Charlotte wrinkled her brow at the rejection. “Posh, you need help and I am here to provide it.”
“It ain’t right,” the woman insisted.
Charlotte couldn’t help but laugh. “What isn’t right is standing here and letting your life wash away because I have some invisible rank above you.” She reached out and caught the woman’s hands. “On any other day I will let you ‘my lady’ me until your face is blue. Today, my name is Charlotte and I’m very happy to help if you will allow it.”
The woman shifted and then glanced down at the rising river. She sighed. “Eliza, my lady,” she said. “And…and I suppose I could use some help in the kitchen.”
“Excellent,” Charlotte said, linking arms with her new friend. “Lead the way.”
She cast one last glance at Ewan as she entered the house, but he did not return it. He was too busy working hard for his people. People he cared about, it was quite obvious.
And that meant she cared about them, too.
The pile of sand that Ewan’s workers had hauled up from the sea was beginning to dwindle as Charlotte helped Eliza and a few of the other women lift a handful of items onto the last wagon.
“We’ll be back shortly for the children,” the driver said, tilting his soaking wet hat toward them and urging the horses forward up the hill.
Charlotte turned back to her new friends with what she hoped was an encouraging smile. In the past hour, she had heard the fear in the women’s voices, she’d seen it on their children’s faces, and it broke her heart.
“What if the dam don’t hold?” Eliza mused out loud.
Her child, a little girl who could be no more than six, reached up to take her mother’s hand as she looked off at the wall the men at the river’s edge had built. Already it seemed to be holding back the lapping waves, but Charlotte felt no more certain about its ability to stem the tide than anyone else.
“Shall we help them?” she asked, motioning to the sand pile. The others shifted with uncertainty and Charlotte’s smile widened in an attempt for comfort. “It’s a game! Whoever can help fill the most bags wins.”
“What do they win?” asked one of the children, a sweet little girl named Maribelle.
Charlotte squatted down to put herself more on the child’s level. “What about sweet tarts from the big house and a new dolly as soon as the bridge reopens and I can go into the village?”
“I don’t want a dolly!” one of the boys called out.
Charlotte stood back up. “Then a wooden sword for the boy who fills the most and, of course, the sweet tarts. Is it a bargain?”
There were eight children in all and now they exchanged looks, excitement replacing their fear, if only for a moment. Charlotte’s heart lurched at their looks. She remembered Ewan looking much the same when his father had abandoned him all those years ago. Uncertainty was the worst thing for children.
The boys and girls hurried down the hill, with the women following. There was only one man left filling sandbags when they reached the pile—the rest were stacking—and he glared up at Charlotte as she neared him. “What do you want?”
She lifted her brows. “We’ve come to help. It makes more sense for you to be stacking. Show me the method for filling the bags and we’ll take over.”
He shook his head. “You can’t be serious.”
Charlotte straightened and put on her best “lady of the manor” face. “I most certainly am. Now, we can waste time talking about this or you can let us help. I’m not offering a third option.”
His brow wrinkled and then he threw up his hands. “Fine.”
Swiftly, he showed Charlotte and the others how much sand to put in the bags and how to tie them off securely. Then he grabbed two of the heavy bags and headed down to the water’s edge to join the others.
Charlotte rolled her eyes at the attitude, but put her charges to work as the rain pounded on and river continued to rise.
Ewan came up the slope of the hill, trying to ignore all the aches and pains in his muscles. It was hard, heavy work to build the barrier, and a reminder that while he might play at physical labor, he certainly wasn’t as strong as some of his tenants or servants.
All those thoughts left his mind as he reached the top of the hill and found Charlotte standing in the drizzling rain, her skirt soaked and the bottom covered in three inches of sand. She was tying off a sandbag with a triumphant call of, “Finished!”
He blinked, uncertain if he was hallucinating. One of the men had said something about the tenants helping to fill bags, but Ewan had had no idea Charlotte had joined their ranks. From the way they all gathered around her, it seemed she was actually the leader of their group.
The children laughed up at her, the women looked at her with approval. And she seemed as though she fit into their circles in that moment, despite the fact that she was a duke’s daughter and an earl’s widow. There was no boundary between herself and his people, and on this day, when he knew the tenants were afraid, that mattered.
She turned and caught sight of him. With a grin, she lifted her hand in greeting and raced down to him. His heart leapt and he leaned forward, as if he could simply fold her into him.
