"The gradient shifts there," she said. "I’d wager on it. Not much, perhaps not even visibly, but enough that the water which should drain south into the field drainage is instead pooling at that level change and then seeping slowly sideways rather than down." She tilted her head slightly. "After a heavy rain you’d see it more clearly. A dark line across the slope where the water collects before it finds its way around the obstruction."
James frowned at the section of slope in question. He thought of the flooding in the north field. He thought of Turlow's previous attempts to clear the drainage channel. He thought of the years that the problem had persisted while the solution sat merely thirty feet uphill, yet invisible because he had been looking in the wrong direction.
"I daresay you’ve discovered the issue," he said.
Cori shifted her gaze, glancing at him briefly with her soft blue eyes, and he felt it in his soul. She was lovely, wasn’t she? He could stare at her all day and never wonder where the time went.
But Cori began walking along the slope, now at the level of the change she’d identified, looking at the ground as she went. "If I’m correct—" she said over her shoulder “—there’ll be a place where the gradient shifts more sharply. A ridge, perhaps, or a change in the underlying stone. That’s where you’d need to work. Cut a channel above it to intercept the water before it reaches the level change, and direct it away from the field drainage entirely."
James followed after her.
Cori stopped again. She crouched and pressed her fingers into the soil, promptly ruining her gloves, though she did not appear to have noticed.
"Here," she said, looking up at him from the wet moorland grass, apparently unbothered by neither the dampness nor the state of her gloves.
James crouched beside her.
He could see it now. The soil here was compacted differently, a faint ridge beneath the turf that the grass had grown over and disguised. Not large. Not dramatic. Exactly what she’d said it would be.
"Your drainage channel," she said, "needs to run along here, just above this ridge, directing the water east rather than letting it pool." Then she stood and brushed the soil from her fingers, already moving on. "I imagine Pemberton will confirm it."
James pushed back to his full height.
He looked at her. The soil on her gloves. The complete absence of any awareness that she’d just solved in twenty minutes what Turlow had not solved in the last three years.
Then he thought of Arch Atherton making her laugh at the breakfast table, and his heart twisted a bit.
She was still young, ten years his junior, but young enough that her life had barely started while his could end at any moment. She deserved someone whole and hale. Someone who could give her everything she could ever want. She deserved someone like Atherton, perhaps, who had his father's confidence and moved through the world without the fear of an untimely death trailing after him like an unwelcome shadow.
The thought landed with considerably more discomfort than it should have, which was itself information he did not want.
"You’re quiet," Cori said.
He looked at her.
"Have I missed something? About the slope?"
"No," he said. "You’ve not missed anything."
"Then what is it?"
He was quiet for a moment. The wind came off the moors, the same cool clean smell, and somewhere above them a curlew was calling.
"You’re very good at this," he finally said because he couldn’t tell her the maudlin thoughts that had plagued him during their walk.
She tilted her head slightly. "At drainage?"
"At reading land," he said. "At reading problems. At arriving at the answer before anyone else has thought to look in the right direction."
She looked back at the slope. “Papa taught me," she said, her voice was different, softer somehow. "He believed the only way to understand a problem was to put your hands in it. Literally, where possible." Her eyes dropped to her soiled gloves with a brief look of surprise as though she just remembered she was wearing them. "He would’ve walked this slope before he ever looked at a map of it."
"He sounds like a man who understood a great many things.”
"The things that mattered." She was quiet for a moment, looking out at the moors. "I find I still miss him rather a lot."
James thought of Hannah and what she would remember of him when he was gone.
"I’m sorry," he said after a bit. "For the loss of him."
