"I see," he said.
"Do you?" She tilted her head, studying him with undisguised curiosity. "I've heard conflicting reports about you, my lord. Mrs. Grimes at the village shop says you are a recluse of the most alarming sort, but Mr. Pritchett, the blacksmith, says you sent a cart of coal to the widow Higgins—says you sent a cart of coal to the widow Higgins last winter when her own supply ran out, which does not sound very alarming to me."
Steven felt a flush creep up his neck. He had given specific instructions that the coal delivery was to be anonymous.
"The widow was in need," he said stiffly. "Anyone would have done the same."
"Would they?" Miss Turner's smile widened. "I've lived in four villages in the past 3 years, my lord, and I can assure you that most people would not. They would talk about doing something but they would not actually do it. There is a difference between good intentions and good actions, and I have learned to value the latter."
Steven did not know what to say to this. He was not accustomed to being seen, not really seen, and the frankness of her gaze made him feel oddly exposed. He fell back on the manners his mother had drilled into him as a child before grief had stolen her voice.
"How do you find the cottage?" he asked. "Beyond the damp, I mean."
"Charming," she said, "in a crooked, leaning, I-might-collapse-in-a-high-wind sort of way, but I have never been one for perfection. Perfect things have no stories to tell." She patted the stone wall beside her. "Won't you sit? I promise I do not bite, unless provoked, and you do not seem the provoking type."
Steven hesitated. Every instinct told him to decline, to offer a polite excuse, and retreat to the safety of his study. But the sun was warm on his face, and the stream was making a pleasant sound, and Miss Daisy Turner was looking at him with an expectation that felt, for reasons he could not explain, like a gift.
He sat.
They did not speak of anything important that afternoon. The weather, the condition of the lane, the surprising number of rabbits in the north field. Daisy asked him if he had ever tried growing roses in the manor's garden, and he admitted that he had not. She told him about a particularly stubborn thistle she had been battling for a week, and he found himself offering advice about soil drainage.
When she laughed at his suggestion, "You sound like a book, my lord, but a very helpful book," he felt the corners of his mouth lift in what might have been a smile.
3 hours passed without his noticing. When Steven finally returned to the manor, the sun was low in the sky, and Mrs. Holloway was hovering in the entrance hall with an expression of barely concealed surprise.
"You look less pale than usual, my lord," she remarked.
He did not tell her why.
Over the following weeks, Steven discovered that avoiding Miss Daisy Turner was impossible. She was everywhere, not in a predatory or calculating way, but in the manner of a force of nature that simply could not be contained. She walked the lanes at all hours, often singing. She planted a vegetable garden at Rose Cottage that seemed to double in size every time Steven passed. She befriended Mrs. Holloway within a week, and within 2 weeks, she had convinced Mr. Grimes to teach her how to shear a sheep.
"She is very determined, my lord," Grimes had reported, looking slightly shell-shocked, "and she does not take no for an answer."
Steven tried to maintain his distance. He returned to his routines, his books, his careful isolation. But Daisy had a way of appearing at precisely the moments when his solitude felt heaviest, when the silence of the manor pressed against his ears like water, when the weight of his own thoughts threatened to crush him.
She never demanded his attention. She would simply fall into step beside him on his walks, chattering about the village gossip or the progress of her peas, and Steven would find himself listening despite his best intentions. She asked him questions, real questions, not the idle pleasantries he had learned to deflect, and she listened to his answers as if they mattered.
"Why do you never go to London?" she asked one afternoon as they sat on the bridge where they had first met. It had become their place, though neither had acknowledged it.
Steven stared at the water. The question was direct, even intrusive, but Daisy's tone held no judgment. She was simply curious, like a child asking why the sky was blue.
"I do not care for society," he said.
"Because you are shy."
He flinched. No one had ever named it so plainly. His mother had called him sensitive. His father had called him disappointing. The town had called him odd and unpleasant, and in the crueler moments, half-witted when his stammer emerged under pressure. But no one had ever looked at him with those clear hazel eyes and said the word aloud.
"Yes," he said. And the admission felt like pulling a splinter from a wound he had forgotten he carried.
Daisy nodded as if he had confirmed something she already suspected. "I thought so. You have the look of someone who has been hurt by people who should have known better."
Steven's throat tightened. He looked away, blinking rapidly. The stream murmured beneath them, indifferent to human pain.