She took nine days after that, and spent four of them at Hartswell without telling him beforehand. Introduced by Higgins not as the countess, but simply as a woman who understood smallholdings, she went into the cottages and the kitchens and listened.
She came home having discovered that the tenants didn't want a duke standing over them making decisions. They wanted someone who understood what a bad year felt like from the inside; someone who could sit with a widow four days after her husband's funeral and know what to actually say to her, rather than have it said correctly, kindly, and uselessly through a letter. And there wasn't a single such person on that entire estate—except, she realized, herself: a woman who'd been £300 in debt on sixty acres and had climbed out of it with her own hands.
What came out of those nine days was not a grand romantic gesture, but four practical things laid out at her own kitchen table:
First, Edmund would be at Hartswell the greater part of every month, properly present, sitting the bench, walking the land himself.
Second, Charlotte would go with him, splitting her time, and would take on the smaller tenancies as her own responsibility, paid a proper wage, entered plainly in the estate book—so that no one would mistake her for a countess merely taking an interest, but would understand her as someone doing a job, answerable for it, good or bad.
Third, Silas May would come too, not as a laborer, but walking the smallholdings with her, because there was nothing about a hedge, a lazy son, or a struggling flock that man couldn't read in four minutes; and tenants would tell Silas things they'd never tell an earl or a steward.
And fourth, the farm itself would remain hers forever, never sold, never let to strangers, with Danny growing into its management over the coming years and both of them returning to it without fail every single lambing season for the rest of their lives.