Chapter Fifteen
Isaac returned to London for his next session at the House of Lords expecting a colder reception than his first visit had earned him.
News of the disastrous dinner had evidently travelled well beyond Rowan Hall's own walls in the days since.
Within minutes of entering the chamber, several peers greeted him with a chill while others managed to avoid acknowledging him at all.
"Lord Rowan," one gentleman said, his tone carrying an unmistakable edge. "I trust you've come prepared to mind your temper rather better than at your own table, this time."
"I'll do my best, My Lord," Isaac said evenly.
He quickly moved on before the exchange could develop into anything further, reminding himself that whatever satisfaction Harwick's insult had earned him at the time, it had cost him rather more standing than it was worth.
The day's business, when the session finally began, concerned itself with a string of difficulties affecting rural counties throughout the kingdom.
Among these were the poor state of country roads which had become nearly impassable in places from years of neglect.
Their state was making the transport of grain and livestock an increasingly costly and uncertain business.
Then there were the mounting number of tenant families across several counties who had fallen behind on their rents after two consecutive weak harvests.
And lastly, the near-total absence, in many parishes, of any proper apprenticeship or schooling for village children who might otherwise have grown into skilled tradesmen rather than casual labourers.
Isaac listened through the first hour of debate in silence, watching a succession of wealthier landowners argue the matter in terms that struck him, increasingly, as more theoretical than practical.
Men discussing tenant hardship and road repair with the careful, distant vocabulary of accountants rather than anyone who had ever actually stood in a leaking cottage or watched a cart founder axle-deep in a rutted lane.
It was during a lull, as one particularly long-winded viscount concluded an argument that had said a great deal without actually proposing anything, that Isaac finally rose.
"If I might offer a thought, My Lords."
He felt several heads turn toward him with the particular wary attention he had grown accustomed to since his first visit to this chamber, but pressed forward regardless.
"I've spent these past weeks walking my own tenant farms, and I'll tell you plainly what I've found there, since it seems rather more useful than theory alone.
The roads want mending, and no single estate can bear the whole cost of it fairly, when half the traffic wearing down any given stretch belongs to a neighbouring landowner's grain carts as much as one's own.
Seems to me the sensible course is shared contribution—several estates pooling the expense of repairing the roads that serve them all in common, rather than each man left responsible for whatever ruined stretch happens to sit on his own land. "
A murmur moved through the chamber, not dismissive, and Isaac continued before his nerve could fail him.
"As for tenants behind on their rents—I'd sooner see a man given time to catch himself up than turned off his land, provided he's willing to put honest labour into improving it in the meanwhile.
Drainage, fencing, irrigation—work that costs an estate less in the doing than it saves in the years after, and gives a struggling tenant a fair means of settling what he owes without losing his home over two bad harvests that were never his fault to begin with.
A farm properly improved earns more over time than an evicted tenant's empty cottage ever will. "
"And the schooling, Lord Rowan?" an older peer asked, his tone carrying genuine curiosity now rather than the polite condescension Isaac had grown to expect. "You mentioned apprenticeships, I believe, in your earlier remarks to Lord Ashby."
"I did. Every estate wants blacksmiths, carpenters, masons—skilled men to keep the place running.
Most landowners bring such men in from the cities at considerable expense, when the same skills might be taught to village boys who'd otherwise grow up with no trade at all beyond field labour.
Fund the apprenticeships locally, and an estate builds its own skilled workforce over a generation, rather than paying London prices for men who've no particular loyalty to the land they're working. "
By this point, the chamber had gone unexpectedly quiet, and Isaac found himself the subject of a different kind of scrutiny than he had experienced on his first visit.
Several of the older peers were leaning forward with evident interest, one or two exchanging looks that suggested genuine reconsideration rather than the poorly disguised amusement he'd endured before.
"Practical enough," one elderly lord observed, to no one in particular, "whatever else one might say of the man's origins."
Not every peer in the chamber had been won over, Isaac noted.
Several of the younger aristocrats maintained the same faintly bored dismissal they'd shown him from the start, and he suspected there were men in that room who would sooner see every proposal he'd offered fail purely for having come from his mouth rather than a more properly bred one.
But when the session finally concluded, two gentlemen he recognised as holding considerable respect among their fellow peers approached him directly, offering compliments on his proposals with a sincerity that struck Isaac as genuine, and invited him to join a small ongoing discussion regarding agricultural reform that met periodically among a handful of interested lords.
It was, he reflected, riding back toward the inn where he and Tom would spend the night before beginning the long journey north, a small victory. But one he was proud of. Every step, even small, was a step forward.
He felt a tentative hope that he might eventually find some place for himself among these people, however hard-won that place might prove to be.
***
They arrived back at Rowan Hall well before sunset on the third evening.
Isaac, who was restless from days spent confined to a carriage, and reluctant to surrender the rest of the day to the usual pile of estate correspondence, decided against returning directly to the house.
Instead, he set off on foot across the grounds, following a narrow path that wound away from the formal gardens toward a stretch of the estate he had not yet properly explored.
There was a quiet stream he'd glimpsed once or twice from a distance, half hidden among a stand of willow trees near the estate's southern boundary.
As he walked, the evening air was cool and still, the low sun casting long gold light through the willows' trailing branches.
Isaac breathed in the fresh air, his thoughts settling into an easy quiet he had rarely experienced since inheriting the title.
He was perhaps thirty paces from the stream itself when the sound of water, disturbed by movement rather than its own natural current, reached him through the trees.
He stopped, suddenly noticing a towel hanging on a low branch near the bank.
Someone is bathing, he thought.
Isaac's first instinct was to turn and retreat the way he'd come. This was obviously some private moment claimed by whichever servant had sought the stream's refreshing coolness after a long day's work.
He had half turned to head back up the path when a sudden gust of evening wind caught the towel and sent it tumbling across the grass toward the water's edge.
He caught it without thinking, the instinct to prevent it from landing in the stream overriding whatever discretion had prompted his retreat. And it was only as he straightened, towel in hand, that he saw her.
Nell stood waist-deep in the stream with her back to him, her cropped hair dark and slicked wet against her head. Above the line of the water, his eyes travelled over her hips and the arch of her back, which were visible through her thin nightdress.
His breath caught in his throat. He knew he should look away. But he couldn’t move.
She must have sensed someone was watching her, because she turned. The moment their eyes met, she startled so violently that she stumbled backwards into deeper water.
"Forgive me," he said, the tremble in his voice giving him away.
Isaac kept his eyes carefully fixed somewhere above the water's surface.
"I didn't know anyone was here. The wind took your towel—I only meant to keep it from the water."
He extended it toward the bank without stepping closer, holding himself as still and as distant as the awkward geometry of the moment allowed.
For a long, suspended stretch of time, neither of them moved at all, the only sound the quiet ripple of the stream settling around her and the faint rustle of willow leaves overhead as the wind that had caused the whole disaster finally, mercifully, died away.
"Thank you, My Lord," she said finally, her voice unsteady.
Nell then began, with evident reluctance, to make her way toward the bank where he stood.
Isaac kept his eyes fixed on the towel in his outstretched hand, on the middle distance beyond her shoulder, on anything at all that might preserve some remnant of the composure he could feel slipping the nearer she came.
But there was no fully avoiding it, not with her rising from the water so close before him.
And once he looked, he could not tear his eyes away. Her thin nightdress soaked through and clung to her breasts and hips, in a way that left very little to any man's imagination. His eyes lingered on her nipples, which were dark and hard and pressing through the material.
Isaac felt a tightness in his breeches.
He had known beautiful women before, had been admired and pursued by more than a few in his years in London's rougher circles, and had never once found himself so thoroughly undone by the mere sight of one.
The composure he was trying exceedingly hard to keep started fraying at the edges.
Nell reached the bank and stopped before him, close enough now that neither of them could pretend the space between them was anything but deliberate.
He expected her to reach for the towel, but she did not.
For one long, suspended moment, they simply looked at each other.
"Do you know," Isaac said finally, his voice lower and rougher than he'd intended it to sound. "What you're doing to me right now, standing there like that?"
Nell did not answer, though something shifted in her expression that told him she understood the question perfectly well. Yet she made no move to retreat.
"Are you teasing me, Nell?" he asked, quieter still.
She said nothing to that either, only held his gaze with an intensity that made the silence between them feel more dangerous than any words might have.
Isaac understood then that whatever restraint either of them still possessed had grown perilously thin.
At that moment, every muscle in his body screamed at him to reach for her, but some part of his mind won out. And before he could talk himself out of it, he closed the gap between them, settling the towel firmly around her shoulders.
"Go," he said, his voice low and rough with an effort she could surely hear as plainly as he could feel it. "Before either of us does something we'll spend a long while regretting."
Nell lowered her eyes, drawing the towel tight around herself with shaking hands. Then she turned and hurried back up the path toward the manor, her wet footsteps quick against the darkening grass until the willows swallowed her from sight.
Isaac remained standing at the water's edge for a long while after she had gone, staring at the place among the trees where she had disappeared.
Only once he was fully certain of his own solitude did he finally let out the breath he had, he realised, been holding since the moment their eyes first met across the stream.
He knew very well that the image of Nell, almost naked in the stream, would remain with him for a very long time, if not forever.