"And why," she said, "would I leave this?"
Edmund stood at that wall and discovered he had no answer at all. And it was, he admitted afterward to several people, the most honest failure of his life. He had spent four days building a set of criteria and ten years refusing arrangements, and it had genuinely never occurred to him, not once in either stretch of time, that a woman might simply not want to come.
"I haven't got an answer to that," he said.
"No," said Charlotte. "I didn't imagine you would. You'd have me as a countess?" She thought about that phrase for a moment, turning it over. "That sounds like a great deal of sitting still," she said.
Edmund laughed then, out loud on a public road in a way he had not done in longer than he cared to admit. "It is," he said, "an extraordinary amount of sitting still."
Charlotte set down the rag she was holding, stood, wiped her hands on her apron, and walked the length of the paddock to the wall. Edmund thought later that this had been the real moment, more than anything said after, because a woman who has already decided to refuse a man does not cross forty feet of mud to keep talking to him.
"Then I'll tell you what I have," she said, "and it will take some minutes, and I'd be obliged if you didn't interrupt. My name is Charlotte Ferris. My father had this land, and he died five years ago, and he left £300 of debt on sixty acres. I've paid the whole of it myself, and it is mine, free and clear. It brings in perhaps £110 in a good year, and rather less in a bad one, and I've had two bad ones and know exactly what both look like from the inside.