"A reasonable portion," she said, "though I should say it is not a sacrifice. There is something satisfying in knowing precisely what went into the ground and what came back out of it." She glanced at him sideways with a lightness that was not quite self-deprecation. "I recognize this is not likely to be the most fashionable conversation you have had this week."
"It is not," he agreed. "But I am not certain that fashionable is a quality I have ever placed much value on."
She looked at him more directly. "No, I did not think so."
That was the end of the supper conversation, and I was fairly certain, watching my brother's face as he passed the rolls, that it was not the end of his thinking about it.
My grandmother had arranged, with the casual genius of her planning, for the rain to be useful. It arrived the following afternoon, a steady gray downpour that drove everyone from the lawn and into the house, which meant that the guests who were staying overnight found themselves gathered in the library without the structure of outdoor activity to manage their time.
There were card tables set out. There was a fire. There were books.
Miss Fairfield did not play cards. She had settled into an armchair near the far window with a volume from the shelves, and she read it with the ease of someone who has arranged herself exactly where she wished to be and has not given the first thought to how it appeared.
Edric had endured 40 minutes of Lord Pemberton's opinions on grain tariffs and excused himself. He crossed the library, I thought without a particular destination, and then came to a stop near Miss Fairfield's chair.
She looked up. "Have you escaped something?" she asked.
"Lord Pemberton."
She pressed her lips together. "Ah. Grain tariffs or the new drainage proposals?"
He blinked. "Tariffs. Is that a guess?"
"Pemberton talks about tariffs when he is at Drevenmore. He talks about the drainage proposals when he is at his own estate where they would affect him, so they make him nervous. He talked to my father about tariffs for 45 minutes at the Allerton assembly last October, and my father didn't find an exit." She returned her gaze to her book. "You should sit down. Standing in the middle of a room after making your escape looks uncertain. It suggests you might go back."
He sat in the armchair adjacent to hers, and after a moment he said, "What are you reading?"
She showed him the spine. It was a treatise on estate management: land rotation, soil composition, the long-term consequences of overworking a particular type of ground.
He stared at it for a moment. "You are at a house party," he said, "and you are reading about soil."
"I am at a house party where it is raining," she said, "and I find this interesting. Is that very eccentric?"
"It is not what I expected."
She considered that. "What did you expect?"
He didn't answer immediately, and I could see from across the room that it was not evasion. He was being precise, which was the thing he was always doing.
"I don't know," he said finally. "Something less direct."
She glanced at him again with that sidelong quality I was coming to associate with her—observant, neither seeking approval nor deflecting attention. "I can be less direct if it would be more comfortable."
"No," he said, "it wouldn't."
He asked what the book said about south-facing clay soil, and she told him without any performance, the way a person tells another person something when they are simply interested in the subject and have decided the other person might be too.
He listened and asked a follow-up question that was genuinely precise. He had an ear for the structural argument in any piece of information, which was a thing she seemed to recognize, because she answered at the level of the question rather than at the level of a general explanation intended for someone who was only being polite.
They talked, with some pauses, for the better part of an hour. I tracked it from across the room by the way the rain moved against the windows, and by the way the card games at the other end of the library evolved through two full hands without either of them apparently noticing.
They spoke about the estate management text, and then about the question of how much of what had been written about agriculture in the last 20 years had actually been tested against ground conditions outside the home counties, and then about the particular difficulty of receiving advice from anyone who had never had to implement it themselves.
Edric had opinions about this that were, apparently, not often expressed in company. Miss Fairfield listened to them with the easy attention of someone who is not waiting for their turn to speak.
"You do not agree with something I've said," he noted at one point.
"I agree with most of it," she said. "I think the part about implementation is right. I am less certain about the part about inherited knowledge versus formal study. My father has no formal training in estate matters, but he has managed a parsonage and its land for 30 years, and there is almost nothing about it he does not know. I am not sure formal study would have given him that, or that formal study gives it to many people."
"That is a fair objection," he said.
She looked at him. "You don't usually say that."