Chapter 16

The gate stood open. The gray mare put her head over the barn door and blew at him and went back to her hay. The long rope hung coiled on its nail exactly where it lived. The pump dripped into the trough. No light in the window, no pencil on the bench.Silas Harrow came out in his shirtsleeves with a candle, saw the Duke of Ravensmere standing alone in his mud in the dark, and did not ask a single question, because the answer was already all over the man's face."She went at four, Your Grace," he said."Went where?"Harrow looked at the empty lane. "She didn't say. She never does." He lifted the candle a little. "But she took the ledgers."The horse went back inside himself within four days. Edmund watched it happen from the gate of his own paddock like a man watching a tide take a beach.On the first morning, Corvus stood at the fence and looked down the lane toward the ford for two hours. On the second, he stopped eating his feed. On the fourth, he put Fenwick's undergroom into the water trough for the crime of walking behind him with a bucket.On the fifth morning, Edmund took a long rope out into the mud himself at five in the dark. He remembered everything: he stood at the near side; he kept his hands open and low; he asked instead of telling; and he said nothing at all. He was patient for forty minutes in a way that would have astonished every man who served under him in the Crimea.The stallion went round him three times, and then stopped square, twelve feet away, and looked at him. Edmund understood the look, because he was finally, at thirty-one years of age, able to hear something that was not being said out loud. It said: You are not her.He coiled the rope and hung it on a nail and went inside and did not come out until noon.The Dowager Duchess of Ravensmere worked faster than her son grieved. On the sixth day, a notice went down to the saleyard at Leominster: One black stallion, nine years old, sound in wind and limb, sold without warranty.On the same afternoon, a second letter went to the county gazette in the same hand, announcing the engagement of Edmund Vane, sixth Duke of Ravensmere, to Lady Clarissa Mowbray of Barrowfield, the wedding to take place at Christmas. She signed the entry with the authority he gave her over the estate in the first month of his mourning and never once thought to take back, and no auctioneer in Herefordshire questioned a Ravensmere signature.

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Send the Simple Girl Inside," the Duke Ordered — She Was Already on His Horse