The woman stepped out of the gatehouse briskly, not looking back at Nell 
and Harv. She was tall and wore a pair of loose khaki trousers, much worn at 
the knees but hardly at all in the seat, and splotched here and there with old 
unidentifiable stains. Above that she wore a very loose Irish fisherman's 
sweater, sleeves rolled up and safety-pinned to form a dense woolen torus 
orbiting each of her freckled forearms, the motif echoed by a whorl of cheap 
silver bangles on each wrist. She was muttering something in the direction of 
her horse, an Appaloosa mare who had already swung her neck down and begun to 
nuzzle at the disappointingly close-cropped grass inside the fence, looking for 
a blade or two that had not been marked by the assiduous corgis. When she 
stopped to stroke the mare's neck, Nell and Harv caught up with her and learned 
that she was simply giving a simplified
account of what had just happened in the gatehouse, and what was going to 
happen now, all delivered rather absentmindedly, just in case the mare might 
want to know. For a moment Nell thought that the mare might actually be a 
chevaline dressed up in a fake horse skin, but then it ejected a stream of 
urine the dimensions of a fencepost, glittering like a light saber in 
the morning sun and clad in a torn cloak of steam, and Nell smelled it and knew 
the horse was real. The woman did not mount the horse, which she had apparently 
ridden bareback, but took its reins as gently as if they were cobwebs and led 
the horse on. Nell and Harv followed, a few paces behind, and the woman walked 
across the green for some time, apparently organizing things in her mind, 
before finally tucking her hair behind her ear on one side and turning toward 
them. "Did Constable Moore talk to you about rules at all?"