A Rogue of Her Own (Windham Brides #4)(39)

Charlotte used their first proper meal as husband and wife to interrogate Sherbourne about the mine. When would it be operational? How much ore would it ship? What quality? How many men would be employed? Her appetite for information matched Sherbourne’s appreciation for the food on the table. She consumed facts and figures at a great rate, all the while asking how Sherbourne liked this dish or that cut of meat.

And to think he’d worried that they’d have nothing to talk about.

“Will you rest this afternoon?” he asked, as the plates were cleared. As soon as the question was out of his mouth, he realized he’d put it to her once before.

“Rest? From what?”

“From running all over the works with me this morning. Hiking to the summit, braving the elements.” Kissing me witless.

“This morning’s outing, while interesting and enjoyable, was hardly taxing. I have lists to make, and I might pay a call on my sister.”

Sherbourne rose to hold Charlotte’s chair, and debated whether to steal a kiss now that the room was free of servants. “Am I to accompany you on this call?”

“Asked the condemned man of his jailer? Do you truly dislike Haverford that much?”

“I resent him,” Sherbourne said. “He was born into wealth and consequence he did nothing to earn.”

Charlotte patted Sherbourne’s cheek. “So were you, so was I, which is why we must use our resources responsibly and not squander them on fleeting indulgences.”

Sherbourne stopped with her at the door to the corridor. “I’m not a damned duke, and if I have nineteen generations of sons, none of them will be dukes, either.”

“But the twenty-first might, Mr. Sherbourne, while if I have a thousand generations of daughters, none of them will ever be a duke. Women are half the population, but once we marry, we legally cease to exist, simply because we had the great misfortune to be born female. The highest ambition my daughters might have is to marry a duke and bear his children. Perhaps you’d like to trade places with me? I’m told childbirth is the most painful privilege known to…well, not man, because men never have to endure it.”

She blinked up at him, as if this were a serious debate.

“I will concede that I was born to significant privilege,” he said. “I also work my arse off.”

Charlotte withdrew the pin from Sherbourne’s cravat, rearranged the linen folds, and fastened them again. “Haverford spends his days lounging about on velvet pillows, then? I must take Elizabeth to task for allowing such sloth.”

Good God, she was dauntless. “Maybe that’s why I resent Haverford—because he’s so blasted saintly. Farmers name their children after him, old women gossip with him in the churchyard, and he actually listens to them.”

“Dastardly of him. What’s the real reason you and he don’t get on well?”

The morning spent hiking around the work site had left Sherbourne hungry. This exchange with Charlotte taxed him in a different sense. His wife made him think, and not about the expenses involved in establishing a working colliery.

“Haverford owed me a substantial sum.”

Charlotte made a “yes, yes, and?” motion with her hand. “Now he owes you much less.”

“Now he owes me nothing, because I forgave him the balance of the loan as a wedding present. Tore up the promissory notes and sent them to him with a signed release. For years, though, he took it upon himself to improve this tenant farm, or import that new strain of sheep. He employed half the valley in his great, crumbling castle, and he kept the shops in the village in custom feeding and clothing his army of servants.”

“And?”

“And he could manage all of that because I forbore to collect on the debts he owed me. In a sense, all of his commerce and charity, every bit of it, was undertaken with my money. He’s well loved and respected, while I’m the modern-day Grendel, laying waste to a paradise of Haverford’s making. I want to sink this mine, Charlotte, not because it will make me rich—it won’t, though I expect it to be profitable—but because the land can’t support all the families who dwell here.”

She was listening, which was more than Haverford seemed to do.

“Haverford means well,” Sherbourne went on, “but he lacks vision. I can employ a hundred men at that mine, while Haverford would have to come up with at least twenty farms to keep them in work. We aren’t making any new farms, and unless we take to the Dutch habit of reclaiming land from the sea, we never will. Corn prices fluctuate wildly, but the world will always, always need to keep warm.”

Why couldn’t Haverford, a reasonably intelligent man, see that?

Charlotte slipped her arms around Sherbourne’s waist and gave him her weight.

What sort of reply was this? Sherbourne stood in the doorway, awkwardly poised to hug her in return, then settling to the embrace for an odd, quiet moment.

“You are a good man,” Charlotte said. “I didn’t think you were a bad man, but I’m glad to know that your ambition is not merely for yourself. In this, you and Haverford are the same. The welfare of your neighbors concerns you. You know it, and I know it.”

For her that seemed to decide the matter. Sherbourne rested his cheek against her temple. Her hair was still damp from the rain and bore the fragrance of gardenias, a sweet, substantial scent that calmed him.