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

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

Chapter 20

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Edmund heard his own voice come out of him, thin and fast and completely unprepared—all the words he worked on for fourteen days arriving at once, and in the wrong order: "That money comes to me. It goes to my own estate. It is my own horse. I telegraphed from Kington to have him withdrawn, and the message sat on a desk. Let the clerk give it back to you, and I will—""You will do nothing of the kind," she said. "It is the price.""Give it back, and it was never a purchase—""And I did not stand two hours in that rain to be handed anything.""Beatrice, I know about Lady Clarissa—""Lord Mowbray told me at nine." She looped the rope once over her elbow. Water ran off her chin. "He thought it would make me glad.""And did it?"She looked at him then, properly: level, gray, awake. And Edmund saw that she was not angry. He understood, with a cold that got into his bones and stayed there until Christmas, that anger would have been an enormous kindness."You were half a second late at your mother's table," she said. "You are four minutes late here. You will always be exactly that late, Your Grace, because you will always stop to count what it costs first." She gathered the rope. "I did not count. I put down everything I have in the world in front of sixty men, and I did not stop, and I did not care what they thought of me while I did it.""Let me—""You may write to me," she said. "You write very badly. It will do you good."She clicked her tongue once, and the black stallion came to her shoulder through the rain like a dog coming in from a field.
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Send the Simple Girl Inside," the Duke Ordered — She Was Already on His Horse

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