He agreed to think it over, and rode back to Northumberland the following Thursday to find her in the yard. This time, he came alone on horseback—which Charlotte noticed and turned over in her mind for some time afterward.
He had four things prepared, he told her, and he wanted to say them in order, because it was the only speech he'd properly rehearsed in a month.
The first was that he would do it.
The second was that he hadn't decided out of any particular charm she held over him. He wanted that said plainly, because he suspected she was braced for a man claiming to be struck by something, and he wasn't. He'd spent nine days doing arithmetic: four hundred people, eleven weeks, a decade of failed arrangements. And she was the only woman in England who'd ever refused him anything. He'd spent those nine days realizing that fact said something unflattering about himself, not something flattering about her.
The third thing he admitted, standing at her gate with his hat in both hands, was that he genuinely did not believe he could manage it:
"I am thirty-four years old, and I have never in my life laid a fire, drawn water from a well, or slept in a house with fewer than thirty people under its roof. I don't know the first thing about sheep. I have a great deal of respect for what you've built here, and most of that respect is for something I don't understand at all. So, I haven't come here to charm you. I will be dreadful at this, and I'll be dreadful at it in front of your brother and your shepherd. And nine days hasn't been enough to get used to that idea, and I don't imagine it ever will be."
"And the fourth?" said Charlotte.