Chapter Twelve
Isaac woke well before dawn, having slept scarcely at all. Instead, he had spent the better part of the night staring up at the canopy of his bed, replaying the previous evening's disasters over and over in his head.
He had ruined the dinner, that much he could not argue himself out of. In the space of a single sharp reply, he had undone all the good that he had managed to do in the last few weeks.
On reflection, he did not regret the words themselves. After all, a man ought not to sit quietly through an insult to his character delivered at his own table, and he did not think any amount of hindsight would convince him otherwise.
What he regretted, lying awake in the grey hour before sunrise, was Nell.
She had come to him with nothing but kindness, offering the same gentle reassurance she had offered a dozen times since their lessons began, and he had turned on her with a coldness she had done nothing to earn.
He'd snapped at her to leave him be, as though she bore some share of the evening's blame rather than being the one person in the whole of Rowan Hall who had troubled to check on him.
He had seen the hurt cross her face before she'd lowered her eyes and left, and the memory of it sat heavy in his chest. It was worse than anything Harwick or his cronies had said to him across the dinner table.
I ought to apologise, he thought.
So, after he was dressed, he headed out to find Nell. But before he had a chance, Fletcher caught him in the hallway.
"Are you ready to go and see the tenants, My Lord?" Fletcher asked.
Isaac hesitated.
He had forgotten all about his arrangement with Fletcher that morning.
"They will be expecting us," the steward added.
Isaac sighed. His apology would have to wait until the afternoon.
"Alright," he agreed. "Let's go."
He rode out with Fletcher shortly after breakfast to inspect the tenant farms scattered across the estate's considerable acreage. If nothing else, it proved a welcome distraction.
He visited a dozen cottages over the course of the morning, listening to an assortment of complaints Fletcher had evidently been fielding for years without much resolution.
Broken fences left unmended, rents grown difficult to meet after two poor harvests running, a well gone brackish that no one had troubled to properly clean.
Isaac listened to each complaint, listening for the places where a man's words and his actual circumstances failed to quite align, and found, more often than not, that the tenants' grievances were legitimate.
It grew increasingly clear throughout the morning that the previous baron's long neglect had left more damage scattered across the estate than Fletcher's ledgers had suggested.
"You'll bankrupt yourself, My Lord, mending every broken thing on the property inside a single season," Fletcher observed as they rode between farms. "Some repairs might reasonably wait until spring, when the accounts have had opportunity to recover from—"
"A man's roof doesn't wait for the accounts to recover, Fletcher."
Isaac had learned, over the past weeks, to hold his ground against the steward's financial caution without much difficulty, and did so again now.
"Whose cottage is next?"
The widow Marsh's cottage sat at the edge of the estate's northern boundary, a small stone dwelling that had clearly seen better decades.
The elderly woman who answered his knock studied Isaac with the particular wary uncertainty he had grown accustomed to from tenants meeting their new landlord for the first time.
"My Lord," she said, dropping into an awkward curtsy. "I hadn't expected—"
"I'm told your roof's been troubling you," Isaac said, before she could finish apologising for a visit she'd done nothing to invite. "Mind if I have a look?"
Once he'd climbed up to examine the roof properly, it proved worse than the word "troubling" suggested.
A whole section near the chimney was rotted through, patched over the years with whatever materials had come to hand, none of it sufficient to keep out a proper winter storm.
"I wrote to the estate office three winters running," the widow said, when he'd climbed back down, her voice carrying the particular resigned weariness of a woman long accustomed to being ignored.
"Never heard so much as a word back. Made do with buckets, mostly, and prayers that the worst of it would hold through till spring. "
"You won't need the buckets this winter." Isaac turned to Fletcher. "Send men out to reroof this properly, starting tomorrow. Whatever it costs."
"My Lord, the expense of a full reroofing, on top of the Hartfield repairs already underway—"
"Send the men, Fletcher." Isaac kept his voice level but left no room for further argument. "A widow oughtn't spend a Yorkshire winter catching rain in buckets because three years of letters went unanswered. Whatever this estate's accounts can bear, they can bear that."
The widow's eyes brightened with emotion, and she thanked him with a warmth that followed him the rest of the ride, settling into his chest alongside a satisfaction more genuine than anything the previous evening's disastrous dinner had offered him.
Word of the morning's visits travelled quickly, as such things did in a small county.
By the time Isaac and Fletcher turned back toward Rowan Hall that afternoon, they passed two tenants along the road who greeted him with a warmth noticeably different from the cautious deference of his first weeks at the estate.
Fletcher, who was riding beside him, allowed himself a rare, grudging smile.
"They're saying in the village you might actually prove a decent landlord, My Lord," the steward observed. "High praise, coming from tenants who've had little enough reason to expect it from anyone bearing the Rowan name."
Isaac said nothing to that, though the observation settled somewhere warm in his chest, a small, quiet counterweight to the previous night's humiliation.
The warmth did not survive long past his return to the manor.
He caught sight of Nell working with several other maids in the kitchen gardens as he crossed the courtyard. They were gathering the last of the autumn vegetables into a wide basket.
As he approached, an unthinking smile rose to his face at the sight of her, but Nell did not return it. Instead, her eyes met his for the briefest instant, and then she lowered her head, returning to her work without any further acknowledgement.
Isaac could not ignore how her posture carried a careful, deliberate formality so unlike the easy warmth he had grown accustomed to over the past weeks.
The dismissal unsettled him, and he thought of it through the remainder of the afternoon's business with a persistence that made the estate correspondence waiting in his office harder to attend to than it ought to have been.
***
That evening, his tea was delivered to the study once the household had begun settling for the night. He had hoped it would be Nell who delivered it, and when she stepped through the door, he felt the knots in his stomach loosen.
"Nell."
She set the tray down with careful precision. "My Lord."
"I owe you an apology," he said at once. "For last night. I spoke to you sharply, and you'd done nothing to deserve it. My temper was for Harwick and the rest of that table, not for you, and I ought to have had better command of it before I let it land somewhere it didn't belong."
"There's no need to apologise, My Lord."
Her voice remained perfectly polite, perfectly even, and somehow that evenness troubled him more than any lingering hurt would have.
"You'd every right to dismiss a servant who overstepped her place. I ought not to have intruded on your privacy uninvited."
"You weren't intruding. You were being kind, and I repaid it poorly."
"You're very gracious to say so, My Lord."
She folded her hands before her in the careful posture of a servant awaiting further instruction, her eyes lowered.
Isaac wished, absurdly, for the sharp-tongued girl who had once scolded him for idling in a barn, or the woman who had laughed so freely over an absurd arrangement of dinner forks, rather than this carefully composed stranger standing before him now.
"Is that all, My Lord?"
"That's all," he said, though it was not entirely true.
He remained in the study long after she'd gone, the tea cooling untouched on the desk before him, turning over the whole strange, unsettled shape of the day.
He had mended a widow's roof and earned, for the first time since his arrival, something approaching genuine goodwill from tenants who had every reason to distrust him. He had ridden the whole length of the estate and back with a satisfaction he had rarely felt in his life before this.
And none of it, he realised now, had occupied nearly so much of his thoughts as the brief, unsettling absence of a smile from a housemaid who owed him nothing beyond the ordinary courtesy of her position.
He thought of the dancing, and the barn, and the careful way she had avoided his eyes tonight, and understood, with a clarity that arrived later than it should have, exactly what Tom had seen in his face that afternoon in the training barn.
He sat alone in the study, knowing that he had allowed himself to become dangerously attached to a woman he had no earthly right to want. A woman he could offer nothing beyond scandal and ruin should his growing feelings for her grow.
Tom had warned him. Isaac understood now exactly how right his oldest friend had been. And yet, it didn't change a single thing about how he felt.