At three-and-twenty, she had taken a place as clerk to a land agent because she could keep a ledger better than any man in the office, and the agent was too idle to care what she wore. She had learned drainage. she had learned entails, enclosure, and the price of a ton of lime laid down at the field gate. And at seven-and-twenty she had taken every penny she had, £311, saved shilling by shilling over 10 years, and bought the bankrupt lease of a ruined farm called Renfield with a leaking roof, 40 acres of couch grass, and a good spring. That had been 8 years ago. Renfield now ran to 1,100 acres.
It bred nineteen horses a year and sold every one of them, and it employed forty people, and it had, Ambrose discovered, by looking at the ledgers she left lying open in front of him with what he was fairly sure was deliberate carelessness, cleared £4,000 in the previous twelve months. You are the best land agent in England, he told her on the fourth evening in the hall by the applewood fire. I am the best land agent in this county, said Tabitha Ren, and it has done me no good whatever, because I am a woman, and so I am not a land agent at all. I am a curiosity. Lord Breakwell up the valley will not deal with me directly.
He sends his steward, and his steward calls me the Ren woman in the inn. And last spring three gentlemen who wanted the ford mended refused to sit at a table where I was because of no husband and no rank, and I once, God forgive me, worked for wages. She poured his brandy. It is not tragic. It is only tiresome.
I have a fire and a good horse, and I have never once had to ask a man's leave for anything, and I would not trade that for a coronet, Your Grace. So do not look at me as though I ought to be pitied. I was not pitying you, said Ambrose. Then what were you doing? He was in fact watching the fire light move on her plain brown hair and thinking that he had spent his whole life in rooms full of beautiful women and could not at that moment have described the face of a single one of them. Counting, he said.
Counting what? The number of things I said in that hall on Monday, said Ambrose Vane, that I would give a great deal to have back. Tabitha Ren looked at him over the rim of her glass, and for the first time in 5 days, she did not have an answer ready. He wrote to Cecily. He wrote every night in the estate room with Tabitha working across the desk from him, and it became a habit so quickly that he did not notice it becoming one.
He wrote about the mare. Then he wrote about the ford and about a bad-tempered colt called Havoc and about a dairy maid who had put a frog in the churn. And then one night, without knowing quite why, he wrote, There is a woman here who is not afraid of me. I do not think I have ever met one before. She is not beautiful, and she is not young, and she has been rude to me four times, and right on every occasion, and I have not felt so much like a man, and so little like a monument since before our father died.
Cecily's answer came back in a week in the shaky hand that broke his heart every time he saw it. Bring her. He did not bring her. He brought the mare. He came back to Grantmere Abbey in November with Silverwood led behind the carriage.