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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 7

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"A month," he said. "You'll want her a month, I expect, till the beast is settled.""Until I say otherwise.""And she'll go." Harrow spread his hands, appealing to the yard, to the gander, to the sky. "She'll go where she's put. She always does. She's no trouble that way."She moved. She crossed the mud to the bench under the barn eaves, and she took the pencil from behind her ear, and she turned over a feed bill that was pinned there, and weighted it with her forearm against the wet, and she wrote. It took her no time at all. She came back and she held it out—not to her uncle, but to the Duke of Ravensmere—straight-armed, the way a man hands over a card.Edmund took it. The hand was not the hand of a girl who could not count. It was upright and even and beautifully spaced, the loops closed, the line running true across a torn piece of paper with no rule on it at all—a hand better than his mother's, better than his own. The hand of somebody who wrote every day for years where nobody looked.It said two conditions:You come to the yard at six every morning. Not a groom, not Fenwick. You.And you do not speak.B. HarrowEdmund read it twice. The second time, his thumb pressed the paper harder than it needed to, and a bead of rain struck the corner and spread the ink of her name into a small, gray flower.He looked up. "Why must I be silent?"She held his eyes for three full seconds: gray, level, absolutely awake. Then she turned and walked back to the gray mare and lifted the hind hoof again, and the conversation was over as completely as if she had walked out of the county.Edmund folded the paper. He put it in his breast pocket behind the watch, where he kept the only other thing he carried.
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Send the Simple Girl Inside," the Duke Ordered — She Was Already on His Horse

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