She did not turn around. You may tell them what I am, your grace, she said. You only have to tell them first. He went down to the yard at 5 the next morning in the dark without a lantern with her feed bill in his breast pocket and a speech he worked on since 3:00. The gate stood open.
The grey mare put her head over the barn door and blew at him and went back to her hay. The long rope hung coiled on its nail exactly where it lived. The pump dripped into the trough. No light in the window, no pencil on the bench. Silas Harrow came out in his shirt sleeves with a candle, saw the Duke of Ravensmere standing alone in his mud in the dark, and did not ask a single question because the answer was already all over the man's face.
She went at for your grace, he said. Went where? Harrow looked at the empty lane. She didn't say, "She never does." He lifted the candle a little, but she took the ledgers. The horse went back inside himself within 4 days.
Edmund watched it happen from the gate of his own paddock like a man watching a tide take a beach. On the first morning Corvis stood at the fence and looked down the lane toward the ford for 2 hours. On the second he stopped eating his feed. On the fourth he put Fenwick's undergroom into the water trough for the crime of walking behind him with a bucket. On the fifth morning Edmund took a long rope out into the mud himself at 5 in the dark.
He remembered everything. He stood at the near side. He kept his hands open and low. He asked instead of telling, and he said nothing at all, and he was patient for 40 minutes in a way that would have astonished every man who served under him in the Crimea. The stallion went round him three times, and then stopped square 12 ft away, and looked at him, and Edmund understood the look, because he was finally, at 31 years of age, able to hear something that was not being said out loud.
It said, "You are not her." He coiled it and hung it on a nail and went inside and did not come out until noon. The Dowager Duchess of Ravensmere worked faster than her son grieved. On the sixth day, a notice went down to the sale yard at Leaminster. One black stallion, 9 years old, sound in wind and limb, sold without warranty. On the same afternoon, a second letter went to the county gazette in the same hand announcing the engagement of Edmund Bain, sixth Duke of Ravensmere, to Lady Cresa Moberry of Barrowfield, the wedding to take place at Christmas.
She signed the entry with the authority he gave her over the estate in the first month of his morning, and never once thought to take back, and no auctioneer in Heraffordshire questioned a Ravensmere signature. Edmund learned of neither until the 13th day, when the printed catalog came back from Laminster with the rest of the mail, and his mother left it on the hall table, open at the page, because she wanted him to find it there. Fenwick took the stallion down on the Monday before under that same signature, and nobody in the house thought to tell the Duke a thing he was assumed to have ordered himself. Lot 41, the property of a nobleman, black entire, 9 years. Tuesday next.