“I miss her smiles, her cooking, her—well, yes, ma’am. After twenty-two years of marriage, I miss my Florrie powerfully.”
“So you understand why the masons really ought to finish at least a portion of the houses before they start on your tram, don’t you? The men will be happier if they’re not pining for their families, and I’m sure Mrs. Jones would have agreed with me that happy fellows do better work. Of course, a temporary dormitory for the bachelors could be erected fairly quickly, but I’m sure Mr. Sherbourne has discussed that with you.”
Mr. Sherbourne was staring at his closed watch, though Charlotte knew he was listening.
“Right,” Mr. Jones said. “A dormitory for the bachelors, who are always the first to come around looking for work, and usually the least skilled, which means they are exactly the fellows to build my tram line.”
“We’ll discuss it later.” Sherbourne shoved his watch into its pocket. “I’ve promised my wife a tour of the premises, and unless I want her to get a soaking in the process, I’d best be about keeping my word.”
Charlotte sent a wistful look at all the figures, charts, and tabulations. “A pleasure, Mr. Jones.”
Sherbourne had her out of the tent in the next three seconds. “A bachelor’s dormitory isn’t in the budget.”
“You expected all of your employees to be married?”
“I’m guilty of an oversight. A budgetary oversight.”
Budgetary oversights apparently numbered among the deadly sins. “This is your first mine. How can you expect to get every detail right?”
This was Charlotte’s first marriage, but she suffered the same need to appear competent that plagued her husband.
“Because it’s not my first business, and all businesses require labor. Did I think the men would sleep in the trees?” He paced along in silence for some twenty yards. “This is why I should have taken on a partner sooner.”
A partner—not a wife. “I beg your pardon?”
“A partner, somebody who knows mining, as Lord Brantford does. I don’t bother with tenant farms because I know little about farming. What to plant where and in what order, when to fallow, when to graze sheep in the valley, when to move them up to the hillsides. I have no interest in such undertakings, so I rent out my acres year-to-year to those who know what they’re about.”
“You do have an interest in mining?” Charlotte did, and she’d been at the colliery less than an hour.
“I thought I did, but what sort of mine owner forgets that his men need a warm place to sleep between shifts?”
Charlotte let her imagination roam over the heavy carts stacked upside down in a neat bank, huge spools of cable sitting under an open-sided tent, the small mountain of gravel piled at the top of a grade where houses would someday sit. The site was muddy and deserted on this bleak autumn day, but in six months, it would be bustling with people and productivity.
“Might I have a look at your site plan, Mr. Sherbourne? If the children are using your schoolhouse during the day, the bachelors can set up cots and make a dormitory of it overnight.”
“My schoolhouse,” he muttered, gazing off at the pile of gravel. “I suppose my lending library will be housed in the same palatial edifice?”
“A lending library can be a few shelves of books to begin with,” Charlotte said, taking his arm, “just as a mine can be a few sketches and some ambition. Do you have unoccupied tenant cottages on your land?”
“Three. My last tenants left a year ago.”
“Then use one of those tenant cottages for your schoolhouse dormitory, or demolish the largest cottage and put the materials to use here.”
Sherbourne looped his arms around Charlotte’s shoulders and drew her against him. Nobody was about, though Mr. Jones was shouting in the tent thirty yards away.
Charlotte held her husband, the experience novel, for all she’d done it before. They stood in the middle of a muddy, unattractive work site, under a grey, forbidding sky, and nothing of desire colored their embrace.
But something of marriage did, something of hope.
“I have a set of site plans at the house,” Sherbourne said. “I’ll be happy to show them to you. The best view of the works is from the top of that hill. Shall we have a look?”
He kept her hand in his all the way up to the summit. The trek wasn’t steep, but the way was wet and the wind became sharper the higher they climbed. When they reached the hilltop, Sherbourne spoke for a long time, about his reasons for choosing the site and for laying it out as he had.
When he pointed over Charlotte’s shoulder to indicate where the tram tracks would run, Charlotte relaxed back against him.
His arm came around her waist, and he fell silent, a warm, solid wall of husband at her back.
“When I considered marriage at all,” Charlotte said, “I saw myself stuck in a cheerful, tidy parlor, pouring tea for an endless procession of gossiping women. My husband would be off until all hours being fitted for a new pair of boots or playing cards with his friends. Children would come along just as I was about to suffer strong hysterics from sheer boredom.”
Sherbourne turned her gently by the shoulders, and another embrace ensued as the wind whipped at Charlotte’s skirts, and a fine mist threatened to turn to rain.
“It won’t be like that,” she said, wanting to laugh and cry at the same time. Laugh for sheer joy, and cry for the young woman who’d spent years dreading a dismal fate. “With us, it won’t be like that.”
Sherbourne kissed her with a restrained hunger that matched the rising wind. “Our marriage will never be like that. Not for either one of us.”
She expected he’d turn loose of her, and they’d hurry down the hill ahead of the next downpour, but Sherbourne instead wrapped her close.
“I’ve changed my mind about something, Mrs. Sherbourne.”
Lord, he was warm. “You don’t want the schoolhouse and the dormitory to be in the same building?”
“Hang the blasted schoolhouse. I told you that we’d consummate our vows at the time and place of our choosing.”
What had once filled Charlotte with trepidation now interested her mightily. “Ours will not be a white marriage, Mr. Sherbourne. You promised me the full menu of husbandly attentions.”
The rain started, a soft shower—for now.
“I will keep my promise, but not at the time and place of our choosing.”
Thinking was difficult when a husband turned such blue, blue eyes on his wife. “And now?”
“We will consummate our vows at the time and place of your choosing, and I pray to the almighty powers that you choose to avail yourself of my intimate favors soon and often.”
*
Charlotte’s hems were a mess by the time Sherbourne returned her to Sherbourne Hall, but she didn’t seem to notice, much less mind. When he handed her down from the landau, he and his wife stood for a moment nearly embracing, regarding each other.
He wanted her—he’d shown her that before they’d become engaged—but he also wanted her to want him back, and—mirabile dictu—she apparently did.
Despite the difference in their stations, despite the dubious beginning of their union, Charlotte was willing to go forward in good faith.
Or so she’d have him believe. She beamed up at him as if he’d promised to buy her an entire jewelry establishment on Ludgate Hill.
Minx. “Shall we go inside, Mrs. Sherbourne?”
She twined her arm with his. “I asked Cook to make us a proper lunch. Hot soup, beef and ham with all the trimmings. She said you eat whatever she puts in front of you, but that will have to stop.”
“You’d starve me?” Now that Charlotte had mentioned food, Sherbourne realized he was famished.
“I’d pamper you. The menus should reflect your likes and dislikes. Because you are so invariably appreciative, Cook isn’t sure what those are.”