A groan of approval went through the yard. The steward approached with his book. "And the spring rate, Miss Marsden?"
"The same through this lot. We review it before the next clip. My workshop lease stays separate, and any private commission stays off the estate account."
The steward nodded and wrote it down. Valentine said nothing. That mattered as much as anything he could have said.
An hour later, the yard was nearly empty. The last workers had gone home, and the loom stood silent in the carriage barn. Maud wiped chalk from her fingers with a rag.
Valentine came through the open doors and stopped several feet away. "The dispatch is safe," he said.
"So it is."
"The estate owes you more than one successful morning."
"It owes the workers their next piece payments. The rest we have just entered."
His mouth shifted. "I was not attempting to revise your accounts."
"One never knows."
He accepted the rebuke with the smallest inclination of his head. Then the carefulness in him changed—not weaker, more precise.
"I want to ask for something that is not in those accounts."
Maud waited.
"Permission to call on you. Not as the man who owns these barns, not as your employer, but as a man who would like an hour you have not sold him."
Ma's gaze went past him to the loom and then to the route board on the worktable. For a moment the old fear returned in a different shape—not that Valentine would seize her work (he had spent months proving he could leave it in her hands), but that the world might look at a duke courting a working woman and decide every authority she possessed had been his gift after all.
A kiss could not take the board from her. People might still pretend it had.
Valentine noticed the pause. He did not fill it with a promise or a persuasion. He put another half-pace between them and left his hands at his sides.
Nothing else in the barn changed. Her loom remained where she had said it. The steward would still come to her tomorrow. Her customers would still write to her name. Desire did not rewrite a contract unless she allowed it to. That was why she could choose it.
"You may call on me," she said, "after tomorrow's carts leave."
Valentine drew breath, perhaps to make the answer unnecessarily solemn. Ma caught his lapel and pulled him down enough to kiss him first.
It was brief, firm, entirely her own decision. For one breath, his composure deserted him. His hands came lightly to her waist, and he kissed her back.
When Ma stepped away, he let her go at once. "Is after the carts an exact appointment?" he asked.
She picked up her shuttle. "It is, your grace. Do try to obey one schedule."
By the next wool clip, early in the summer of 1819, Elmsworth no longer looked like an experiment. Baskets of new fleece filled the sorting bay. The cottage looms had winter scars on their beams and new orders tied beside them. Ma's workshop lease was secure for another year, and two private Brighton customers now sent their own carriers to the upper gate.
She stood at the route board moving pegs while the new clip came in. A distant field wagon was late.
Edwina passed with a basket of spun yarn and saw Ma's expression. "You are scowling at the board again. The upper sorting bay is full. Commanding a duke has made you intolerable."
"Commanding him is easy. Keeping him on schedule is impossible."
Earlier that afternoon, Maud had sent an instruction through the steward: Valentine was to hold the late field wagon at the upper pasture until the sorting bay cleared. It meant he would miss the worker's closing meal. He had gone anyway. Maud did not ride after him to see whether he obeyed.
By the time the last basket was undercover, evening had cooled the barn boards. Workers drifted home. Edwina took the final tally without being reminded. Ma hung the wooden route board on its peg beside the loom and left the chalk with it. Work was finished for the day.
Footsteps sounded at the open door. Valentine entered, dusty from the ride, coat over one arm and shirtsleeves rolled. He looked entirely too satisfied with himself.
"The wagon is exactly where you ordered it," he reported. "Upper pasture, off the lane. Driver instructed to wait until morning."
"You missed the meal."
"I obeyed the route."
"You also missed the fiddler."
He looked around the empty barn as though assessing a military loss. "That is more serious."
Maud had no tally to hand him, no road to sign, no failure requiring his rank. For once, there was nothing useful she needed from him. The old Maud might have invented a task rather than stand inside such an hour. This Maud held out her hand.
"There is still one tune," she said, "if you can follow."
"No musicians."
"You have managed greater shortages."
Valentine smiled. He tapped a slow measure against the wooden post of the loom. Ma took the first step. He followed.
They turned once across the empty floorboards, past worktables cleared for morning. The route board hung untouched on its peg. Valentine's hand was in hers, not on the chalk.
While outside, the waiting carts stood where she had ordered them for the next.