Liam squared off with her, pointedly turning his shoulder to Aaron and Lilah. “Your dowry is mine. You can fight it in the courts, but you will lose.”
“Don’t be too sure—” Aaron grumbled, but he cut off his words when Clara made a curt gesture at him.
“What is it that you propose?”
“Stay and spend your money.”
She frowned, not sure what he meant.
He gestured around him. “You’re a brilliant woman. You have knowledge on subjects I never even heard of. Look around at my castle, at my people. Make all that knowledge useful by doing something with it here.”
“What would I do?”
“What do you want to do?”
He stepped forward and touched her arm. She was too angry to allow him to touch her, so she jerked her arm back. But he remained distractingly close. “When we first met, you were talking about modern plumbing in a castle. Why not start with that?”
“That was Mr. Russell’s idea. He has a fascination with such things.”
“Hire him. Bring him here to build his ideas.”
She shook her head slowly. “That would be expensive.”
“I’m told you have a large dowry.”
She did. Well, it was large enough to pay Mr. Russell. “You say that now, but I know how this works.” Indeed, she had tried it several times at her parents’ home. During her adolescence, she had talked her parents into all sorts of improvements only for it to go disastrously wrong. “You will pretend it is the most exciting project until it comes time to implement it. Then the money will need to be spent elsewhere. The townspeople will reject innovation. Workers will grumble because workers always do, and your determination to stand up against all that intransigence will disappear.”
“Leave my people to me.”
To the side, Aaron snorted. “You cannot control your father or his men. They hold the power here.”
“They do not have the coin. I do.”
“Not yet you don’t—”
“Aaron, stop,” Clara snapped. Or perhaps it came out more as a growl. “I am negotiating, not you.” A bold statement from a woman who was lousy at hiring her servants and routinely made a mess of the practicalities of life. She turned to Liam. “So I am to bring in Mr. Russell to refashion the water in this place. What then?”
“What do you want to do?” He tilted his head. “You could teach the children. Create a school for them.”
She nodded. She had already thought of that. Indeed, Clara had already thought about Deirdre’s brother and sister running naked through the fields without anyone to care for them or teach them. But she was not the woman for that. Her education was in esoteric topics and her patience with children was never high. She shook her head. “I would be a very bad teacher.”
“But you would be able to supervise a curriculum for the children, yes? You could hire someone to teach them letters and figures.”
She snorted. “I would train the girls equally to the boys. There would be no difference between the sexes in their education.”
“Done.” He spoke the word firmly enough that it echoed in her head. How many times had she decried the lot of women in this world? Uneducated and unskilled, they were trapped in bad marriages with no way to escape. Even worse, the cycle continued with their daughters. Generation after generation with no way to thrive.
“I would teach the women how to handle money, how to work and live without a man.”
He nodded. “So be it. If a man cannot prove his worth to a woman, then he does not deserve her as a wife.”
She snorted. He was giving her lip service, telling her what she wanted to hear. If she agreed to stay, he could change his mind at any moment. Unless she forced him to put his name to it.
“Would you sign a paper to that effect? That you will use my dowry as I direct to bring good water to the castle and to let me run a school as I choose.”
“I will.”
“But it would not be binding because you are not the laird,” inserted Aaron.
