Page 46 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“He said one could not know a country until one had seen it from the one place it could not hide itself.”

“He was right.”

“He was right about horses and country and very little else, which I have decided is a respectable proportion for a man.” She smiled at the water, a small, private smile that had not been made for him, though he was close enough to receive some of it. “He bought a hunter once that three counties had given up as a man-killer. Paid ten pounds out of pure contrariness and had him taking apples from my hand inside the month.”

“How?”

“He said there were no bad horses, only men in a hurry.”

Theodore watched the river move between the fields. “And was he in a hurry?”

“Never with a horse.” Ellen’s fingers stilled on the reins. “Only with money, at the end. Money was the one thing he could not gentle, however slow he went.”

The quiet between them changed. It did not break. It merely became a place where one might set something down if one were foolish enough to trust it.

Theodore looked at the ridge ahead, at the track bending through the grass, and heard himself speak before caution could make itself useful.

“I rode this ridge as a boy. Before my parents passed on.”

The words came out three words longer than he had intended, and none of them were dressed for company. They landed in the open air between them, plain and exposed, and he could not call them back.

Ellen turned her head a little toward him, and there was something in her face he had not put there, a recognition that ran ahead of his words. She knew more of the shape of it than he had told her. The stable, he thought. Hibbert was an old gossip with a long memory, and she had clearly been listening in that yard to a good deal more than the care of a mare.

“I am sorry,” she said.

“It was a long time ago.”

“That is what people say,” she replied gently. “I have never found it makes the thing any shorter.”

He had used that very sentence himself for years to close exactly that very same door. She had extended her hand to prevent its closure, and he was surprised to discover that he harbored far less objection than propriety demanded.

“Do you ride it still?” she asked.

“The ridge?”

“In the mornings.”

“No.”

“Hibbert says you used to. With your mother. Every morning she was living.”

A longer pause passed between them, with only the sound of the horses breathing and the river moving below.

“Hibbert remembers a great deal that is no longer true,” Theodore said.

“Is it not true that you rode with her?”

“It is true that I rode with her.”

“Then what has changed?”

His hand gathered the reins by a fraction, which was neither retreat nor answer. “It is not true that I am still the boy who did.”

Ellen looked at him for another moment. There was no pity in her face, and for reasons he did not care to examine, that made it easier to bear.

“No,” she said softly. “I am inclined to believe that none of us can long remain the same being who first held an affection for a place.”

In another mouth the sentence would have been too much. From hers it settled quietly enough to be permitted.