Send the Simple Girl Inside," the Duke Ordered — She Was Already on His Horse
Chapter 21
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Edmund stood in the mud with his hands open at his sides. "Where will you take him?""North," she said. "The Selby stud at Warthill, past Ripon. They keep a hundred and sixty horses, and they want a hand who can read a ledger. I wrote to them from my mother's cousin's house at Kington, where I have been these fourteen days. The man there wrote back and did not ask me one single question about my wits. He asked me what I would do with a colt that would not take the mare." She almost smiled; it was worse than the stillness. "Two hundred miles, Your Grace. It is a long way to be late from."Four weeks, eleven letters. Not one of them answered.He wrote eleven letters between the saleyard and Christmas, and every one of them was terrible. He knew it while he wrote them. He was a man who dictated to a secretary for two years, and the habit was in his wrist. The letters came out level and handsome, and said nothing whatsoever, and he burned the first four in the library grate before the ink dried.The fifth one he sent:Miss Harrow,The stallion boxes were whitewashed last week, and his now stands empty, which I did not expect to mind, and I mind a great deal. I stood in it on Tuesday for some time. I am aware of how that sounds.My mother said your name at dinner on Sunday. She said it correctly and without any particular expression, and then asked for the salt. I am told this is what victory looks like in this family.You said I write badly. I do. I am going to keep doing it.RavensmereShe never answered one of them. He kept writing. By the ninth, he stopped trying to be elegant and started telling her what the weather did, which horse coughed, what Fenwick said, how the light came over the beechwood at four o'clock. By the eleventh, he was writing the way a man talks to someone across a kitchen table, and he sent it, knowing perfectly well that it might be going into a fire at the other end. He sent it anyway.That was the whole of the change in him, and it took four weeks and cost him everything he owned in the way of pride.