Send the Simple Girl Inside," the Duke Ordered — She Was Already on His Horse
Chapter 19
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Sold.He shouldered through a wall of wet wool and hats and cattle smell and got to the rail. Corvus stood in the ring with his head up and his ears forward, looking at somebody—and he was not looking at the auctioneer.At the far side of the ring, at the rail, in a brown wool habit gone black with rain, stood Beatrice Harrow, with her hand raised.They told him the rest afterward, in pieces, over years. She came in on the Leominster carrier at seven that morning with her uncle beside her and a canvas bag inside her coat. She stood at the rail for four hours and spoke to one person in all that time.When Corvus came into the ring, three men bid: two dealers and a farmer from Kington. The Earl of Mowbray came up from the county in his own carriage that morning with every intention of buying the horse; he never once raised his hand, because the first thing he saw at the far rail was a girl in a brown habit with a canvas bag held against her stomach.The dealers went out at thirty guineas because the horse showed his teeth at the second one. And at thirty-nine guineas, with the bidding on the farmer, she put her hand up and said, in a voice that carried across the whole yard because the rain stopped drumming for exactly that moment: "Forty."Every head in that yard turned. Mowbray put his hands in his pockets and looked at the roof and hummed four bars of something very badly all the way to the hammer. The hammer came down at forty guineas—which was, to the shilling, the sum his brother paid for the colt nine years before, and Edmund worked that out standing at the rail with the rain going down his neck.She counted it out on the clerk's table in front of everyone: thirty-one pounds in silver saved over nine years, ten pounds in gold from her uncle that he did not tell her he was bringing, and one pound in new coin—ten days' wages and a little over, at ten shillings a week, paid to her hand, not his. It left her with nothing.The clerk asked twice whether she wished to reconsider."No," she said.Edmund reached the rail as the ring boy handed her the rope. "Beatrice."She turned around. The rain came off the tin roof behind her in a gray sheet, and the whole yard was watching.