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.”
Free found herself smiling. She came to sit beside him. “Is that how we’ll sully the family name then?”
“Oh, we’ve already made an excellent start on that. But why limit ourselves to just the one option? I might expand the farrier’s station so I can do some metalwork here. If we decide to stay here.” He glanced over at her. “That would employ some of the men, too. And the way I see it, the more people we employ in an actual productive scheme, instead of supporting our degenerate ways…” He swept his hand, indicating the house below. “Well, the better it will be.”
She took his hand. “The massive palace and the ridiculous estates are a significant problem. But I want to run my newspaper.” She hugged her knees. “That’s the one thing I insist upon. Everything else, I suppose we can work with, but my newspaper is not negotiable.”
“Very well, then. We will make that happen. I promise.”
They stared off into the distance. It was really an excellent hillside for a ruined castle. She had a vantage point on the slow, lazy river making its way through the trees. On the far horizon, she could see the sea—sparkling blue waters fading into indistinct sky.
“Someone,” Free said, “is going to have to do the things the lady of the manor is supposed to do.”
She didn’t go on. She was really considering this. She was considering him, considering what she would have to be, have to do, to become his viscountess.
She wasn’t sure who took whose hand, whose fingers twined with whose.
“On the benefit side,” Free said, “that house leaves a lot of room for me to hide the bodies of my enemies.”
His thumb caressed her palm. “We’ll put them in the zebra-striped parlor,” he told her.