The Reluctant Countess

Chapter Nine: Retaliation

They returned to Wentmoor to find the north barn burned to the ground.

No one had been hurt — the fire had caught in the small hours, when the barn stood empty, and the tenants who’d fought it through the night had managed to save the grain store beside it — but the barn itself was a ruin of blackened timber, and the estate’s steward met James at the drive with a grim face and a report that made James’s blood run cold before he’d even dismounted: two men, strangers to the estate, had been seen near the barn the evening before the fire, asking questions of the tenants about the family’s movements.

James stood in the ash-black wreckage of a barn his grandfather had built and felt, for the first time since his uncle’s letter arrived, something closer to rage than fear. Aniya, beside him, was very quiet — the particular quiet he’d learned meant she was thinking hard and fast, not that she had nothing to say.

She said, finally, that this was no longer a fight over paperwork. A man willing to burn tenant property to frighten them was a man who’d escalate further if he thought it would work, and she wasn’t willing to wait and find out how much further.

Calloway, arriving from the house at a run, confirmed what James already suspected — there was nothing here that could be proven against Charles directly, no note, no confession, nothing but two strangers and a fire that had started suspiciously well for an accident. But proof or not, the message was plain enough: Charles Ashworth had learned about Dr. Whitfield’s statement, and had decided that if the law wouldn’t hand him Wentmoor, he’d make holding it too costly for James to want it.

That night, James doubled the watch on the estate and sat up long past midnight going over the tenant rolls with Aniya, trying to work out who among the strangers passing through the county lately might be worth questioning further. It was well past two when Aniya finally set down her pen, rubbed at her tired eyes, and admitted — quietly, in a voice that had none of her usual steel in it — that she was frightened. Not for herself, particularly. For him. For the tenants. For a life they’d only just finished building that a bitter old man seemed determined to burn down along with the barn.

James pulled her close, there at the desk, and told her the truth of it plainly: he was frightened too. But he told her something else as well — that fear, shared, was a very different thing from fear carried alone, and he’d carried enough of the latter in the year after his father died to know the difference in his bones. Whatever Charles threw at them next, they’d face it exactly the way they’d faced everything else since that first terrible drawing room — together, and on their own terms, not his.

Aniya laughed, a small, tired, genuine sound, and told him that a year ago she’d have found that sentiment unbearably sentimental. Now she found she simply believed it. He kissed the top of her head and told her that was, without question, the nicest thing she’d ever said to him, and she elbowed him lightly in the ribs and told him not to get used to it.

It was Margaret, in the days that followed, who provided the household’s only real levity — mostly by way of Henry Calloway, who had taken to finding excuses to consult her on matters of local gossip and estate history that, James suspected, he could easily have gathered from the steward. Aniya, watching the two of them across the dinner table one evening, murmured to James that his sister was hopeless, and James murmured back that he’d been exactly as hopeless once, and here they were.

Aniya conceded the point, and reached for his hand under the table, and for a moment — one small, stolen moment, in the middle of burnt barns and hired strangers and a scheme that seemed to grow more dangerous by the week — the four of them at that table felt almost, impossibly, like an ordinary family, rather than a household under siege.

It didn’t last. Two days later, a second letter arrived from Charles — no longer courteous, no longer pretending at legal formality. It stated, plainly, that James would do well to remember how much a man in his uncle’s position stood to lose, and how little, therefore, he had left to be careful about.

James read it once, felt the cold settle back into his stomach, and understood, with sudden clarity, that this fight was no longer about a title or a codicil at all. It had become, somewhere in the ashes of that barn, a fight for their lives.