Lincolnshire Farm
"When London investment banker Tom inherits a fenland farm, he finds guidance from neighbor Sarah—whose agricultural expertise leads to unexpected cultivation."
The farm had been in my mother's family for generations, but I'd never visited—childhood in London, adulthood in finance, no connection to the land that had somehow produced me. Now it was mine, and I had no idea what to do with it.
"You'll be needing help."
The woman at my gate was built like the fenland itself—broad, solid, weathered in ways that suggested permanence. She was driving a tractor, which I would later learn was unusual only by city standards.
"I don't know what I need."
"Obviously." She climbed down. "Sarah Marchant. I farm the next two hundred acres. Your mother and I were friends."
"She never mentioned—"
"She never mentioned any of this, by the sound of it." Sarah looked at the neglected fields, the crumbling outbuildings. "It's not too late. If you're willing to learn."
I was willing. What choice did I have? The inheritance included debts that selling wouldn't cover, and something in the land—something I didn't understand—made me want to try.
Sarah became my teacher. She showed me how fenland worked—the drainage, the soil, the particular crops that thrived in reclaimed marsh. She didn't mock my ignorance or lose patience with my questions. She treated learning as natural, like the seasons.
"Why are you helping me?" I asked after the first month.
"Because your mother would have wanted me to. Because the land deserves someone who cares." She paused. "And because you're not what I expected."
"What did you expect?"
"City boy playing at farming. Selling within the year." She met my eyes. "You've got something different. Something that takes."
Six months in, the farm was recovering. I'd learned enough to be useful, though nowhere near enough to survive alone. Sarah still came daily, her guidance essential, her presence increasingly something I anticipated.
"You're staring," she said one evening. We were sharing a meal in my kitchen—something that had become routine.
"I'm thinking."
"Dangerous for a banker."
"Former banker." I'd quit the month before, fully committed to whatever this had become. "And I'm thinking about you."
"What about me?"
"About how I'd have failed completely without you. About how you've given me months of your time without asking anything in return." I reached across the table. "About how somewhere in the middle of learning to farm, I started wanting more than lessons."
"That's very forward."
"I've learned that fenland people appreciate directness."
She kissed me across the table, knocking over a glass neither of us cared about. Her mouth was practical, purposeful, exactly like everything else about her. When she pulled back, her eyes held something I recognized from my own reflection: cautious hope.
"The bedroom's through there," she said.
"Is that where you want this to go?"
"I've wanted this for months. I just wasn't sure you'd want someone who drove a tractor."
"I want someone who drives a tractor, reads the weather, knows when to plant and when to wait." I stood, pulled her up. "I want you, Sarah. All of you."
We made love in a bedroom that still felt borrowed, our bodies finding rhythms that the months of proximity had promised. She was strong, certain, knowing exactly what she wanted and unafraid to show me.
"You're beautiful," I said.
"I'm a farmer."
"Same thing." I traced the muscles in her arms—built from work, not exercise. "The most beautiful person I've met since coming here."
"That's not a high bar. Lincolnshire isn't known for competition."
"Stop deflecting." I kissed her quiet. "I mean it."
She stayed the night. Then the next. Then started leaving things—a coat, a book, a pair of boots—until the cottage that had been my mother's was becoming ours.
"This is fast," she observed one morning.
"This is agricultural. You plant when conditions are right." I pulled her closer. "Conditions are right."
The farm thrives now. We combined operations—her knowledge, my investment background—and built something neither could have managed alone. The London colleagues who visit can't understand why I stayed. They look at the fields and the mud and the woman who taught me to read the land, and they see nothing worth having.
They're wrong. They're spectacularly wrong. What I have here—the work that matters, the woman who matters more—is everything the city couldn't give me. Real growth instead of portfolio performance. Real partnership instead of professional networking.
Sarah laughs when I tell her she saved me. "The land saved you," she says. "I just showed you where to dig."
But she's wrong too. The land gave me purpose. Sarah gave me home. And together, in the middle of nowhere that's become somewhere, we're growing something that no spreadsheet could ever capture: a life worth cultivating, season after season, with someone who makes the work worthwhile.