He stood where she put him, 3 ft from a horse that put three men on their backs that summer, with his palms open at his sides, like a boy waiting to be inspected. Corvis came round the circle, came round again. On the third pass, the stallion turned his head as he went by, and his breath struck the back of Edmund's hand, warm and damp, and smelling of crushed grass, and Edmund did not move, and afterward he found that he was not breathing either. There, she said. It was, he thought later, the single most flattering word anyone spoke to him in the whole two years of his dukedom.
She began to talk the way ice goes off a pond, not all at once, and never in the middle. On the fifth morning, with her back to him, cleaning the grey mare's clouded eye with a cloth and warm water. They think it went in the fever, my wits, a pause while she rung the cloth. It was only the ear, but the village decided long before I could hear out of the left one, and there is no answer to a thing like that. You cannot argue a village out of a word.
You can only stop giving it new ones. Edmund said nothing because he promised not to. And because for once in his life he had nothing worth putting in the space. 9 years is not so long, she said. It gets quiet and then it gets comfortable.
That is the part I would not tell anyone. She hung the cloth on the nail and turned around and looked at him. And the look said, "And now you know a thing about me that the whole county does not." On the sixth morning she said before anything else, "You may talk today." And then she told him about Corvis, and it undid him. He was fold here, she said, "In the far, the 8th of May, and it rained for 3 days after, and my uncle said he would not make an hour." She said it easily, coiling the rope over her elbow. I was 12.
I slept in the straw with him for 11 nights because he would not take the mare and somebody had to warm the milk and hold the bottle every 2 hours. She smoothed the rope. He knew my hands before he knew anything else in the world. Edmund stood very still. And then and then a gentleman came down from the great house in June and paid 40 guineies for him where he stood and left him at the yard until he was strong enough to travel.
They took him away in October. I took the fever in August and never saw him go. She shrugged one shoulder, a movement of no importance at all. That is the whole of it. What gentleman?
She looked up. Your brother, she said. The rain stopped sometime in the night before, and Edmund only noticed it now in the silence that came after. He gave me sixpence, she said, and he said that if the colt ever came back through this yard, he would want the girl who kept him alive, brought out to see him first. She began to coil the rope again, though it was already coiled.