And the man at her side… She stole a glance over at him.
Edward strode beside her. He seemed as uneasy in this place as she felt, and maybe that was the only thing that kept her from running in horror.
Yesterday, he’d told her he wanted to make her happy. Today, she’d come with him to his estate in Kent. Because—she still didn’t quite believe this—the man she married had an estate in Kent, and that was now an inextricable part of her life. She’d married him for richer or poorer, but quite frankly, at the moment she would have preferred poorer.
He’d made every effort to make her feel comfortable. He’d not yet announced the marriage. He’d wired ahead and sent the servants away on holiday, because he knew that she’d be overwhelmed by a procession of people all wanting to meet her needs.
Yet somehow the absence of servants made the tour Edward was giving her even more bewildering.
This was what he’d kept from her: this vast empty space screaming of responsibility. This was what he hadn’t told her, because he’d feared she wouldn’t want it.
“The grand hall,” he told her. Then a few minutes later: “The blue parlor to the right; the yellow parlor to the left.”
“The zebra-striped parlor,” Free muttered as he paused at the door of the next room.
He glanced down at her, and the half smile on his face slowly died. “You…hate this.”
She’d been trying her best to imagine herself in any of these rooms, in any role except gawking seer of sights. She’d failed.
“It’s not really filling me with delight,” she admitted.
He turned from the room. “I’m doing this all wrong. Come with me. Let me show you the good parts.” He marched down the hall to an unobtrusive door set in the wall. He wrenched this open and led her into a bare hall, one not floored underneath by marble. Here, no massive portraits looked down in snooty disapproval.
“Oh, thank heavens,” Free said, breathing in relief. “I was going mad out there.”
“Here.” Edward jiggled a door to a room and then opened it wide. “The seamstress’s work area. Patrick Shaughnessy—he’s that friend I told you about—his mother was a seamstress.”
Free blinked. “Patrick Shaughnessy? Is he any relation, by chance, to…” She trailed off, and then she glanced up at him. “Of course he is. Of course. Stephen Shaughnessy—he’s why you came back in the first place.” She looked around the room. A small, dingy window let light spill onto the bare wood floor. A simply made chest of drawers stood against one wall.
“Yes. He is. He’s like a little brother to me.”
She frowned, recalling… “He lied to me about you. That little…” But she couldn’t muster up anger over it.
“Clod,” Edward suggested. “It’s what Patrick and I always called him. We referred to him as ‘the clod.’ But only when he was present. You’re not angry at him for lying, are you?”
“He hardly knew you were going to marry me,” she said dryly. “But I’ll have words with him.” It made sense of everything Edward had done in the beginning. “Then it wasn’t entirely about revenge when we first met, was it?”
He gave her a look. “It took about five minutes before it was about you, too. You’ve been the one easy part in all of this. If I didn’t ask you to join this uneasy future with me, it’s because I love you too much to ask you to come into this.” He gestured around him.
She turned away from him to hide the emotion that swept through her. Yes. She knew he loved her. She’d known it almost from those first five minutes. He was just learning how to do it properly.
She blindly opened a drawer. “Let’s see what we have in here.” The drawer didn’t stick as she’d expected from her own household drawers. It slid open smoothly on a clean, oiled track. “Linens,” she said coolly. She slid that drawer closed and picked another. “More linens. Good heavens. If we sewed the sheets end to end, we could reach the ocean from here.” She shut that drawer, too, and put her hand on the topmost drawer. “Let me guess what’s in this one: yet more linens.” Free yanked it open.
But this drawer rattled as she pulled it open.
And when she looked inside, it wasn’t linens. It was a collection of thimbles, large and small. Some were old, weathered iron; some were new and shiny tin. There were hundreds of thimbles there. For God’s sake, why would anyone ever need so many thimbles? Even the servants here ran to excess.
Free stared at the drawer, blinking in confusion. And somehow, that was what broke her—not the four parlors or the vast grounds. It was thimbles.
She began to laugh. Not just a little giggle, but a helpless, unladylike belly laugh. She should have been able to stop, but after the last few days, somehow she couldn’t. It almost hurt to laugh like that. Edward watched her in confusion.
“Well,” she said, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes, “if your brother ever comes to visit, I know just what to slip under his mattress.”
Edward let out a crack of laughter. “The needles are in the drawer just over.”
Somehow, after that, the tour got better. Not that it became any less overwhelming; it was still utterly ridiculous that any human beings would spend their lives surrounded by this kind of wealth. But the visit started to be something that they were doing together.
There were a handful of servants in the gardens and stables that he hadn’t sent away—those whose duties could not bear a few days’ neglect—but they slipped away when Free and Edward approached. Edward showed Free around the farrier’s station. He explained how to shoe a horse, demonstrated how to work the bellows. That, she could accept. After that, he took her up to the ruins on the hill.
He pointed out the boundaries of the estate—hazy and indistinct, thousands of acres, hundreds of tenants. She could scarcely believe it.
“One of the early skirmishes in the battle for Maidstone took place just down there,” he told her. “Back when my forefather was a mere Baron Delacey. People come constantly to see this place for historical reasons. My father hated it.”
“Let’s put up a monument,” Free suggested. “Open it to the public.”
He sat on one of the broken battlements and smiled. “Better. We could charge admission. That would be so crass that my father would turn in his grave.” His smile widened, and he turned his finger in a lazy circle. “Which would also be useful. We could attach his coffin to some kind of an engine and use the power of his outrage to…I don’t know, grind corn.”