But Hartswell began drifting in the new year, and neither of them noticed for months.
Edmund wrote faithfully four days a week, answering every letter from his steward within two days, and made two brief visits south. Each time, he came back quieter than before. Charlotte noticed the quiet and said nothing, which she called afterward the single largest mistake of that marriage.
Tenancies that should have been settled face-to-face were settled correctly and generously by letter instead—and settled correctly proved not to be the same as settled well. A drainage scheme that four farms needed to agree to stalled because two stubborn tenants wanted the Earl himself standing in the field, not a letter, however well-composed.
By April, his steward Higgins made the thirty-mile journey himself—something he had never once done in twenty years of service. He sat at Charlotte's kitchen table and laid out, without exaggeration, exactly what eight months of good letters and no presence had cost. Nobody was starving. Nobody had been turned out. The books were perfectly exact. And none of that was the point.
"A place with a landlord in it," Higgins said, "is simply a different place from a place that only receives his letters. It takes about a year for the difference to become visible, and we are eight months into it."
That night, Edmund proposed, in despair, to sign the whole estate over to Higgins in trust, live at the farm permanently, and let Hartswell find its own future.
It was Charlotte who stood at the window with her back to him and told him plainly that he would not do it: that she had known him eight months and knew exactly what kind of man he was; that the man who'd once climbed out of a carriage on a muddy road because four hundred strangers mattered to him would not now abandon them to spare himself the discomfort of being pulled two directions at once.