"You are covered in mud," she said. I am. There is a young woman behind me in that carriage who will be your wife by Christmas, and you are standing in your own doorway smelling of a stable. Lady Cresa Moberry, the Earl of More's daughter, stepped down after her in gray silk and good gloves, 23 years old, with the flawless composure of a girl raised to be looked at. She gave Edmund her hand and a smile of real warmth, and he took it, and he thought with a calm that surprised him, "None of this is her fault, and I'm going to hurt her anyway." "Your grace," she said, "Lady Cresa." Papa talks of nothing but your black horse." Her eyes went past him toward the stable arch, bright with genuine interest.
He says, "A girl from the village rode him down the huntfield on a loose rein, and made 12 men look like boys on ponies. Behind her, the Dowager Duchess went perfectly still. "Did he?" Said Augusta. She spent two days finding out. She did it the way she did everything, pleasantly through servants without once asking a direct question.
By the second evening, she knew the whole of it, the yard, the 6:00, the 10 shillings a week paid to the girl's own hand, and the Duke of Ravensmere standing in the rain with his hat off for 2 hours at a stretch, saying nothing. On the third day she sent the carriage down for Beatrice Harrow at 7 in the evening. She sent it deliberately with no message and no warning and no hour to change a dress. They brought her into the long drawing room at a quart 8 with mud drying on her boots and the smell of the yard still on her wool and 10 faces turned around to look at her. The candles were lit down the whole table.
The silver went on forever. There were house grapes in a pyramid on a stand in November because the Daager Duchess of Ravensmere kept a glass house and a man to run it and the room was so warm that Beatric's breath caught once visibly at the door. Edmund stood up so fast his chair went back against a footman's shins. Mother, sit down, Edmund. Augusta did not raise her voice.
She never needed to. Miss Harrow, how very good of you to come at such short notice. Beatrice stood inside the door with her hands at her sides. Do come in. We are all of us curious about you.
Augustus smiled around the table, gathering them, making them complicit. My son tells me nothing. Lord Mobre tells me everything. Between them, I have a version of you that cannot possibly be true, and I did so want the original. Somebody laughed.
It was not a cruel laugh. That was the worst of it. None of them were cruel. They were only comfortable, and being comfortable in a warm room is its own kind of knife. Now, Augusta lifted her hand, and a footman set a leather book on the table beside her and opened it at a fresh page and laid a pen across it.