Send the Simple Girl Inside," the Duke Ordered — She Was Already on His Horse
Chapter 3
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The field was waiting: twelve gentlemen and forty hounds and the whole county in wool and brass, waiting on a morning they talked about all through August.Edmund looked up at the girl. She looked back at him for the first time: quick, level, gone again. Gray eyes, nothing simple in them whatsoever. Then she turned her head a little to the right, the way a person turns toward a sound. He saw that it brought her left ear round to him and carried the right one away, and something in his chest slipped a half inch out of place."Ride, then," he said.She rode. She gave the stallion nothing that Edmund could see: no heel, no rein, no word. The horse went from stone to flight in the space of a heartbeat, and the frost came up off the turf behind them in a white spray that hung in the air and fell.Someone swore. Somebody's hat went into the grass."She is riding astride," said a voice in the line, in the tone of a man reporting a fire.Edmund was on his own bay and through the line before he made the decision to do it. The field dropped away from the house in a long green fall toward the beechwood, and she took it the way water takes a hill. She did not sit the horse; she belonged to it. Edmund rode from the age of four, and he never in his life saw a rider do so little and be obeyed so completely. No fight, no correction, only a thing agreed on between the two of them before either of them reached the slope.The wind pulled tears across his face. His bay ran full out and lost ground on every stride. At the bottom, she turned along the woodline, and the black stallion came around under her in a curve as smooth as a signature, and Edmund, twenty lengths behind and falling further, heard something he could not account for. She was laughing, not loudly—a small sound torn away by the wind almost as soon as it left her, the laugh of someone who never expects to be heard, and therefore never bothers to hide it. The sound went into him and sat there.She slowed at the gate. She brought the stallion down by degrees: gallop to canter to trot to walk. By the time Edmund closed the distance, the horse was blowing steam in great white columns and walking on a loose rein, and she was leaning forward with both hands flat on the black neck.Edmund pulled up beside them. His own breath came hard. Hers did not."Who taught you?" he said.She did not answer. He tried again and heard his own voice do something it never did: falter."That horse put three men in the surgeon's hands between June and September."