Send the Simple Girl Inside," the Duke Ordered — She Was Already on His Horse
Chapter 17
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
Edmund learned of neither until the thirteenth day, when the printed catalog came back from Leominster with the rest of the mail, and his mother left it on the hall table, open at the page, because she wanted him to find it there. Fenwick took the stallion down on the Monday before under that same signature, and nobody in the house thought to tell the Duke a thing he was assumed to have ordered himself.Lot 41: The property of a nobleman. Black entire, nine years. Tuesday next.Every horse dealer between Kington and Ludlow kept that catalog on a nail by the door; Silas Harrow kept two.Edmund stood in the hall for a long time with it in one hand. Leominster. He knew the paper he burned in September; he knew the word. She arranged the identical sale he refused once already, and she arranged it in the certainty that he was too well-bred to stop her twice.Then he took his hat and had the bay saddled, and rode eleven miles to Barrowfield without sending word ahead.Lady Clarissa received him in the morning room with her sleeves pushed up and a spaniel asleep across her feet, and she took one look at his face and sent the maid away herself."You have come to release me," she said.Edmund stopped where he was. "I thought about how to say this the whole way here.""Please do not say it well. I should like to keep some of my pride." She closed the book on her knee. "My father came home from your mother's table and did not speak for an hour. Then he said, 'That girl is the best hand with a horse in this county, and they made her sign a book like a performing dog.' He was not talking about you, but he was rather.""Clarissa—""I am twenty-three, Edmund, and I am not a fool, and I watched you at that dinner." She looked up. "You did not defend her. I remember thinking, How strange. He looks like a man watching his own house burn down and calculating the insurance."He took that standing, because it was accurate.