I will swear before any bishop in England that the most feared man in the north very nearly smiled.
What followed over the next six weeks, I can only describe as a comedy that did not know it was becoming something else.
Ashworth called on Cecily three days after the wedding, ostensibly to thank her. He stayed two hours debating the management of tenant housing in the northern counties—opinions she had formed from reading reports I had lent her.
"You disagree with my steward," he said at one point, in the tone of a man encountering a new species.
"Your steward has never wintered in one of those cottages," she said. "I have sat with the families who do."
He left looking, as my housekeeper put it, as if someone had surprised him.