Good boy, she said. You remembered. Before the Duke of Ravensmere walked down to that yard the next morning, you should know one thing about the girl on the black horse. She was not brave. She told him so herself, and she was telling the truth.
Rain came in the night and took the frost with it, and by morning the lane down to Harrows Yard ran brown and loud between the hedges. The Duke of Ravensmere went on foot. He told himself it was the mud. The bay slipped twice on the hill, and he turned her back at the crossroads and handed the reins to a boy. He walked the last half mile with the wet coming through his collar, and he did not examine the decision any further than that.
Three children stood on the wall above the ford. They stopped throwing stones at the water when they saw his coat. "Harrow's yard," he said. The tallest boy pointed down the lane. Then, because he was 9 or 10, and because the world seemed suddenly generous, he added, "The simple one lives there." Edmund stopped.
The boy's grin faltered by degrees, the way a candle goes out in stages. "What did you call her?" "Everyone calls her that, sir. Your grace." The boy looked at his feet. "She don't mind. She don't understand it." "Go home," Edmund said.
He heard them scatter behind him, and he found no satisfaction anywhere in it, because the phrase came out of his own mouth on the huntfield the day before in front of 12 men at a volume he chose on purpose. The yard smelled of wet straw and apples going soft, and the cold iron smell of a forge that went out hours ago. A gander came at him sideways along the wall and thought better of it. She stood at the far end with a cartor, an old gray mare thick in the leg, one eye clouded white. She was picking out the near hind hoof with the mare's whole weight leaned into her shoulder like a wall about to fall.
She did not look up. Miss Harrow. The mare's ear swiveled. The girls did not. Edmund walked around.
He came at her from the left side and he saw it work. Saw her chin lift, saw her find him, and he filed the fact away with the discomfort of a man learning something he should have known for 9 years. She set the hoof down. She straightened mud to the elbow, a farrier's pencil behind her ear, that loose braid over one shoulder. I came about the horse, he said.
The yard door banged. Your grace. Silas Harrow crossed the mud at the speed of a man watching the lane since dawn, wiping his palms down his front, hat already in his hand. Your grace, forgive the yard. We don't She didn't mean anything by it.