The rigid set of his shoulders slumped just a fraction. He rubbed a hand over his tired face, careful to avoid the scarred tissue on the left side. The roof on the west wing is failing, he said quietly, his voice devoid of the earlier aggression. It leaks into the grain stores below. That is where the money goes.
We have to keep replacing the rot. I blinked, thrown off by the sudden shift. He wasn't yelling. He was explaining. And the tenant farms?
I asked, keeping my voice cautious. Struggling. The soil is poor this year. I haven't collected full rents in two seasons. He tossed the ledger onto the table.
It landed with a dull thud. Pendleton's debt wiped out my cash reserves. I bought you, Cecilia, but I bankrupted the estate's immediate future to do it to secure the inheritance. The bitter truth hung between us. We were both trapped.
He was shackled to this decaying stone, and I was shackled to him. I picked up a cloth and began wiping down the silver tray beneath the candalabra. Then we have work to do. Nathaniel watched me for a long moment. You are a terrifyingly practical woman, Cecilia.
Survival requires practicality, Nathaniel, not poetry. He didn't argue. He walked over to the hearth, entirely empty of wood, and stared at the blackened bricks. "Tell Mrs. Gable," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "That she may light the fires in the main rooms.
Just not in the library." "Not yet." It was a concession, a small, fragile truce handed across enemy lines. "I will tell her," I said. He nodded once, not looking at me, and walked out of the room.
I watched him go, the heavy tread of his boots fading down the hall. I looked back down at the tarnished silver, my reflection warped and distorted in the dark metal. I picked up the rag and polished harder until the dirt began to clear, and a small bright patch of silver shone through the rot. Three weeks bled into four, marked not by the calendar, but by the slow, agonizing reduction of grime in Harwood Hall. The smell of lemon wax began to wage a successful war against the pervasive scent of mildew.
Fires burned in the drawing rooms, casting warm, flickering light against the ancient tapestries, but a clean house was merely a polished sinking ship. I sat at the massive oak desk in the estate office, my fingers stained with cheap iron gal ink. The ledgers Nathaniel had initially tried to withhold from me, were now my daily obsession. The mathematics of ruin were laid out in jagged, aggressive handwriting. Generations of neglect, compounded by the devastating fire, and finally accelerated by Nathaniel's own isolation.
You are scowlling at the paper as if it offended you personally. A voice rumbled from the doorway. I didn't look up. I dipped my pen into the inkwell. It does offend me.
Your grandfather sold off the best grazing land to a neighboring baronet for a pittance, and your father somehow managed to lose money during a boom in the wool trade. It is a legacy of spectacular incompetence. Nathaniel stepped into the room. He brought the scent of the moors with him. Damp earth, crushed heather, and cold wind.