“The horses in your field?” cried Jinny, shocked. “But they looked so lively.”
“They’re all like that,” he explained. “Once out of harness they get a bit jaunty again, but they’re worth more dead than alive.”
“It’s dreadful killing off a horse that has served one!” Jinny burst out. “Just for a few shillings!”
“A few shillings? Why there’s horses over two-fifty pounds! Flesh, I mean,” he explained, with a chuckle. “Not to mention the skin, hair and bones. Why, there’s eighty pounds of intestines for sausage-skins!”
“Oh, do hold your tongue!” cried Jinny, feeling sick again.
“Yes, and what about his tongue!” retorted Elijah triumphantly. “It ain’t only Frenchies that get that. And his tail waving for funerals! And his hoofs in your own shoe-buttons!”
Jinny felt indeed as though hoofs had descended on her feet, and she could almost have sacrificed Methusalem’s high-waving tail to adorn her passenger’s obsequies.
“My neighbour, the chemist—he buys the blood!” continued the ghoulish Elijah. “He makes it into——”
But just here at a cross-road Jinny’s horn signalled to a smart young man in a velvet waistcoat, who was driving a trap, and brought him to a standstill. Would Barnaby deliver a keg of oil at Uckford Manor if he was passing that way?
That Manor was, it transpired, the one goal and purpose of Barnaby’s journey.