Sebastian returned to Ashford Hall with the uneasy realization that Margaret Hale had achieved more with £20 than his office had managed with years of reports. Three days later, he sent her a formal invitation. Margaret arrived expecting another discussion about the Belford well. Instead, she found Sebastian in the library with maps of four nearby villages spread across a large table.

“I want you to come with me,” he said.

Margaret looked from him to the maps. “Where?”

“To see what else my reports have failed to mention.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And what exactly would my role be?”

Sebastian had expected curiosity, maybe even gratitude. “You would advise me.”

“Without pay.”

The question caught him off guard. Margaret started to turn away before he recovered.

“Mrs. Hale.”

She stopped.

“If I am asking you to work, you should be paid for it.”

“That would be a more promising beginning.”

He almost smiled. “You negotiate with a duke rather aggressively.”

“You invited me because I disagreed with you. It would be unfortunate to stop now.”

That was how Margaret became a temporary advisor to the Ashford Village Improvement Program.

Their first journey took them to Westmere, where Sebastian had already approved funds to widen a road leading to the market. The village clerk had described congestion as the community's greatest problem. Margaret listened to Sebastian's explanation, then asked, “Have you spoken to the people using the road?”

“The clerk represents them.”

“That was not my question.”

Sebastian sighed. “I begin to understand why you have remained unmarried.”

Margaret gave him a dry look. “I was married for eleven years.”

He immediately regretted the remark. “Forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive. My husband used to say much worse whenever I corrected his arithmetic.”

The mention of her late husband changed something in her expression, but she did not dwell on it. They spent the morning speaking with shopkeepers, farmers, and women carrying baskets between cottages. By noon, Sebastian discovered the road was inconvenient, but hardly urgent. The greater problem was that the village midwife had died six months earlier, forcing pregnant women to travel several miles for help.

“No report mentioned this,” Sebastian said.

Margaret glanced at him. “Reports rarely become pregnant.”

He stared at her, then laughed.

At another village, Sebastian arrived prepared to discuss repairing the schoolhouse roof. Margaret spoke to the teacher and learned the roof had already been patched by local carpenters. What they lacked was fuel for winter because several children stayed home whenever the classroom became too cold. By the third journey, Sebastian stopped presenting solutions before they arrived.

Instead, he began asking Margaret the same question. “What should we look for?”

Her answer never changed. “Ask them.”

The simplicity of it followed him everywhere. Sebastian had spent years believing leadership meant arriving with answers. Margaret behaved as though the first responsibility of authority was admitting that one might not know enough to answer at all.

Their conversations became easier during those journeys. One evening, after rain forced them to stop at a small roadside inn, they ate supper in a corner away from the other travelers. Without servants hovering nearby or maps covering the table, Sebastian finally asked what had been troubling him since Belford.

“Why £20?”

Margaret looked up from her soup. “Because that was what the repair cost.”

“You know what I mean.”

She did. For a moment, she turned the spoon slowly between her fingers. “When my husband died, he left me the house and very little else. There were months when £20 would have solved every problem I had.”

Sebastian said nothing.

“There was one winter when the chimney needed repair, the roof leaked, and coal prices rose all at once. I could fix two things, not three.”

“What did you choose?”

“The roof and the coal.”

“And the chimney?”

“I learned where not to sit when the wind changed.”

There was no self-pity in the answer, which made it more affecting. Margaret continued, “Someone who has always had £500 thinks twenty is small. Someone who has needed twenty knows better.”

Sebastian looked down at his untouched wine. “I've probably wasted more than that on dinners I barely remember.”

“I'm sure you have.”

“You could pretend to be polite.”

“Apparently, you hired me to make you uncomfortable.”

“Then you are earning your wages.”

He laughed again, and Margaret smiled with him. That evening marked a change neither of them named. Sebastian began looking forward to the hours spent traveling beside her, to the way she challenged him without trying to embarrass him, and to the rare moments when her practical seriousness gave way to warmth.

Margaret, for her part, started seeing beyond the duke who had once seemed to her like every other wealthy landowner. Sebastian listened when corrected. More importantly, he remembered. A week later, he rejected a costly proposal for a new market pavilion because villagers had asked instead for drainage repairs.

Margaret noticed. “So, you listened.”

“I've been told repeatedly that it is useful.”

“By whom?”

“A remarkably persistent widow.”

She turned toward the carriage window to hide her smile. Sebastian noticed it regardless.

The improvement program grew, and soon more officials started asking Margaret to attend meetings. Her name appeared alongside Sebastian's on notices sent to the villages. People who would never have spoken freely to a duke approached her without hesitation. He was discussing exactly that with his younger brother Edmund one afternoon when Margaret arrived earlier than expected.

She paused outside the partly open study door when she heard her name.

“Margaret understands these villages better than anyone on my staff,” Sebastian was saying. “If she remains involved, people will trust the program because they trust her.”

By the following morning, every conversation she had shared with Sebastian seemed altered. The invitations, the journeys, the meetings, the way he always made certain villagers saw her standing beside him. Had he respected her judgment, or had he simply discovered that a local widow made his reforms easier to sell?

When Sebastian brought her the newest village proposal that afternoon, Margaret did not open it. She handed it back.

“Find someone else.”

He stared at her. “For what?”

“For this.”

“What happened?”