Send the Simple Girl Inside," the Duke Ordered — She Was Already on His Horse
Chapter 18
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"I will say it was my doing," she said. "I will tell my father this morning, and he will tell the county by Friday, and by Sunday you will be the man who was refused by Mowbray's daughter. That is the kindest version available, and it costs me nothing, because I never wanted it." She held out her hand. "Go and get your horse, Your Grace. And then go and get her. In that order, because the second one will not be quick."He rode back through the rain with the first clean feeling in his chest since the hunt.His mother was standing in the hall when he came in."You will not do this," Augusta said."It is done.""Everything I have arranged for you—""Everything you arranged for me," Edmund said, "was arranged so that I would never in my life have to say a difficult sentence out loud in front of other people." He put his hat on the table. "I am going to Leominster in the morning. When I come back, this house will use her name."It was the first time he ever walked away from his mother while she was still speaking. It was also, he thought on the stairs, thirteen days too late to be of any use whatsoever, and the horse was already in a strange stall forty miles away.The saleyard at Leominster ran from nine, and the rain came in from the west at ten and drummed on the tin roof so hard that the auctioneer was shouting by the time they reached the forties.Edmund stopped at Kington at eight and paid for a telegraph message to the auctioneer at Leominster, withdrawing Lot 41 from the sale. It reached the Leominster office at ten minutes to nine and lay on the desk in the clerk's room, because the clerk was in the ring from nine o'clock and nobody carried it out to him. Then Edmund lost a shoe off the bay at Pembridge, and the last six miles took him fifty minutes.The hammer came down on Lot 41 at seven minutes past eleven.He came through the gate at eleven minutes past, soaked to the skin, hatless, with the reins still in his fist, and he heard the word before he cleared the crowd: