Page 73 of The Heir's Fortune
EPILOGUE
Gideon loved Castleton in the summer.
He loved it all year round, of course, but the grounds and gardens were unlike any others he had seen and he was particularly pleased with how they were looking now that the groundskeeper had returned.
Burt was taking great care in returning them to their former glory, and Gideon stood now, surveying the grounds before him.
Madeline stood beside him, her hand in his as they took it all in.
“Shall we walk?” she asked, and he nodded, swinging her hand in his.
“Let’s.”
They walked in comfortable silence for a few minutes, Scout bounding in front of them, running ahead and then back as though urging them to keep up, past the water fountain, which was running once more, down the path and toward the ruins, which were one part of the grounds that remained as they always did.
“It’s beautiful,” Madeline mused, looking around them. “No longer perfectly overgrown and formidable enough to be a setting for one of my gothic novels.”
“A pity,” he said, tsking and she laughed.
“I suppose you could say that.” She looked up at him. “Thank you for taking the time to walk with me this morning. I know how hard you have been working.”
“Of course,” he said. “I will always take time for you. Besides, none of this would have been possible without you.”
“I can hardly take the credit,” she murmured, although her cheeks turned slightly pink.
“It’s true,” he insisted. “I spent so long trying to improve on the way we had done things before when you made me realize that we had to do things adifferentway. A better way.”
“Who would have thought that my father and his laziness would have helped us?”
“Perhaps he is smarter than us all,” Gideon said with a laugh.
Gideon had been musing one day on the fact that Madeline’s father spent so much time away from his own property. It was not nearly as expansive as Castleton’s land and village, but he still had much to care for.
Madeline had told him that he had done so by diversifying his land, investing in innovations that required less labour, and hiring men to look after things for him.
Of course, Gideon had no interest in divesting his responsibilities upon another – that was how they had ended up in this mess, after all – but it did urge him to start to think about how they could better utilize the land.
As Madeline had helped her father research all of the different ways he could make more money with less time, she was rather knowledgeable about options available to them, and Gideon had already begun implementing some ideas on crop rotation and had started to invest what he could into some innovations that showed promise.
“I have a surprise for you.”
“A surprise? Out here?”
He nodded, taking her hand and tugging her toward the stables, his pulse picking up when he imagined what she might think about what awaited them.
“Are we going for a ride?”
“No.”
“Are we going to see Lady?”
“No, but of course we can check in on her.”
“Then what?—”
She stopped suddenly when she saw the men before them, along with the timber that was piled high beside the stable.
“What are they doing?”
