He very nearly turned back on the fourth morning. He told his coachman as much, standing in the yard of the inn: that they would go home, and he would write to his aunt in London and let her arrange something proper, because four days chasing an idea had been an absurd use of eleven weeks.
Then one of the carriage horses came up lame on the road out of the village, and the coachman climbed down cursing, and Edmund got out to stretch his legs on a lane running along a low stone wall. He looked over that wall into a paddock full of sheep, and saw a woman on her knees in the mud with her arm inside a struggling ewe.
He watched her for nearly five minutes before she noticed him, and he told her afterward exactly what had gone through his mind in those five minutes, and none of it concerned her face:
The fence along this side wants mending, and has wanted it for at least a season. The flock looks well-fed despite that. There's a boy at the gate doing half the work she's doing, and she hasn't once raised her voice at him. She's up to her elbow in a difficult birth without a single hand to spare her, which tells me there's no husband and likely no grown son either. And she hasn't looked up once in five minutes, which means she isn't expecting company. And that is the first thing in four days that hasn't been arranged for my benefit.
The ewe delivered at last, a wet, trembling lamb landing in the straw. Only then did the woman look up and see him standing at her wall. She was perhaps twenty-eight, with dark hair coming loose from its pins and an expression that suggested she had already priced him, his coat, his boots, and his carriage before he had said a word.
"You've come about the horse," she said, not a question. "The smith is two miles on past the chapel. Tell him Charlotte Ferris sent you and he'll see to it before supper instead of tomorrow."
"That's useful," he said, "but it isn't what I stopped for."