"Your father has never once raised his voice to me in thirty years. And I would give a great deal to know what that costs a person to manage for thirty years."
So Edmund had refused every arrangement without ever explaining why, because the reason belonged to his mother, and it wasn't his to hand around; and because a grown man admitting he feared a polite, empty marriage sounded absurd even inside his own head. And now he had eleven weeks, and every available path would deliver him precisely the marriage he had spent a decade avoiding.
What he did instead struck everyone who heard about it as either mad or romantic, and it was neither.
He got into his carriage in the last week of June and drove north into a county where nobody had ever seen his face, deliberately avoiding the towns and the manor houses where he would be recognized within the hour and the whole enterprise would collapse into exactly the theater he was trying to escape. He wanted farms—working farms. And he wanted to find a woman who ran one herself, because a woman managing land on her own had already said no to circumstance a hundred times over and had been forced to prove herself right. She would have kept accounts. She would have handled difficult men in difficult seasons. She would have done something hard in plain view that he could judge with his own eyes inside a few minutes of watching her. And above all, she would not have been placed in front of him by anybody.
The first three days were failures, and he was honest with himself about why. He spoke to four different women running smallholdings, and every conversation went wrong at the same point. It took him until the third night in a coaching inn to understand it. He was not recognized by name in that part of the country, not once. But a well-dressed stranger stopping at a farm gate reads the same to any woman alone on her land, whether he's a duke or a debt collector or a buyer with a low offer already prepared.
He wrote it down that night on the back of a letter:
I have spoken to four women in three days and learned nothing whatsoever, and I have been calling their silence reserve, when in fact it is simple arithmetic. A woman standing on her own ground has everything she owns behind her, and she isn't going to hand a careless word to a stranger until she understands what he's really come for.