It was the first time he ever walked away from his mother while she was still speaking. It was also, he thought, on the stairs, 13 days too late to be of any use whatsoever, and the horse was already in a strange stall. 40 mi away. The sale yard at Leaminster ran from 9 and the rain came in from the west at 10 and drumed on the tin roof so hard that the auctioneer was shouting by the time they reached the 40s. He stopped at Kingington at 8 and paid for a telegraph message to the auctioneer at Laminster, withdrawing lot 41 from the sale.
It reached the Liaminster office at 10 minutes to 9 and lay on the desk in the cler's room because the cler was in the ring from 9:00 and nobody carried it out to him. Then Edmund lost a shoe off the bay at Pembridge and the last 6 mi took him 50 minutes. The hammer came down on lot 41 at 7 minutes 11. He came through the gate at 11 minutes past, soaked to the skin, hatless with the rain still in his fist, and he heard the word before he cleared the crowd. Sold.
He shouldered through a wall of wet wool and hats and cattle smell and got to the rail. Corvis stood in the ring with his head up and his ears forward looking at somebody, and he was not looking at the auctioneer. At the far side of the ring, at the rail, in a brown wool habit gone black with rain, stood Beatrice Harrow, with her hand raised. They told him the rest afterward in pieces over years. She came in on the Leam Minster carrier at 7 that morning with her uncle beside her and a canvas bag inside her coat.
She stood at the rail for 4 hours and spoke to one person in all that time. When Corvis came into the ring, three men bid, two dealers and a farmer from Kingington. The Earl of Mory came up from the county in his own carriage that morning with every intention of buying the horse. He never once raised his hand because the first thing he saw at the far rail was a girl in a brown habit with a canvas bag held against her stomach. The dealers went out at 30 guineies because the horse showed his teeth at the second one.
And at 39 guineies with the bidding on the farmer, she put her hand up and said in a voice that carried across the whole yard because the rain stopped drumming for exactly that moment, 40. Every head in that yard turned. Mobre put his hands in his pockets and looked at the roof and hummed four bars of something very badly all the way to the hammer. The hammer came down at 40 guineies, which was to the shilling the sum his brother paid for the colt 9 years before, and Edmund worked that out standing at the rail with the rain going down his neck. She counted it out on the cler's table in front of everyone. £31 in silver saved over 9 years, £10 in gold from her uncle that he did not tell her he was bringing, and £1 in new coin, 10 days wages, and a little over at 10 shillings a week, paid to her hand, not his.
It left her with nothing. The cler asked twice, whether she wished to reconsider. "No," she said. Edmund reached the rail as the ring boy handed her the rope. Beatrice.
She turned around. The rain came off the tin roof behind her in a gray sheet, and the whole yard was watching. Edmund heard his own voice come out of him thin and fast and completely unprepared. All the words he worked on for 14 days, arriving at once, and in the wrong order. That money comes to me.