“Lady Bedlow, may I present Captain Trelawney?” Nev said.

“How do you do?” Penelope said, trying to hide her consternation. The steward looked more promising than his office. He was an upright, well-built man in perhaps his late forties, with a military mustache and a ruddy complexion.

“At your service, my lady.” His smile struck her as too friendly. “I’m honored. Please, sit down.”

Nev took his seat again once she was settled. “My wife is going to be helping me with the business end of things. She understands these things better than I do.”

Penelope could not help blushing under the captain’s speculative gaze. “What were you discussing with Lord Bedlow?”

“I was explaining the nature of the estate’s expenses and how difficult any new economy would be.” His patronizing tone raised Penelope’s hackles. “As you can see, my lord, Loweston will not run itself, and the harvest is close by.”

Nev nodded uncertainly. It was perfectly clear to Penelope-and, she was sure, to Captain Trelawney-that he could not make heads or tails of the accounts. “May I see?” she asked.

“Certainly, my lady.” The captain smiled and passed the ledger across the table.

Penelope stared. No wonder Nev had been baffled. The accounts were in a largely illegible scrawl-the captain’s, she assumed. She squinted at the page. It appeared to be nothing more than a long tally of expenses, all jumbled together, and every so often a gain from the sale of-she squinted closer-“4 grate oaks” or the like. The last several pages appeared mostly to record the sale of various horses: “Prometheus, a prime goer, to Sir J,” and so on.

“How are the books organized?” she asked at last. “Have you separate accounts for the house and the farm? Surely economies might be most easily made here.”

“Separate accounts?” the captain said in some amusement. “I don’t know how it’s done in London, but I’ve never met a steward who kept separate accounts. Estate books merely show charge and discharge.”

“But then, how can you tell if you’ve made money on a particular venture or if your expenses are rising?” She looked at the expenses more carefully, but it seemed he was right. She saw an outlay for candles cheek-by-jowl with one for feed for the workhorses, and there a record of wages paid to have the lawn scythed.

“Either you’ve a balance or you haven’t, I’m afraid,” he said, confirming her worst fears. It would be next to impossible to make any kind of systematic analysis of where money might best be saved. She thought of her father’s shelves of ledgers, all so clear and neat. All showing a profit.

She glanced at Nev, who had been counting on her to make sense of these chaotic, unreadable books. He was staring longingly out the window at the morning sun. “Is the principal income from the home farm or from rents?” she asked.

The captain chuckled. “Oh, rents, certainly. Fortunately all your tenants are upstanding men who paid even through the recent bad harvests.”

“How many tenants have we?” Penelope asked.

“Four, and good men all.”

Nev turned his head sharply. “Only four? But I thought we had dozens of tenants.”

“Not during my tenure here,” the captain said. “I daresay you mean before your father enclosed the commons, four or five years ago. The majority of your former tenants chose to avoid the expense of the hedges by selling to larger farmers.”

“Oh.” Nev was plainly disconcerted. “Who’s left?”

“Thomas Kedge, John Claxton, Henry Larwood, and William Shreeves. Mr. Kedge has by far the largest part. He pays us almost three thousand pounds per annum in rents and does very well for himself with what remains. The others amount to less than a thousand pounds each.”

“So our income at New Year’s will be…?” Penelope asked.

“Very nearly two thousand pounds and three-quarters.”

She sat appalled. Only a few thousand pounds left of her dowry to last them through the year, and then only a few thousand more to be gained! And Nev thought the estate had been abused; where was the money to refurbish it to come from?

“Will there be much profit on the home farm’s harvest?” Nev asked.

The captain stroked his mustache. “Five hundred pounds at the most. Very likely less. It has not been a good year, though nowhere near so disastrous as ’16, of course. With more funds, perhaps, we might have made more of it, but-” He shrugged, without the least embarrassment at this reference to his late employer’s prodigality, nor with the least consciousness, Penelope thought angrily, of Nev ’s stricken look.

“How much of an outlay will we need to make the farm more profitable next year?” Nev said. It had to be asked, but Penelope suspected the answer would not comfort him.

The captain made an airy gesture. “Oh, two thousand pounds at the least.”

Nev stared out the window again, shoulders slumped.

“Why don’t you assemble the last five years’ ledgers and receipts for me to look over? I’ll get them from you this evening,” Penelope said. “Perhaps going over the home farm and visiting our tenants will help us understand what needs to be done. Lord Bedlow, what is your opinion?”

Nev started, then looked hopeful. “Oh, yes. Jolly good idea. I’ll have two horses saddled directly.”

Penelope would have liked to tell him when Captain Trelawney was not by, but then he would have the horses already saddled and he would want to know why she hadn’t said anything, and she would look a fool. “I don’t ride.”

Nev stared at her. “You don’t-you don’t ride?”

Penelope could not help glancing at the captain. Sure enough, his eyebrows had shot up nearly to his graying hairline.

“No,” she said shortly.

Nev ’s disappointed look smoothed away into probably false cheer. “No matter. We’ll take the cart.”

They plodded down the tree-lined avenue in silence. Nev had wanted to be on horseback for this, able to gallop off and lose himself in the wind on his face and the ground flashing away beneath him if things got too bad. He would have to teach his wife to ride soon. It wasn’t an unpleasant thought. He glanced at Penelope, sitting quietly beside him in the cart. Her face was hidden by the brim of her bonnet as she gazed out over the lawn. But he could see the rest of her just fine, and she would look nice in a riding habit.

“If we cut down these trees, we might be able to get almost a thousand pounds for them,” she said.

Nev turned to look at her.

A wash of crimson covered her cheeks before she looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. “That was mercantile of me. Of course we can’t cut down the trees, they’ve been here for generations and-”

Nev grinned at her. “I wanted to cut them down myself, but my mother threw a fit.”

She relaxed and smiled at him. He wondered what would happen if he leaned over and kissed her. He probably couldn’t, because of the bonnet. He was calculating his angle when the gardener came into view and the opportunity was lost.

Nev had been encouraged by the appearance of the park when he had looked at it out of his window this morning. Although he knew it couldn’t be true, he had almost hoped for a moment that it was all a sham, that when he looked over Loweston later he would find it as prosperous and flourishing as ever.

He had known it couldn’t be true, and it wasn’t.

Things began to deteriorate as soon as they passed out of sight of the house. Nothing dramatic, at first. The grass was less well-kept, and there were stumps where Nev remembered inviting stands of elms and beeches. Then the path curved through a small wood of trees not valuable enough to be cut down, and they came out in view of the home farm.

There seemed to be fewer people working than Nev remembered from previous years this close to harvest-not that he had ever paid much attention. Indeed, Nev wasn’t sure he would even notice if there were anything wrong with the fields or the equipment. The swaying, ripening wheat ran in thick, crooked rows just as it always had. Was it a little thinner, or was that his imagination? He had no idea. In the distance he could see pastures where sheep grazed, but it was too far off to judge the size or health of the herd.