“You’re their guardian?” he asked with surprise.
She took another swig from the tankard, her eyes cast down. “There were no close relatives whom Mrs. Spenser trusted. One reason she helped me get the Strickland position was so that I could keep the children with me.”
“I see why they call you Lady Alys,” he said with a mocking humor. “Managing an estate, several businesses, and children as well. You are an extraordinary woman.”
“Most women are extraordinary. It compensates for the fact that most men aren’t,” Alys snapped, then immediately bit her tongue. With his talent for getting under her skin, Davenport made her forget how dependent she was on his goodwill. She, who had always prided herself on her control, was continually skirting explosion with him.
He laughed, his extraordinary charm visible again. “I suppose your next project is to advance beyond needing the male half of the species? As a stock breeder, you must know that will be difficult, at least if there is to be a next generation.”
Alys had no doubt that his supply of suggestive remarks could easily outlast her belligerence. With as much dignity as she could muster, she reached for the ale pitcher. “I have never denied that men have their uses, Mr. Davenport.”
“Oh? And what might they be?”
His hand brushed hers casually when they both reached for the handle of the pitcher at the same time. Her nerves jumped, and she dropped her eyes to avoid his gaze. His hands were quite beautiful, long-fingered and elegant, the only refined thing about him. A seductive current flowed from him that made her want to yield, so melt and mold herself, to discover the other ways he could touch, to touch him back. . . .
In a voice that seemed to come from someone else, she said, “We’re out of ale. Shall we order another pitcher, or are you ready to see more of the estate?”
“More ale,” he said, apparently quite unaffected by the fleeting contact between them. “I still have a number of questions. For example, the sixty pounds a year for schoolmasters, books, and other teaching supplies.”
He signaled for another pitcher, refilling his tankard when it arrived. Alys was four rounds behind him, and knew better than to try keeping up. She didn’t doubt that in a drinking contest he could put her under the table.
And what would he do with you there? a mocking little voice asked. Nothing, of course. More’s the pity.
Trying to ignore the lewd asides of her lower mind, Alys said, “The teachers are a married couple. He teaches the boys, she teaches the girls. I require all the children on the estate to go to school until at least the age of twelve.”
“Don’t the parents resent that their children can’t start earning wages earlier?”
“Yes, but I have insisted,” she replied. “In the short run, it’s better for the children. In the long run, the estate will have better workers.”
“Miss Weston, did some Quaker or reforming Evangelical get hold of your tender mind when you were growing up?” Davenport asked, his dark brows arching ironically.
She blinked. “As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Wonderful,” he muttered into his ale. “A fanatic.” Grabbing hold of her frayed temper, Alys said with hard-won composure, “Not a fanatic, a practical reformer. You have seen the results at Strickland over the last four years. I would be hard-pressed to say precisely which reforms have produced what results, but the total effect has been more than satisfactory. The estate is prospering, and so are the people who work on it. The evidence speaks for itself.”
“I keep reminding myself of that, Miss Weston,” he said dourly. “I trust you appreciate that you are being treated to a display of open-mindedness and tolerance that none of my friends would believe.” He shook his head. “A female steward, and a reformer to boot.”
“It’s your income, Mr. Davenport,” Alys pointed out in an icy voice. “If you make sweeping changes, there might be a drop in the profits.”
“I remind myself of that, too.” He poured the last of the ale in his tankard. He’d drunk most of two pitchers himself. “What about the money given to help emigration?”
She sighed and traced circles on the table in a few drops of spilled ale. It had been a vain hope that he would overlook her cryptic notes in the account books. The blasted man missed nothing. “Three of the veterans who returned from Wellington’s army wanted to take their families to America, but didn’t have adequate savings to pay their passages and start over.”
“So you gave them the money?” He slouched casually against the back of the oak settle, relaxed but watchful.
“Theoretically the money was loaned, but it was understood that they might never be able to repay,” Alys admitted.
“And the chances of collecting from another country are nil. So you just gave it away,” he mused. “Are you running a business or a charity here?”
“If you saw the books, you know that less than two hundred pounds were lent,” she said, defensive again. “All of the families had served Strickland with great loyalty. One man’s wife worked on the harvest crew until an hour before her first baby was born.”
Under his sardonic eye she realized how foolish that must sound to a man of the world. She added more practically, “Helping them leave also reduced the strain on Strickland’s resources—fewer jobs to find and mouths to feed.”
“If every worker on the estate wanted to emigrate, would you have given money to them all?” he inquired with interest.
She turned one palm up dismissively. “Few people want to leave their homes for a strange country. Most of the Strickland tenants were born here, and they can imagine no other end than to die here.”
She thought, with sudden piercing sorrow, of where she herself had been born, the home to which she could never return. Alys had exiled herself as surely as the three families who had gone to America. Then she wondered how much her expression had revealed, for Davenport was watching her keenly.
“Somehow, I doubt that the old earl knew about your odd little charities,” he said, a flicker of amusement in his light eyes.
Relieved that Davenport was enjoying the thought of his uncle’s ignorance, she assured him, “The old earl never had any idea. His man of business must have known at least some of what I was doing, but he didn’t interfere since the overall profits were up.”
“In other words, you gave away less than your predecessor stole.”
She gave a lopsided smile. “I never thought of it that way, but I suppose you’re right.” After hesitating for a moment, curiosity drove her to ask, “Now that you know how Strickland has been run, do you have any comments?”
Davenport thought for a moment, his hands loosely laced around his tankard. “As you have pointed out, your results are a justification for your methods. Also, everything you described belongs to the past, when I had no say in what went on, so I have no right to criticize your decisions.
“The future, now . . .” He swallowed his remaining ale in one gulp, then clinked the tankard onto the table as he watched her expression narrowly. “That will be a different story. I expect I’ll want to make some changes, but I shan’t rush into them.”
As an endorsement, it didn’t go as far as Alys would have liked, but it was the best she was likely to get. At least he intended to move slowly.
She started to rise, but her employer wasn’t finished yet. He lifted his hand to halt her. “I have only one more question at the moment. As an eager reformer, have you had everyone on the estate vaccinated against smallpox?”
Alys was startled. “No, I’ve encouraged vaccination, but some of the workers are very suspicious about ‘newfangled