Chapter 12

Augusta Vane, Dowager Duchess of Ravensmere, came down out of the carriage the way frost comes down on a garden, and she looked at her son from his hat to his boots and back again."You are covered in mud," she said."I am.""There is a young woman behind me in that carriage who will be your wife by Christmas, and you are standing in your own doorway smelling of a stable."Lady Clarissa Mowbray, the Earl of Mowbray's daughter, stepped down after her in gray silk and good gloves: twenty-three years old, with the flawless composure of a girl raised to be looked at. She gave Edmund her hand and a smile of real warmth, and he took it, and he thought with a calm that surprised him: None of this is her fault, and I am going to hurt her anyway."Your Grace," she said."Lady Clarissa.""Papa talks of nothing but your black horse." Her eyes went past him toward the stable arch, bright with genuine interest. "He says a girl from the village rode him down the huntfield on a loose rein and made twelve men look like boys on ponies."Behind her, the Dowager Duchess went perfectly still."Did he?" said Augusta.She spent two days finding out. She did it the way she did everything: pleasantly, through servants, without once asking a direct question. By the second evening, she knew the whole of it: the yard, the six o'clock, the ten shillings a week paid to the girl's own hand, and the Duke of Ravensmere standing in the rain with his hat off for two hours at a stretch, saying nothing.On the third day, she sent the carriage down for Beatrice Harrow at seven in the evening. She sent it deliberately, with no message and no warning and no hour to change a dress. They brought her into the long drawing room at a quarter to eight with mud drying on her boots and the smell of the yard still on her wool, and ten faces turned around to look at her.

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