Every horse dealer between Kingington and Lello kept that catalog on a nail by the door. Silas Harrow kept two. He stood in the hall for a long time with it in one hand. Leo Minster. He knew the paper he burned in September.
He knew the word. She arranged the identical sale he refused once already, and she arranged it in the certainty that he was too well bred to stop her twice. Then he took his hat and had the bay saddled and rode 11 mi to Barrowfield without sending word ahead. Lady Cresa received him in the morning room with her sleeves pushed up and a spananiel asleep across her feet and she took one look at his face and sent the maid away herself. You have come to release me, she said.
Edmund stopped where he was. I thought about how to say this the whole way here. Please do not say it well. I should like to keep some of my pride. She closed the book on her knee.
My father came home from your mother's table and did not speak for an hour. Then he said, "That girl is the best hand with a horse in this county, and they made her sign a book like a performing dog. He was not talking about you, but he was rather." Cresa, I am 23, Edmund, and I am not a fool, and I watched you at that dinner. She looked up. You did not defend her.
I remember thinking how strange. He looks like a man watching his own house burn down and calculating the insurance. He took that standing because it was accurate. I will say it was my doing, she said. I will tell my father this morning and he will tell the county by Friday and by Sunday you will be the man who was refused by More's daughter.
That is the kindest version available and it costs me nothing because I never wanted it. She held out her hand. "Go and get your horse, your grace, and then go and get her in that order, because the second one will not be quick." He rode back through the rain with the first clean feeling in his chest since the hunt. His mother was standing in the hall when he came in. "You will not do this," Augusta said.
"It is done." "Everything I have arranged for you. Everything you arranged for me, Edmund said, was arranged so that I would never in my life have to say a difficult sentence out loud in front of other people. He put his hat on the table. I am going to Leo Minster in the morning. When I come back, this house will use her name.