Send the Simple Girl Inside," the Duke Ordered — She Was Already on His Horse
Chapter 22
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The Ravensmere Boxing Day Hunt gathered at half past ten on the field above the beechwood in a hard, white winter that turned the mud to iron overnight. The same twelve gentlemen came, the same forty hounds, the same wool and brass and steaming horses and boys running with stirrup cups. And the Dowager Duchess of Ravensmere sat in the pony carriage at the top of the field with a blanket across her knees, because she was told by three separate people not to come.And down at the gate, because the Duke of Ravensmere wrote to a stud in Yorkshire in the first week of December, stood a string of four horses from the Selby yard at Warthill, brought down for showing. Three of them wore Selby's blue blankets. The fourth wore no blanket at all, because he belonged to nobody in Yorkshire: he was black to the hoof with one white hair above the off eye, and the person at his head wore a brown wool habit worn pale at the elbows.Edmund saw her from two hundred yards away, and his hands went cold inside his gloves. He told nobody she was coming; he told her nothing at all. Her master sent her with three horses to show because he paid her master handsomely to send her, and she brought the fourth for herself because she went nowhere without him. She came down by rail two days before, and slept at her uncle's, and walked up the lane in the dark that morning to do a day's work. And she did not know—she could not possibly know—what he intended to do at eleven o'clock.That was the point. He worked it out slowly over four weeks, the way a slow man works out a thing that a quicker man is born knowing: You only have to tell them first. Not when she is watching, not to be forgiven. First.At eleven, he gave his own horse to a boy and walked out into the middle of the field and stopped. The talk went down by degrees, the way it does when a man stands in the wrong place."Your Grace," said Fenwick.Edmund took off his hat. "I should like to say something," he said. "And I should like all of you to hear it, because the last time I said something on this field, I made certain that all of you heard that, too."Nobody moved. Somewhere down the line, a horse shifted and its bit rang."On the first morning of the season, I stood here and called a woman simple in front of every one of you." His voice carried; he made it carry. He was, after all, extremely well-trained. "I did it because you were looking at her instead of at me, and I could not bear it. That is the entire reason. There was no other."At the top of the field, the Dowager Duchess of Ravensmere put her hand on the rail of the pony carriage."Her name is Beatrice Anne Harrow. She was born on this land. She kept my brother's colt alive for eleven nights when she was twelve years old. She is the reason that horse is alive and in her own hands this morning instead of sold out of the county. And she paid for him with nine years of her own savings and ten pounds of her uncle's gold in front of sixty men at Leominster, while I was still on the road counting what it would cost me to arrive."He turned slowly and made himself look at them one at a time: Mowbray, Fenwick, the younger men who laughed at the meet.