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“That was . . .” he finally murmured.
“That was . . .” she echoed.
He smiled. He couldn’t help it. “It definitely was.”
Her face broke into an echoing grin, and the sheer joy of the moment was almost too much. “Your hand is still on my head,” he said, feeling his smile turn lopsided and teasing.
She looked up, as if she needed to actually see it to believe it. “Do you think your hat is safe?” she asked.
“We might be able to risk it.”
She took her hand away, and the motion changed her entire position, trebling the space between them. Richard felt almost bereft, which was madness. She sat less than a foot away on the wagon bench, and it felt as if he’d lost something infinitely precious.
“Perhaps you should tie your bonnet more tightly,” he suggested.
She murmured some sort of assent and did so.
He cleared his throat. “We should be on our way.”
“Of course.” She smiled, first hesitantly, then determinedly. “Of course,” she said again. “Who will we be seeing first?”
He was grateful for the question, and the necessity of forming an answer. He needed something to prod his brain back into motion. “Ehrm . . . I think the Burnhams,” he decided. “Theirs is the largest farm, and the closest.”
“Excellent.” Iris twisted in her seat, peering at the pile of gifts in the back of the wagon. “Theirs is the wooden box. Cook packed extra jam. She said young Master Burnham has a sweet tooth.”
“I don’t know that he still qualifies as young,” Richard said, giving the reins a flick. “John Burnham must be twenty-two now, maybe twenty-three.”
“That’s younger than you are.”
He gave her a wry smile. “True, but like me, he is the head of his family and farm. Youth departs quickly with such responsibility.”
“Was it very difficult?” she asked quietly.
“It was the most difficult thing in the world.” Richard thought back to those days right after his father’s death. He’d been so lost, so overwhelmed. And in the middle of it all, while he was supposed to pretend he knew how to run Maycliffe and be a parent to his sisters, he was grieving. He’d loved his father. They may not have always seen eye to eye, but there had been a bond. His father had taught him to ride. He’d taught him to read—not the actual letters and words, but he’d taught him to love reading, to see value in books and knowledge. What he hadn’t taught him—what no one had dreamed was yet necessary—was how to run Maycliffe. Bernard Kenworthy had not been an old man when he’d taken ill. There had been every reason to believe that Richard would have years, decades even, before he needed to take the reins.
But truthfully, there wouldn’t have been much for his father to teach. Bernard Kenworthy had never bothered to learn it himself. He had not been a good steward of the land. It had never interested him, not deeply, and his decisions—when he bothered to make them—had been poor. It wasn’t that he was greedy, it was just that he tended to do whatever was convenient, whatever required the least time and energy on his part. And Maycliffe had suffered for it.
“You were just a boy, really,” Iris said.
Richard let out a short, one-note laugh. “That’s the funny part. I thought I was a man. I’d gone to Oxford, I’d—” He caught himself before he said he’d slept with women. Iris was his wife. She did not need to know about the benchmarks by which stupid young men measured their virility.
“I thought I was a man,” he said with a rueful twist of his lips. “But then . . . when I had to go home and be one . . .”
She placed her hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged, but with his opposite shoulder. He did not want her to remove her hand.
“You’ve done a remarkable job,” she said. She looked around, as if the verdant trees were evidence of his good stewardship. “By all accounts, Maycliffe is thriving.”
“By all accounts?” he said with a teasing grin. “How many accounts, pray tell, have you heard in your lengthy time in residence?”
She gave a gigglish snort and bumped her shoulder against his. “People talk,” she said archly. “And as you know, I listen.”
“That you do.”
He watched as she smiled. It was a satisfied little turn of her lips, and he loved it.
“Will you tell me more about the Burnhams?” she asked. “All the tenants, actually, but we should begin with the Burnhams, as they are our first visit.”
“I’m not sure what you wish to know, but there are six of them. Mrs. Burnham, of course, her son John, who is now head of the family, and then four other children, two boys and two girls.” He thought for a moment. “I can’t remember how old they all are, but the youngest, Tommy—he can’t be much more than eleven.”
“How long has it been since the father passed?”
“Two years, maybe three. It was not unexpected.”
“No?”
“He drank. A great deal.” Richard frowned. He did not wish to speak ill of the dead, but it was the truth. Mr. Burnham had been too fond of ale, and it had ruined him. He’d grown fat, then yellow, and then he died.
“Is his son the same way?”
It was not a silly question. Sons took their cues from their fathers, as Richard well knew. When he had inherited Maycliffe, he, too, had done what was convenient, and he’d packed his sisters off to live with their aunt while he continued his life in London as if he had no new responsibilities at home. It had taken him several years before he realized how empty he had become. And even now, he was paying the price for his poor judgment.