Send the Simple Girl Inside," the Duke Ordered — She Was Already on His Horse
Chapter 15
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Beatrice looked at her. "They call me simple because I stopped talking," she said. "I stopped talking because talking never once made any of them listen. Your Grace has talked since I came through that door, and everyone in this room has listened to every word." Her voice stayed perfectly level. "I do not think either of us is the liar. I think one of us was born in the right house."The candles ticked. Somewhere down the table, a fork went onto a plate and stayed there. Ten people came to that room to watch a girl who could not speak, and not one of them thought to wonder what she would say if she did. Lady Clarissa put her hand over her mouth, and then every one of them did the same thing at the same moment, because there was only one thing left to do in that room: all of them turned and looked at the Duke of Ravensmere.Edmund opened his mouth. He knew the words; he knew them completely: She is under my protection, and the next person who uses that word in this house leaves it. They were in his throat. And the whole of his life was standing on the other side of them: his mother, his name, forty thousand acres, a girl in gray silk who did nothing to deserve any of this, and ten witnesses who would carry the sentence into every drawing room in the county before Sunday.He hesitated.It was not long. Afterward, he timed it against the clock on the chimneypiece in his memory over and over for weeks: half a second, perhaps less. One tick of the clock on the chimneypiece.It was long enough.He saw her see it. Nothing in her face moved; that was how he knew. That stillness, the door shut on purpose, the one she leaned against for nine years, came down over her features while he watched, and every bit of the warmth of seven mornings went out behind it like a lamp carried into another room."I should like to go home now," she said to no one in particular."Beatrice," he said. He said her name out loud for the first time in front of his mother, in front of all of them, and it came half a second too late to be worth anything at all.She stopped at the door. She did not turn around."You may tell them what I am, Your Grace," she said. "You only have to tell them first."He went down to the yard at five the next morning in the dark, without a lantern, with her feed bill in his breast pocket and a speech he worked on since three o'clock.