Trial by Desire by Courtney Milan

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 aspeck 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.”
    Oh, the inopportune moments of his childhood.
    “I’m perfectly serious. I’ll manage it.”
    Over the past few years he’d learned he could contain the restiveness, his simple inability to just stop. All he had to do was channel that excess energy into physical tasks. The more mundane, the more repetitive, the greater the strain on his muscles, the better it worked.
    Plum simply shook his head, no doubt washing his hands of his master’s madness. “Cart’s already in the field,” he said.
    Ned found the cart in question half an hour later. Champion watched him, his eyes lowered, yards away at the fence. Pitching hay into a cart was excellent work—back-straining and tiring. Ned could feel his muscles protestwith every lift of the fork. His back ached in pain—the good sort of pain. He worked through it.
    One hayrick. Two. The sun moved a good slice in the sky, until Ned was past the point of tiredness, past the point of shoulder pain, until his muscles burned and he wanted nothing more than to set down the pitchfork and leave the work to the men Plum would undoubtedly send.
    But he didn’t. Because not only did this bleed off all that extra intensity, this was good practice. While there were days like today, when he felt vigorous and invincible, there also came times when he wanted nothing more than to simply come to a halt.
    Those were the poles of his life: too much energy, almost uncontainable, followed by too little. When the next pole came riding ’round, he’d be ready for it again.
    For now, though, he pitched hay.

CHAPTER FIVE
    K ATE FOUND her husband’s coat carelessly tossed across a fence rail. She’d trudged down a muddy footpath in search of him. The trail meandered behind a short scrubby line of trees, past an old, weathered line of fence. In the distance, ducks gabbled peacefully.
    By the time she found him, her dress, once pristine, had picked up a band of mud at the hem. The starch of her collar had become limp against her skin. Not quite the way