”

Melrose tried to think of one, couldn’t—except for murder. “You must be a horse whisperer.”

“No. Maybe Aggrieved is. It’s the horse, not the human, that does the whispering. I think that word has long been misunderstood.”

They seemed to be so far away from the subject of murder, Melrose had no idea how to bring it up. Then he thought of the Ryders. “I got the horse from Ryder Stud in Cambridge. Do you know it?”

With an arm embracing Aggrieved’s front leg, she said, “I don’t believe I do.”

“They have a tragic history.” Melrose told her about the kidnapping of Nell Ryder and the horses kept at that farm.

“How awful.” But Melrose’s story elicited no personal history from Sydney Cooke.

He said, lamely, “You must have a horse.”

“More than one, actually. We have stables.”

“On your property, you mean?”

“It’s called Heron House. It’s my aunt’s. Great-aunt’s, to be exact.”