Eleanor looked at him across the table. "Which part?"
"All of it."
"That would take longer than your dinner guests will appreciate."
"They have wine."
"Then civilization may survive."
A laugh nearly escaped him. Nathaniel pulled out a chair but remained standing. "The grain."
Her amusement disappeared. She touched one finger to the papers. "Your managers intended to purchase additional winter grain after prices rose. I stopped them."
"With what authority?"
"None."
"That must have been inconvenient."
"Mostly for them," she explained without flourish. "Grain stored for spring planting had been inventoried badly. Enough could be redistributed temporarily if each farm received seed according to acreage rather than tradition. Coal contracts had been renewed automatically for years, so I found another merchant willing to accept delayed payment in exchange for a longer agreement. And unused carriage horses had been eating through expensive feed, so I persuaded Samuel to lease several until spring."
Nathaniel listened, irritation slowly giving way to something less comfortable. "My advisers knew these figures."
"They knew the numbers." Eleanor fed a small piece of wood into the fire. Sparks lifted. "They did not know Widow Carter was burning furniture because her coal allotment was late. They did not know three families were sharing one sack of flour. Numbers behave differently when you know the names attached to them."
His jaw tightened. "And you did."
"I live here."
The words were quiet. They landed harder than an accusation. Nathaniel glanced toward the narrow room: the mended curtain, the worn edge of her table.
"Why did no one write to me?"
Eleanor became very still. The fire cracked between them.
"Someone did."
Nathaniel looked up. "Who?"
She met his eyes. "I did."
His breath stopped for half a beat. "When?"
"October, twice in November, again before Christmas."
"I received nothing from you."
"I know."
There was no bitterness in her voice, which somehow made it worse. Nathaniel stepped closer to the table. "What did you ask for?"
"For someone at Blackmir to listen before the shortages became a crisis."
"And when no one answered?"
Eleanor's fingers rested on the stack of calculations. "I stopped asking."
Outside, one of the carriage horses stamped against the frozen ground. Nathaniel studied her face. "Yet you saved the estate anyway."
"No, Your Grace." Her gaze held his. "I helped save the people living on it. Your estate merely benefited."
Silence settled between them, deep enough that he heard the small hiss of damp wood in the hearth. Then Nathaniel noticed the corner of another ledger beneath her papers. It bore the Blackmir seal.
"Where did you get that?"
Eleanor followed his gaze. For the first time that evening, caution entered her expression. "Samuel lent it to me."
"Why?"
She hesitated. "Because there was something in your accounts he could not explain."