Chapter 24

"I am not going to ask you here," he said quietly, for her and for nobody else. "There are a hundred people watching, and you spent your whole life being looked at by people who decided about you in advance, and I am not going to make one more thing happen to you in front of an audience."Something moved at last behind her face. "Then what is this?""This is me telling them first."He held out the folded page—his brother's page, two years and five months in his breast pocket, soft as cloth at the creases. His brother's hand, and four words underneath a price."And this is yours. It was always yours. I carried it for two years without knowing what it said."She took it. She read it standing in the frost: The girl kept him.Her hand came up, and she pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth once, hard. Edmund looked away across the beechwood to give her the only privacy available on an open field in front of a hundred people.When he looked back, she was holding the rope out to him. "Hold him," she said."Beatrice—""Hold my horse, Edmund."He took the rope. And Beatrice Anne Harrow, who stopped talking at twelve years old because talking never once made anybody listen, turned around on the hunt at Ravensmere in front of twelve gentlemen and forty hounds and a Dowager Duchess. She raised her voice on purpose in front of all of them, so that not one person on that field could pretend afterward that they misheard it."You may all hear this, too," she said. Nobody breathed. "My answer is yes. He has not asked me yet." She folded the page and put it inside her coat against her stomach with both hands, the way a person holds the only thing they own. "He will get to it. He is slow."

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