Page 49 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“And if I become lost?”

Theodore folded his letter.

“You will not.”

“You sound very certain.”

“I know exactly where you ride.”

The silence that followed was brief but noticeable.

Theodore returned to his correspondence.

Ellen looked down at her coffee.

Both appeared unexpectedly occupied.

Lady Augusta, who had been pretending to read a letter with the theatrical patience of a woman waiting for fools to notice one another, set it down at last.

“Theodore, your wife’s diligence has completely revived the kitchen garden; it was quite gone to ruin, but she has made it flourish beautifully.” she said. “Had you noticed, or do you attend only to the park?”

“I had noticed. The beds were turned and limed a fortnight since, the pears are tied in, and the stillroom has been opened for the first time since my mother kept it.” He did not look up from the letters. “I attend to a good deal I do not remark upon, aunt. You of all people should know it.”

Ellen had gone very still over her cup, and he marked that too, and said nothing.

***

He came upon her in the kitchen garden that afternoon, not by accident, though he told himself it was.

She was kneeling down at the herb border with her sleeves pushed to the elbow covered in dirt to the wrist, and she did not hear the gate.

“You will ruin that dress,” he said.

She sat back on her heels and looked up without alarm. “It was ruined two seasons since. This is the first honest work it has done in all that time.”

“Coyne has men for this.”

“Coyne has two men and forty rooms of glass to keep, and neither of them knows lavender from couch grass, which is how the border came to be three years of nobody.” She pulled a fistful of weed and shook the soil from the roots. “I do not mind it. One cannot think in a drawing room. One thinks very clearly with one’s hands in the dirt.”

“What do you think about?”

It was out before he had decided to ask it, and she looked up, as surprised by the question as he was to have put it.

“Today, the Burton smallholding.” She turned back to the border. “I met the wife on the lane. She called it what was left of it, and looked sorry the instant she had, the way people do when they have told a duchess a true thing by mistake.”

“What was left of what?”

“That is what I came out here to ponder on. The holding runs down toward the river, and there is good bottom land below it in somebody else’s hand now, by the state of the hedges, and Mrs. Burton would not say whose.” She sat back. “You own this country. I thought you would know who had been buying the river land off your own tenants.”

Theodore was quiet a moment. “Parcels along the bottom have gone these last few years. Through agents, to a name I never troubled to chase, because the price was fair and the land was poor and a man cannot buy up all of England to keep his neighbors comfortable.” He heard himself say it and did not care for the sound. “I did not look closely. I am beginning to think I should have looked closely.”

“It is your country,” she said again, without sting. “People here measure a great deal by whether the man at the top is looking.”

“You have been at Wrenfield a month and learned more of my tenants than I have in eleven years.”

“I have been poor, Your Grace. The poor learn one another quickly. It is the comfortable who can afford not to look.” She brushed the soil from her palms and stood. “I did not mean it as a reproach.”

“It was one regardless, and a fair one.” He looked down the long garden, the cleared beds, the tied pears, the whole of it brought back by her hands from being nobody’s for a decade. “Should you wish the lowlands to be examined, I shall see that it is done immediately. And if the garden wants anything, men or money or glass, you have only to tell Crewe. You did not need to set Coyne to keep it from me.”