"The boy at the gate is my brother Danny. He's thirteen. And if I leave, there's no one to keep him fed and schooled until he's old enough to run this place himself. The old man in that cottage is Silas May. He's past sixty, shepherded for my father for thirty years, and he can't get taken on anywhere else at his age. Nobody hires a shepherd that old. There's a widow two farms over, Mrs. Enfield, who helps at lambing and shearing for what little I can spare her, and she's got nowhere better either."
She put both hands flat on the wall.
"So here's my difficulty, and I want the whole of it before you say another word: if I go with you, I can't keep this land. I have no husband to leave managing it. No grown brother yet. Nothing. I'd have to sell or let it. And any man who takes sixty acres in this county brings his own people onto it within the year. He wants strong hands, not an old shepherd who's slow in the mornings. And he wants my brother's schooling to be somebody else's business entirely.
"He'd be entirely right to think that way; it's exactly what I'd do myself in his position. So, it isn't the land I'm holding on to. I want that understood, because you'll assume it is, and it isn't. I have no particular love of sixty acres of sheep. I've been tired since I was seventeen. It's that there are three people standing on this ground with nowhere else in the world to go, and I've spent five years making certain of them, and I won't hand them to a stranger for a house with rooms I can't count."
"Then you're refusing me," Edmund said.
"I haven't said that," said Charlotte. "I said it was my difficulty. I didn't say it was my answer."
She looked at him directly.