"The fourth is a condition of my own," he said, "and I've thought about it more than the other three combined. I need an heir. That's the entire weight behind the will. Marriage protects Hartswell while I'm alive; a son protects it after I'm gone. And if there is no son, everything we build here lasts only as long as I do, and then it reverts regardless. I'm telling you that plainly now, rather than letting you discover it in a year and wondering whether I deliberately let you not think about it."
"And if there isn't one?" said Edmund quietly. "Then there isn't one. And it will never be your fault, and I will never once suggest that it is. I've thought about that for nine days as well. But I won't pretend I don't want it. Every man in my position wants it. And half of them tell their wives it doesn't matter. I've watched that kind of marriage from the inside, and I won't do it to anyone."
They married at the small chapel in Hartswell at the end of that summer, with perhaps thirty people present, which had been Edmund's insistence over the objections of nearly everyone who advised him.
He arrived at Charlotte's cottage in the second week of September with a single trunk and a horse, having spent a fortnight arguing his own valet down from packing four.
The first morning nearly undid him entirely. He was woken before dawn to an empty kitchen, a dead fire, and no one at all, because Charlotte had already been out with the flock for an hour. He stood there in his shirtsleeves with absolutely no notion what to do with himself until she came in for the tinderbox and found him.
She did not laugh, and she said afterward that the decision not to laugh was the single most important choice she made in that entire first year.
"The fire's out," she told him. "It goes out every night, and gets lit before five. This morning, there was no one free to do it. Watch me, and tomorrow you'll try it yourself. You'll be terrible at it for a fortnight, and that's simply how it goes."