Cori laughed, she couldn't help it. From beside her came something quieter, not quite a laugh, but very close to it. He’d found it funny but hadn’t let himself show it fully.
They stood a little while longer, looking at the moors and the foals and the wide, grey sky. The wind came off the heather cool and clean. And Cori let herself be there, absorbing it all, in the last of the evening light, at the top of a turret she had heard so much about, beside a man she had thought about nearly every day since she’d first spotted him across a crowded ballroom.
Dining Hall
Acklan Castle
James couldn’t remember the last time the dining room at Acklan had sounded so full of life.
Six people was not, by any standard, a large dinner. But six people who were genuinely glad to be in the same room, in a home that had been quiet for too long, made a different kind of noise than six people performing the obligations of a formal evening. The candles were lit along the length of the table and the fire had been built up against the unseasonable chill, and the whole room had the particular warmth of a place that had remembered what it was for.
From his spot at the head of the table, James watched his brother hold court and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he didn’t want to be anywhere else.
"The point," Daniel began, and not for the first time by the sound of it, "is not the quality of the juggling. The point is the conviction with which the juggling is performed. A man who juggles three things with absolute certainty is considerably more entertaining than a man who juggles six things while looking anxious about it."
"That is the most extraordinary position I have ever heard taken on juggling," Hythe said, amusement in voice.
"I have strong feelings on the subject,” Daniel said.
"You have strong feelings about everything," Miss Beckett said, beside him.
"That is also true," Daniel agreed cheerfully. Then he looked at his intended the way he had been looking at her all evening, the way that James had been noticing for some time now. Though he was genuinely glad for his brother, he found the sheer volume of Daniel's devotion to be slightly exhausting.
"What do you think of Acklan, Miss Beckett?" James asked his soon-to-be sister-in-law.
"It is everything Daniel said it was." Miss Beckett beamed in Daniel’s direction. "And a good deal more. There’s something about the way Acklan sits in the valley. As though it belongs here in a way that was not designed but simply true."
Daniel looked at auburn-haired beauty he intended to wed as though she had just said the most remarkable thing he had ever heard. Of course, Daniel looked at the girl the very same way approximately forty times a day. Even so, the whole thing had not yet become less affecting to witness.
"Yes," James said, because Miss Beckett was right in this, and it deserved acknowledging. "That’s exactly it."
Hythe set down his wine and glanced in James’ direction. "I understand your north field has been giving you some trouble."
“I mentioned it in passing,” Daniel told James.
"The flooding last spring?” Hythe asked. “The lower drainage not clearing the way it should."
"We have dug it out twice," James said with a nod. "It fills again within a fortnight."
"The field sits too low," Hythe said. "You won’t solve it by clearing. You’ll need to redirect entire thing. There’s a rather good drainage engineer in York. Pemberton, I think his name is, who did something similar for Carlisle on his eastern fields three years ago. The solution was counterintuitive. He ran the channel north rather than south, away from the natural fall of the land, and it worked because?—"
"Because the blockage was not in the channel," Miss Corinna said, from further down the table.
Everyone looked at her.
She seemed mildly surprised to find she’d spoken aloud. "I beg your pardon," she said, composedly. "I didn’t mean to interrupt."
"No, go on," James said, before he thought about whether he meant to say it.
She glanced at him once, quickly, and then at Hythe. Then said, with a directness he found rather endearing, "The blockage is never in the channel when the channel keeps filling. The channel is doing exactly what it should. The problem is where the water’s coming from in the first place." She shrugged one shoulder. "We had something similar with the eastern salt pans on the Turks a few years ago. The rakers kept clearing the drainage but it kept backing up. Everyone assumed the channel was the problem, but it was the land above it. There was a section where the gradient had shifted, not much. It was barely perceptible, but enough to redirect the natural flow of the water. Once we found the problem, we didn’t need to touch the channel at all."
The room was quiet for a moment. Miss Beckett smiled at her younger sister, warmth evident in her expression.
Hythe set down his wine and looked at the girl. Something in his face had shifted. "How did you find it?" he asked.
"We walked the land after a heavy rain," she explained. "We watched where the water actually went rather than where the maps said it should go."
James looked at her.
