Send the Simple Girl Inside," the Duke Ordered — She Was Already on His Horse
Chapter 8
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"Six o'clock," he said. "Tomorrow. And the horse will be here when you wake."He got as far as the gate."Your Grace!" Harrow came after him, hat still in his hands, and there was something in the man's face now that was not greed and not deference, something closer to fright. "Your Grace, forgive me. That horse... you said she rode him.""I did.""Only..." Harrow glanced back at the yard and lowered his voice. "Only, she's never sat a horse in her life. Not once. Not since the fever. She won't go near one under saddle. Nine years since the fever, Your Grace, and she's never so much as put a foot in a stirrup."The rain ran cold inside Edmund's collar. Because the girl spoke out loud on the huntfield yesterday for the first time in nine years, and she spent the words on the horse rather than on the Duke of Ravensmere, and the one that mattered was: remembered.On the first morning, the Duke of Ravensmere stood at the gate of Harrow's yard for two hours together and said nothing at all, and he discovered that he did not know how to do it. Fenwick brought the stallion down at first light in a lead halter and a great deal of bad temper, on an order the Duke gave at midnight and did not explain, and by six, he stood in Harrow's Lane, looking at the hedges.She worked Corvus on a long rein in the lane behind the barn. That was all: no saddle, no bit, twenty feet of worn rope, and a circle of mud the size of a barn floor, and the black stallion went round her while the light came up gray over the hedges.Edmund lasted forty minutes before the words started arriving: Why the rope and not the bridle? He carries his head too high. Surely you are letting him drift on the outside. My father's man would tell you...He closed his teeth on every one of them. By the second hour, something in him went quiet from exhaustion rather than from grace.In that quiet, he heard the yard for the first time: the suck and release of hooves in wet ground, the gander muttering along the wall, a robin working the hedge behind him, the small tick of rain coming off the barn roof one drop at a time. He heard the rhythm of the stallion's breath change when she lifted her shoulder; he heard it change back when she dropped it.He led a squadron of light cavalry in the Crimea. He commanded forty servants and forty thousand acres and a seat in the Lords. He was thirty-one years old, and he was learning at the gate of a horse dealer's yard in the rain that he had never once in his life listened to anything he was not already talking over.She unclipped the rope at eight o'clock and walked past him to the pump without a glance. Edmund went home and could not account for the whole of the afternoon.