Dread sank like a stone in Amelia’s belly. “It may not be my place, my lord, but…what exactly do you have planned for Glenrose?”
He tugged distractedly on his cravat. “If I don’t tell ye, Mrs. Drummond undoubtedly will,” he muttered. Then he met her uncertain gaze, his eyes steely. “Yer accent reveals ye to be an Englishwoman, Miss Harlow.”
“I am indeed,” she replied cautiously.
“I don’t know how much ye understand of what has been happening in the Highlands for the last several decades, but the way of life here has been upended by the forces of change and modernization.”
She stiffened. “You are speaking of the Clearances.”
She hadn’t witnessed any of the forced removals herself, but the Clearances were like a scar on the hearts of all those in the Highlands. Thankfully, Lord Glenrose had never taken up the practice himself, but even in this isolated corner of the Highlands, whispers and fear hung over the land like the almost ever-present clouds here.
He assessed her for a moment before nodding. “I’ll not deny that it has been ugly, but to preserve whatever can be saved, it has been a necessary evil.”
“You aren’t…surely you aren’t contemplating clearing Glenrose of its inhabitants and turning over the estate to sheep, are you, my lord?” Amelia breathed.
It seemed she’d said the wrong thing, for his jaw tightened and his eyes went ice-hard.
“That remains to be seen,” he bit out. “I have yet to look over Glenrose’s ledgers. But from what I have observed so far, the estate is no different than countless others in the Highlands—teetering on the brink of dissolution.”
“But surely there must be another—”
“It is my responsibility to ensure that Lady Lavinia’s inheritance is protected,” he cut in. “If that means I must make difficult decisions on her behalf, then so be it.”
Amelia nearly recoiled at his harsh, flat tone. All the rippling warmth that had filled her earlier evaporated.
It seemed Glenrose—and by extension her own life—had been placed into the hands of a man with a heart of stone.
Chapter Five
Blair squinted at the line in the ledger as best he could through Scone’s outstretched paws. The damned cat lay sprawled across the open book, and no matter how many times Blair had moved him, the beast returned. Blair had been forced to give up and simply try to read around the cursed animal.
In the week since his arrival at Glenrose, Scone had practically been Blair’s only companion. He still hadn’t met his ward. In fact, he hadn’t caught more than a passing glimpse of crepe skirts or red-gold ringlets.
If Miss Harlow was to be believed, though, Scone’s presence indicated that the lass was at least in the manor. How she managed to avoid him for a whole week baffled and irritated him.
As for the governess… Blair exhaled sharply. Though he’d seen her only a handful of times in passing, she’d occupied his thoughts far more that she ought to have this past week.
Despite his better judgment, he found himself intrigued. His first impression upon nearly running her down with his horse was that she was rather diminutive and prim, but she’d quickly disabused him of that notion. She’d looked at him directly, boldly, with those large hazelnut-brown eyes, challenging him even from several feet below.
And though she’d attempted to demonstrate proper deference when she’d learned he was an Earl and her new employer, she seemed hardly able to contain her judgments of him. Whenever he did something she disapproved of, her dark, full brows lowered in a severe line of displeasure that he found surprisingly humbling.
It was entirely ridiculous to care what the governess thought of him. She was a wisp of a thing, petite and plainly dressed in modest grays. What was more, she was English—an outsider who had no right forming opinions about his affairs.
But damn him if he couldn’t stop picturing the shock and censure written on her pale, delicately formed features when he’d spoken of clearing Glenrose to protect Lady Lavinia’s inheritance. Worse, the memory of her slight weight settled across his lap kept invading his mind at the most inopportune moments.
Like now, when he ought to be concentrating on Glenrose’s ledgers.
Exhaling through clenched teeth, Blair lifted Scone’s fluffy tail out of the way and tried to focus on another line of neatly inked figures. The cursed cat picked up his head to eye Blair’s grip on his tail, but then he relaxed back onto the ledgers, apparently quite at his leisure and perhaps even a little bored.
It seemed that matters weren’t quite as dire as they’d been at Brenmore. Being situated farther east than Brenmore, Glenrose’s soils were more arable and the weather less temperamental. The estate had managed to avoid falling into crippling debt, though only just barely.
Three and four years past, when a partial crop failure had sent most landlords in the Highlands into bankruptcy, the late Earl had managed to feed his tenants and keep the estate solvent by cutting back on household expenditures at the manor. He’d also taken out a few small loans, which he’d managed to repay before his death.
Still, teetering just on the edge of break-even as it was, the estate was one unforeseen expense or bad harvest year away from ruin. Blair still had several dozen pages of the ledger book to study—without some blasted tomcat getting in his way—before he made his final assessment, but it seemed his initial suspicions about what must be done would be borne out.
One
