The Reluctant Countess

Chapter Six: The Uncle

The letter arrived on a morning that had, until then, been an unusually good one. James had woken before dawn, as he often did now, to find Aniya already awake beside him, tracing lazy patterns against his chest and telling him — half teasing, half serious — that she’d found a fault in his crop rotation plans that he was going to have to admit she was right about. He’d argued the point purely for the pleasure of being argued back at, and it was nearly an hour before either of them remembered there was an estate to run at all.

It was that warmth he was still carrying with him when the steward brought in the post, and it made the letter, when he opened it, land all the harder.

It was from his uncle. Charles Ashworth, his late father’s younger brother, a man James had seen perhaps four times in his adult life and never once warmly. The letter was formal, almost courteous in its phrasing, which somehow made it worse — it informed James that certain irregularities had come to light regarding the late Earl’s will, specifically a codicil drafted in the final months of his illness, and that Charles’s solicitors would be initiating an inquiry into the legitimacy of James’s inheritance. Until the matter was resolved, Charles trusted James would understand the need for restraint regarding the estate’s assets.

James read it twice, the way he’d read the marriage contract nearly a year before, and felt something cold settle low in his stomach that had nothing to do with the debt he’d already spent a year clawing his way out from under.

Aniya found him still holding the letter twenty minutes later, and didn’t ask what was wrong so much as simply sit beside him and wait, which he’d learned by now was her particular way of making space for him to speak when he was ready and not a moment before. When he finally handed it over, she read it with the same sharp, unhurried attention she gave any set of figures that didn’t balance, and when she looked up, her expression had gone flat and dangerous in a way he hadn’t seen since the drawing room in London, over a year ago now, when she’d looked at him like livestock.

She asked, without any softness at all, whether this uncle had ever shown the slightest interest in Wentmoor before now — before it had a solvent future worth stealing.

James admitted he hadn’t. Charles had been perfectly content to let the estate rot under James’s father’s mismanagement, had never once offered so much as a loan to ease the debt. It was only now, with the roof repaired and the tenant farms turning a profit again — with Aniya’s dowry and a year of careful work behind it — that Charles had apparently discovered an urgent legal interest in who rightfully held the title.

Aniya set the letter down with a precision that somehow conveyed more fury than slamming it would have. She said, simply, that she was not going to watch a man who’d done nothing to save this place walk in now and take it, not after everything they’d built together — and James, hearing the we and together in that sentence, felt something in his chest ease even through the fear, because whatever else this fight cost them, he understood in that moment that he wasn’t going to face it alone.

They brought in Henry Calloway within the week — a young barrister James had met years before at Cambridge, sharp-minded and hungry in the way of men who’d built their careers from nothing rather than inherited them, which made him, James suspected, exactly the sort of advocate who’d relish tearing apart a claim built on a conveniently “discovered” codicil.

Calloway arrived at Wentmoor with a case full of documents and a directness that took the household somewhat by surprise — least of all Margaret, who met him in the front hall on his first afternoon and, within the space of one conversation about the weakness of Charles’s legal position, found herself considerably more interested in Mr. Calloway than in the legal argument itself.

James noticed it before Margaret did. Aniya noticed it before James did, and said nothing, only exchanged a look with her husband over dinner that promised she’d have opinions on the matter later, in private, and that those opinions would almost certainly be correct.

For now, though, there was work to do. Calloway laid out the shape of the fight plainly: codicils added late in a testator’s illness were vulnerable to challenge if there was any question of the deceased’s capacity, or any irregularity in witnessing. If Charles’s document was forged or altered, they could defeat it outright. If it was merely opportunistic — real, but discovered and pressed only once the estate had value again — the fight would be uglier, slower, and fought as much in the court of public opinion as in any actual court.

James asked what that meant, practically. Calloway’s answer was blunt: it meant Charles would not fight fair. He would use whatever he could find — including, Calloway said, with a careful glance at

Aniya, anything that might make the marriage itself look like part of some grasping, calculated scheme rather than the partnership it plainly was to anyone who spent an afternoon in this house.

Aniya’s jaw tightened at that, but she didn’t flinch from it. She said only that Charles was welcome to try. She had weathered worse than gossip her whole life, and she intended to weather this too — beside her husband, not behind him.

James reached for her hand under the table, and didn’t let go for the rest of the conversation.

That night, lying awake with the weight of the coming fight settling over both of them, Aniya asked James, quietly, whether he was afraid.

He considered lying, the way his father might have — the same instinct toward pride that had cost the man everything. He decided against it. He told her he was terrified, actually — not of losing the title, which he’d never much wanted for its own sake, but of losing Wentmoor itself, the tenants, the life they’d only just started building together in earnest.

Aniya pulled him closer in the dark and told him that he wasn’t going to lose any of it — not the estate, not the tenants, and certainly not her, whatever Charles Ashworth threw at them. She had faced down a city full of people who’d looked at her sideways her entire life and built something worth having anyway. She wasn’t about to let one bitter, greedy man undo it now.

James kissed her then, slow and certain in a way that had nothing left of the wary distance that had once stood between them, and thought, not for the first time, that whatever else this fight cost them, he would face all of it gladly, as long as he got to face it with her.