“I left my shoes at home. They are not helpful.”
From the corridor, Harris materialised with a blanket and a brown bottle. After Miss Linton tended to her mother, he nudged the baroness toward the staircase.
Miss Linton returned to the drawing room.
“I shall put the funds in a trust in your mother’s name. My solicitor as trustee.”
The fire had gone out. She crossed her arms and slowly rubbed her shoulders.
“Do we have an agreement, Miss Linton?”
“The full sum.”
“Acceptable.”
“Before the wedding.”
“Acceptable, so long as you stay at my townhouse from that same night.”
“Agreed.”
She held out her hand. Henry held her gaze and took it. Her grip was firm, and her hand was cold.
“Miss Linton.”
“Your Grace.”
“You will, I think, find me a less satisfactory husband than you have allowed for.”
“I have allowed for nothing satisfactory, Your Grace. I am not marrying you for satisfaction.”
He had been hated. He had been feared. He had been whispered about in every drawing room from Mayfair to Edinburgh. None of it had cut quite like being accepted, without expectation, by a woman.
Chapter three
The Kitchen Garden
Henry
He had no business returning to Hampstead. The solicitor would need four days, possibly five, to prepare the documents. Mr Brigg had told him as much that morning, standing in the study at Iredell House with his case under his arm. There was nothing for Henry to do in the interval. Nothing that required his presence at Thornwick House. Nothing that could not have been accomplished, if it needed accomplishing at all, by letter.
He went anyway.
He left the carriage at the foot of the lane and walked. The afternoon was grey and cold and damp in the way that February is damp when the rain has stopped but the sky has not committed to stopping. The hedgerow was as overgrown as before. The brass plate still green. He did not go up the drive.
He followed the line of the hedge along the eastern boundary, where it thinned enough in places to see through. The ground was soft underfoot and his boots sank into it. He kept close tothe hedge and told himself that a man had every right to inspect a property he was about to take responsibility for.
The kitchen garden was at the back of the house, behind a low wall of brick that had lost several courses at its far end. It was larger than he had expected. Someone had been working it with more care than the rest of the property suggested. The beds were dug and weeded with a care that the rest of the property had been denied for years. A row of bean poles stood ready, their twine still tight.
The tools leaning against the wall were old: a trowel with its handle bound in twine where the wood had split, a watering can with a patch soldered over a hole, a hoe worn thin at the blade from sharpening. Along the south facing wall, where the brick held what warmth the winter sun offered, herbs grew in close rows. Some had been cut back to the root. Some were still green.
She was kneeling in the near bed with her back to him. The dress was darker than the one she had worn for their meeting, with the sleeves pushed above her elbows. Her hair had been pinned loosely and much of it had come down. A wooden trug sat beside her with cuttings in it: stems, roots, a quantity of something leafy and dark. Her hands were in the soil.
One of the younger sisters was beside her. The golden-haired one, Poppy, sat on an upturned bucket with her knees drawn up and her arms around them, talking. He could not hear the words, only the rhythm of a young voice that had not yet learned when to stop. Miss Linton listened or appeared to. Her hands did not stop moving in the earth.
At the far end of the garden, near where the wall had crumbled, the baroness stood among a patch of something tall and gone to seed. She wore no hat. Her grey hair was loose. She held a stem between her fingers and examined it with the grave attention of a woman who found in plants what otherwomen found in drawing rooms. She was speaking to no one. Or perhaps to the plant.
Miss Linton sat back on her heels and said something to Poppy. Poppy leaned over and brushed something from her older sister’s shoulder without pausing in whatever she was saying. The gesture was small, thoughtless, the kind of touch that came from years of sitting beside a person. Neither sister noticed of course. Henry had not intended to move from the hedge. The gap in the brickwork at the garden’s far corner was visible from where he stood, and the wall itself was low enough that a man could rest his arms upon it. He was there before he had made the decision, close enough now to see the soil beneath her fingernails and the mend in the elbow of her sleeve. Close enough to see her hold a cutting up to the grey light and turn it slowly, examining the roots, her lips pressed together in concentration. She set it down and chose another, then wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist and left a streak of dark earth across her brow that she did not notice or did not care about.