Chapter 11

Edmund put his hand inside his coat. Behind the watch, folded small, was her feed bill. And behind the feed bill was a page torn out of his brother's pocketbook—the only thing of his he carried—and it lay in that coat for two years and three months. At the top was a date. Underneath were four words that Edmund read a hundred times and never once understood until that moment:The girl kept him.He did not take it out. He could not have explained it if he tried, not without something in his throat giving way in front of her.Corvus put his nose into her shoulder and left a long gray smear of dust across the brown wool, and she reached up without looking and rubbed the white hair above his off eye."He remembered me," she said. "On the field, that is all it ever was, Your Grace. It was not bravery."By the seventh morning, the village knew. The vicar's wife found reason to walk the lane at ten minutes to six. The miller's boys took to sitting on the wall above the ford. Fenwick asked twice, with elaborate blankness, whether His Grace would be wanting the bay saddled for the morning or whether His Grace would be walking again.Edmund came at five. He told himself it was the light; he told himself the stallion went better early. He stood at the near side with his hands open and watched a girl in a brown habit ask a horse a question in a language he was only now learning to hear, and he thought, with the flat clarity of a man reading his own sentence aloud: I am going to have to marry her, and it will cost me everything I own.The thought did not frighten him. That frightened him.He came up the drive at nine with mud to the knee and his hat in his hand, whistling something badly.The carriage stood at the door: four horses, gray livery, the Ravensmere arms on the panel, polished by somebody who polished them at an inn at four that morning in order to arrive looking exactly this way. Fenwick came down the steps fast, and his face carried the particular gray of a man delivering weather."Her Grace, Your Grace," he said. "Three weeks early."The carriage door was already open, and she did not come alone.

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