“We might be able to risk it.”

She took her hand away, and the motion changed her entire position, trebling the space between them. Richard felt almost bereft, which was madness. She sat less than a foot away on the wagon bench, and it felt as if he’d lost something infinitely precious.

“Perhaps you should tie your bonnet more tightly,” he suggested.

She murmured some sort of assent and did so.

He cleared his throat. “We should be on our way.”

“Of course.” She smiled, first hesitantly, then determinedly. “Of course,” she said again. “Who will we be seeing first?”

He was grateful for the question, and the necessity of forming an answer. He needed something to prod his brain back into motion. “Ehrm . . . I think the Burnhams,” he decided. “Theirs is the largest farm, and the closest.”

“Excellent.” Iris twisted in her seat, peering at the pile of gifts in the back of the wagon. “Theirs is the wooden box. Cook packed extra jam. She said young Master Burnham has a sweet tooth.”

“I don’t know that he still qualifies as young,” Richard said, giving the reins a flick. “John Burnham must be twenty-two now, maybe twenty-three.”

“That’s younger than you are.”

He gave her a wry smile. “True, but like me, he is the head of his family and farm. Youth departs quickly with such responsibility.”

“Was it very difficult?” she asked quietly.

“It was the most difficult thing in the world.” Richard thought back to those days right after his father’s death. He’d been so lost, so overwhelmed. And in the middle of it all, while he was supposed to pretend he knew how to run Maycliffe and be a parent to his sisters, he was grieving. He’d loved his father. They may not have always seen eye to eye, but there had been a bond. His father had taught him to ride. He’d taught him to read—not the actual letters and words, but he’d taught him to love reading, to see value in books and knowledge. What he hadn’t taught him—what no one had dreamed was yet necessary—was how to run Maycliffe. Bernard Kenworthy had not been an old man when he’d taken ill. There had been every reason to believe that Richard would have years, decades even, before he needed to take the reins.

But truthfully, there wouldn’t have been much for his father to teach. Bernard Kenworthy had never bothered to learn it himself. He had not been a good steward of the land. It had never interested him, not deeply, and his decisions—when he bothered to make them—had been poor. It wasn’t that he was greedy, it was just that he tended to do whatever was convenient, whatever required the least time and energy on his part. And Maycliffe had suffered for it.

“You were just a boy, really,” Iris said.