And she's never so much as put a foot in a stirrup. The rain ran cold inside Edmund's collar. Because the girl spoke out loud on the huntfield yesterday for the first time in 9 years, and she spent the words on the horse rather than on the Duke of Ravensmere, and the one that mattered was remembered. On the first morning the Duke of Ravensmere stood at the gate of Harrows yard for 2 hours together and said nothing at all, and he discovered that he did not know how to do it. Fenwick brought the stallion down at first light in a lead halter, and a great deal of bad temper, on an order the Duke gave at midnight, and did not explain, and by 6 he stood in Harrow's Lane, looking at the hedges.
She worked Corvis on a long rain in the lane behind the barn. That was all. No saddle, no bit, 20 ft of worn rope, and a circle of mud the size of a barn floor, and the black stallion went round her while the light came up gray over the hedges. Edmund lasted 40 minutes before the words started arriving. Why the rope and not the bridle?
He carries his head too high. Surely you are letting him drift on the outside. My father's man would tell you. He closed his teeth on every one of them. By the second hour something in him went quiet from exhaustion rather than from grace.
In that quiet, he heard the yard for the first time, the suck and release of hooves in wet ground, the gander muttering along the wall, a robin working the hedge behind him, the small tick of rain coming off the barn roof one drop at a time. He heard the rhythm of the stallion's breath change when she lifted her shoulder. He heard it change back when she dropped it. He led a squadron of light cavalry in the Crimea. He commanded 40 servants and 40,000 acres and a seat in the lords.
He was 31 years old and he was learning at the gate of a horse dealer's yard in the rain that he never once in his life listened to anything he was not already talking over. She unclipped the rope at 8:00 and walked past him to the pump without a glance. Edmund went home and could not account for the whole of the afternoon. On the third morning he brought the pencil. He wrote on the back of the same feed bill, which he carried in his breast pocket behind the watch, and which by then showed the fold lines of a paper opened more often than it needed to be.
Why no bridle? He held it out over the gate. She read it while she coiled the rope. She took the pencil out of his fingers the first time they touched, and it lasted no time at all, and he felt the cold of her hand for an hour afterward, and she wrote underneath and handed it back. Because a bridle tells him, "A rope asks him," he was told for 6 years.
Nobody asked him once. Edmund read it standing in the mud with the rain going down his collar. Then he wrote before he could stop himself, "Who asked you?" She looked at that for a long moment. She put the pencil behind her ear and walked away. On the fourth morning she spoke.
She did it sideways with her left ear toward him and her eyes on the stallion's shoulder in a voice so low and so unused that he leaned across the gate to catch it. Stand at his near side, she said. Not the gate. He wants to see your hands. Edmund came into the yard.