Hartswell was not about money, and Edmund had said so to his steward more times than he could count. He could absorb the loss of that income without feeling it in any meaningful way. What he could not absorb, what kept him awake through most of that spring, was the thought of four hundred people who had never once seen a Canadian relation, who would wake up one morning to discover their landlord lived three thousand miles away and had never walked their lanes or stood in their kitchens.
His steward, a careful man named Higgins who had served the family for two decades and did not exaggerate, had told him plainly what would happen:
"It gets leased to an agent within a year, my lord. And the agent raises the rents, because raising rents is the entire function of an agent. And within five years, there isn't a family left on that land who was there when you were a boy."
Why Edmund had not married in the ordinary course of ten years was a separate question, and he had never given anyone the true answer. He had declined seven arranged introductions, four of them orchestrated by his mother before her death, and the rest assembling themselves the way such things do at dinners: a young woman seated beside him three seasons running, a father who happened to bring up crop rotation whenever Edmund was within earshot. The county had settled on its own explanation: that he was proud, or that some old heartbreak had soured him on marriage entirely.
Neither was true. There had been no heartbreak.
The actual reason lived in his own childhood home, in twenty-six years of watching his parents be scrupulously civil to one another across a breakfast table. Two people who had run out of anything real to say long before Edmund was born, and had simply continued anyway, decade after decade, because that was what a marriage of convenience became if nobody disturbed it.
His mother had said one thing about it to him in the last winter of her life, and he had never repeated it to a living soul: