She'll go where she's put. She always does. She's no trouble that way. She moved. She crossed the mud to the bench under the barn eve and she took the pencil from behind her ear and she turned over a feed bill that was pinned there and waited it with her forearm against the wet and she wrote.
It took her no time at all. She came back and she held it out not to her uncle to the Duke of Ravensmere straight armed the way a man hands over a card. Edmund took it. The hand was not the hand of a girl who could not count. It was upright and even and beautifully spaced, the loops closed, the line running true across a torn piece of paper with no rule on it at all.
A hand better than his mother's better than his own. The hand of somebody who wrote every day for years where nobody looked. It said two conditions. You come to the yard at 6 every morning. Not a groom, not Fenwick.
You and you do not speak. B. Harrow Edmund read it twice. The second time his thumb pressed the paper harder than it needed to, and a bead of rain struck the corner and spread the ink of her name into a small gray flower. He looked up.
Why must I be silent? She held his eyes for three full seconds. Gray, level, absolutely awake. Then she turned and walked back to the gray mare and lifted the hind hoof again, and the conversation was over as completely as if she walked out of the county. Edmund folded the paper.
He put it in his breast pocket behind the watch where he kept the only other thing he carried. 6:00, he said. Tomorrow, and the horse will be here when you wake. He got as far as the gate. Your grace.
Harrow came after him, hat still in his hands, and there was something in the man's face now that was not greed and not deference, something closer to fright. Your grace, forgive me. That horse, you said she rode him. I did only. Harrow glanced back at the yard and lowered his voice.
Only she's never sat a horse in her life. Not once. Not since the fever. She won't go near one under saddle. 9 years since the fever, your grace.