Read Chapter 35: Ashworth's Proposal

The knock came as Maeve was reviewing the spring seed ledger, her finger tracing the column of oat prices with the dull ache of arithmetic she already knew would not balance. She had grown accustomed to Ashworth’s visits—his quiet knock, the way he entered her study as if the room belonged to him as much as to her.

But today, when she looked up, there was something different in his bearing. He stood in the doorway without his usual stack of correspondence, without a single paper in his hands, and he closed the door behind him with a deliberation that made her set down her pen.

“Mr. Ashworth,” she said, rising. “You look grave. Has something happened with Sir Godfrey’s affairs?”

“No.” He crossed the room and stopped at the edge of her desk, close enough that she could see the careful composure in his face was costing him something. “I’ve come to make you a proposal.”

Maeve’s hand moved instinctively toward the letters hidden in her bodice, a gesture she had developed over the past weeks without meaning to. “If this is about the testimony—Rourke’s widow has not yet—“

“This is not about the trial.” He drew a breath. “I have been in Ireland for five years, Mrs. Kelly. I came as a young man eager to prove myself to an empire that did not care whether I lived or died, and I have spent those years administering lands for men who saw tenants as numbers and debts as victories.” He paused. “I have watched you do something else entirely. You bury your own dead and plant your own fields. You refused four thousand pounds because your tenants would have suffered.”

Maeve’s throat tightened. “I refused it because I have no desire to become Sir Godfrey.”

“No,” he said softly. “You refused it because you cannot imagine being anyone but who you are. That is a rare thing, and I find I do not wish to leave it.”

She studied him. The firelight caught the lines around his eyes, the grey at his temples she had not noticed before. He was a man who had spent years in service to other people’s schemes, and there was something almost painful in the way he held himself now, as if he were about to lose his footing.

“I am proposing a partnership,” he said. “A legal one. We will draw up articles of agreement equal in every respect. I shall bring capital—I have savings enough to see Ballymore through the planting season and beyond. You will bring the land, the tenants, the knowledge of how to run this estate. Together we will co-manage it, and we will share the profits equally.”

Maeve felt the breath leave her. Of all the things she had imagined Ashworth might say—a proposal of marriage she had half-anticipated and dreaded in equal measure—this was not it.

“You would give your money to an estate that is not yours,” she said slowly. “To a plan that may well fail. For a share of nothing, if the harvest is poor.”

“I would give my money to a plan that may well succeed. I have seen your work these past months. You have outmaneuvered a titled man with nothing but your wits and a dead husband’s letters. You have kept your tenants fed through a famine that has emptied half the county. I would be a fool not to stake my future on that.”

Maeve lowered herself back into her chair. She felt the weight of the letters against her breast, the weight of everything she had fought for, and she was suddenly, terribly aware of how alone she had grown accustomed to being.

“You said partnership,” she said. “Not marriage.”

“I did.” He met her eyes steadily. “I have seen what marriage has done to you, Mrs. Kelly. I would not ask you to bind yourself to another man’s name or another man’s authority. A legal agreement between us as equals—” he paused, and something flickered behind his composure, “—that is what I can offer. I will not pretend it is what I would choose, if I believed you could choose differently. But I will not trap you into tenderness.”

Maeve’s eyes stung. She blinked rapidly and looked away, toward the window where the last weak February light was fading over the fields she had refused to sell.

“You would work alongside me,” she said. “In the fields. In the tenants’ cottages. You would be no better than a land agent, and no worse than a brother.”

“I would be your partner,” he said. “Nothing more. Nothing less than what you ask of me.”

She was silent for a long moment. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the house, her mother’s voice rose in a soft hymn, and she heard Cormac’s laugh in answer, and the domestic sound of it made the gravity of Ashworth’s offer real in a way she had not yet let it be.

“I have secrets you cannot share,” she said quietly. “Plans I have not told you. A trial that may go badly, a scheme that may expose me to the law as much as it exposes Sir Godfrey.”

“I have been party to your schemes from the moment I gave you the ledger,” he said. “I have sat in a prison cell with you and I have watched you lie to a magistrate with a face like stone. Whatever else you are keeping from me, Mrs. Kelly, I have already chosen my side.”

Maeve looked at him then, truly looked. The man who had come to her estate with nothing but a vague mistrust of his English master’s motives. The man who had given her the blackmail letters instead of burning them. The man who had stood beside her when her own brother had confessed to his part in her husband’s death.

“You would be a fool,” she said, echoing his own words back at him. “To tie yourself to a bankrupt widow and a field of dying potatoes.”

“Then I shall be a fool.” He smiled, barely. “But I shall be a fool with a legal agreement.”

Maeve laughed—a short, surprised sound that caught in her throat. She pressed her hand to her mouth, and for a moment she was afraid she would cry, and then she was afraid she would not stop laughing, and through it all Ashworth stood there with his ridiculous, careful proposal and his honest eyes.

“I need time,” she said at last. “A day. Perhaps two. I will read your terms, and I will think on it, and you will not press me further until I have given you my answer.”

“I will not press you,” he said.

“And if I refuse?” She watched him for signs of hurt. “What will you do then?”

He was quiet for a moment. “Then I will go to Dublin, and I will find some other empire to serve. But I will think of Ballymore every day for the rest of my life.”

The confession hung between them, bare as winter fields.

Maeve rose and extended her hand. He took it—warm, rough, honest—and she felt the breadth of his palm against hers and did not pull away as quickly as she should have.

“A day,” she repeated. “Perhaps two. I will send for you.”

He nodded once and released her hand. At the door, he paused, and she saw him struggle with something before he spoke again.

“The proposal in my room,” he said. “The legal articles. There is one clause I should tell you of before you read them.”

Maeve’s heart caught. “A hidden term? That is unlike you, Mr. Ashworth.”

“It is not hidden.” He met her eyes. “I have stipulated that if you should die without issue—if the estate should pass to no heir of your body—half of everything we build shall go to your tenants in permanent tenure. They will never be evicted from Ballymore, even if you are gone.”

The words struck her like a blow. She opened her mouth to speak and found nothing would come.

“I thought you should know,” he said quietly, “that my investment is not in land. It is in you. And in the people you have chosen to stand with.” He opened the door. “Good evening, Mrs. Kelly.”

He was gone before she could answer, and Maeve stood alone in her study with the fire burning low and her hand pressed to the letters in her bodice, and she felt the shape of a future she had not dared imagine closing around her like a warm coat.

She crossed to the window. In the darkness, she could see a lantern moving toward the stables, where Ashworth would collect his horse and ride back to his rented rooms in the village.

“Your tenants,” she murmured to the glass. “He has not even met them yet, and he has already promised them a home.”

She turned away from the window and went to her strongbox, where the confession copy lay locked beside her mother’s hairbrush and Connell’s wedding ring. She did not take it out. She simply placed her hand on the cold iron lid and bowed her head, and for the first time in months, she allowed herself to ask what she wanted.

Not what Ballymore needed. Not what the tenants required. Not what justice demanded.

What she wanted.

The answer, when it came, was not at all what she had expected.