Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
On the fifth day of their marriage, Roman was already dressed to leave the house when Tamsin came down, standing near the entry table with a small stack of pamphlets tied in string.
He wore the expression she now categorized as serious.
Given his mostly neutral way of bearing himself, she had to find the tiniest hints to guess at what his mood was when she came upon him.
The way his brows were drawn together, even if it was slight, gave away his emotions at present.
“You are going out,” she observed. “On an important errand.”
“I am.” He glanced up, something in his face easing at the sight of her—a twitch of his lips she suspected immediately gave away that he was pleased.
Because of her presence? Her interest in his activities?
“I intend to visit the York Herald offices first, then a few other businesses about town. I have had these printed.” He held a pamphlet out to her.
“In regards to the matter we discussed at dinner.”
She took it, reading the bold typeface at the top. A Concerned Citizen of York, on the Preservation of Our Ancient Bars. Beneath it, in smaller print…his name. Written and Authorized by Roman Eastwood, Baron Hartwell.
“You will put your own name to the pamphlet?” Tamsin was surprised. Oftentimes, political opinions and social observances were published anonymously.
Her husband nodded. “I thought it best, in this instance, to make it clear who authored the piece. The alternative never even occurred to me. I have written with honesty and respect for our city’s history.
A man ought to be willing to stand behind his own convictions, especially where his home is concerned. ”
Tamsin turned the pamphlet over, reading a line here and there—the bar’s four hundred years standing witness to the city’s history, a paragraph about what was lost when a thing was pulled down for the sake of convenience.
It was, she thought, entirely unlike the dry political talk she’d half-listened to at the wedding breakfast. This had feeling in it.
Conviction, too. “You wrote all this yourself?”
“Every word.” His smile appeared, though it was faint, and he lowered his head. “Holly tells me I use too many adjectives when I feel strongly about something. He might be right.”
Tamsin found she wanted, quite suddenly, to see him do this.
Not just hear about it after, secondhand, the way she’d absorbed most of his world so far—bits and pieces at meals, names she couldn’t yet attach faces to, committees she couldn’t picture.
She wanted to watch him be the man his friends at the wedding breakfast had deferred to without a second thought.
So the question spilled from her lips. “May I come with you?”
That earned her a look of genuine surprise—a brief widening of Roman’s clear blue eyes, a wrinkle in his brow he quickly smoothed over, and a slight pause before he spoke. “Do you truly wish to accompany me to the newspaper office?”
“I wish to see what it is you spend your time doing, especially when it is something you care about so passionately.” She hoped he heard the sincerity in her words—but perhaps he would think her a nuisance?
Or overly concerned with his doings? “When you say you are busy with things like matters of finance and correspondence, I leave it entirely to my imagination. But this seems different.” She offered the pamphlet back though he didn’t take it, only studied her with an expression she couldn’t yet describe.
“Unless you would rather go alone. I do not wish to be in the way—”
“No.” The word came so quickly, she suspected it had startled him, too. “No, I should like your company. Very much, as a matter of fact. Of course you may come.” He glanced toward the stairs, some calculation passing behind his eyes. “Will you need long to ready yourself?”
“Ten minutes.” She was already turning for the stairs before she’d finished speaking, her familiar need for efficiency rising without effort.
She had spent years getting children into coats and out the door on a moment’s notice.
“I only need my bonnet, spencer, and shorter boots. The streets will not be kind to my slippers.”
“Practical,” Roman said, and there was something warm beneath the single word, something that followed her partway up the stairs. He approved.
The flush of pleasure in Tamsin’s cheeks from such a simple word, barely even true praise, surprised her—yet he had meant it as a compliment. Instinctively she knew he admired that trait. He had recognized it and spoken it out loud.
The notice was rather gratifying.
Jones was the groomsman who held the carriage door, but it was Roman who handed her into the vehicle with the ease of a man who had done so a thousand times.
The gesture held none of the awkwardness of something newly begun.
He settled across from her, drawing the pamphlets into a neat stack on his knee, his brow set in the line she now recognized as thinking rather than displeasure.
The York Herald’s office occupied a narrow frontage on Coney Street, easy to miss if not for the painted sign above the door, gilt lettering gone slightly dull from weathering.
Roman held the door for her, and the smell reached Tamsin before her eyes had adjusted to the dimmer light: ink, heavy and mineral, and beneath it the drier scent of paper and dust. From somewhere beyond the front room came a steady, rhythmic thud, unhurried but insistent. Each heavy thud made her wince.
“The press,” Roman said, catching her expression. “Mr. Hargrove claims he no longer hears it at all, though I suspect that is more boast than truth.”
“I think it would give me the worst of headaches.” She kept her voice low as she spoke, hand on his arm. “If not drive me to madness, in time.”
That made her new husband’s smile appear, a soft hum of amusement meeting her ear. Even that small response was intriguing, and somehow satisfying.
A young man at a high desk near the window looked up, recognized Roman, and quickly bowed.
“Your lordship. I will fetch Mr. Hargrove at once.” The clerk disappeared through a door at the back without another word, returning a moment later trailing a broader, older man in shirtsleeves and a printer’s apron, ink worked so thoroughly into the creases of his hands that it seemed less like a stain than a second complexion.
“Lord Hartwell.” Hargrove’s voice was pitched to carry over the press, which did not stop for their conversation. He bowed respectfully to them both. “I wondered if you would come by, or send a servant instead.”
Tamsin watched as Roman inclined his head. “I prefer to hear objections firsthand, Mr. Hargrove, rather than have them softened for me by a messenger.”
“Wise. Fewer surprises that way.” Mr. Hargrove’s gaze moved to Tamsin with open, unhurried curiosity.
“This is my wife, who you will not yet have met though you published news of the wedding. Lady Hartwell, may I present Mr. Hargrove, owner and editor of the York Herald.”
“Lady Hartwell, it is an honor—my congratulations. The whole of York holds their breath, waiting to see how you will manage your ever-active husband.” His broad smile put her at ease.
“You flatter me, Mr. Hargrove. Am I to hope you are as complimentary in print?” Tamsin asked, and was rewarded with a short bark of a laugh.
“I flatter no one in print, my lady, whatever I might do standing in my own doorway.” He turned back to Roman, and something in his manner sharpened, businesslike now.
“I must apologize for greeting you while covered in ink. I ought to let the men in my employment have all the pleasure of the work, but I am as enamored by the printing press and typesetting now as I was when but a lad. Besides, a man ought to know how his paper runs, from the smallest task to the greatest.” His gaze flickered to Roman.
“I have read your submission. Twice, in fact.”
Tamsin’s husband’s chin lifted, but it was slight. He waited a moment, then prompted, “And? What are your thoughts?”
“I confess it took me aback.” Mr. Hargrove folded his arms, ink-blackened hands tucked beneath them.
“I would have expected differently, from a Whig. Reform, new roads, new building—men your age and on your side of politics are usually eager to see the old cleared away to make room for it. Yet you have written pages in defense of a stone barbican which does naught but slow the carts coming and going from our city.”
Tamsin watched her husband consider this. He did not answer at once, and it took her a moment to realize why. He was sorting out what to say rather than reaching for a prepared argument on the matter. A small crease appeared on his brow, fading as quickly as it appeared.
“I do not believe progress requires the erasure of all things historic, Mr. Hargrove.” Roman spoke slowly, testing the shape of the thought as it left him.
“A city that pulls down everything that came before it, in the name of what comes next, has no better claim to permanence than what it replaced. York is not valuable because it is old and therefore quaint. It is valuable because it is full of history—our history as a kingdom. Because our gates, our barbicans, have been the first entry points for our city as far back as our knowledge can stretch. That is an asset, and a considerable one, if a man cares to look at it as such. We have done trade in this city for more than a thousand years, and we will yet stand for another thousand. That is what our gates, our walls, and our barbicans say about us to the rest of the world.”
Mr. Hargrove nodded. “An economic argument, from a preservationist. I hadn’t thought to hear that pairing.”
“Perhaps you have been listening to the wrong preservationists.” There was a faint dryness in Roman’s tone, a glimmer in his eyes, and the closest thing to a smile Tamsin had yet seen him direct at someone outside the family.
“Reform, as I understand it, is meant to give people a stronger claim on their own future, not strip them of everything that came before it. I fail to see why the Bars should be excepted from that principle merely because they are made of stone rather than law.”
Mr. Hargrove studied the baron with a frank assessment, obviously used to dissecting and weighing arguments for his living. “You have thought about this more than a few pages’ worth.”
“I have thought about very little else since I heard the scheme from the Corporation.”
“That, I can believe.” Mr. Hargrove glanced toward Tamsin again, amusement in his eyes, including her in a private observation. “Your husband has always had opinions, your ladyship. It is only lately that he has taken the time to write them down where the rest of us might read them.”
“I find that a reassuring thing in a politician. I would like to know where their minds are at, given they make decisions for the rest of us,” Tamsin said, before pressing her lips together and looked at Roman with eyebrows raised. Oh, dear. Had she spoken out of turn?
Roman’s gaze met hers with an approving glimmer and he nodded.
Mr. Hargrove huffed something that might have been agreement, or might only have been the closest he came to letting a conversation end instead of continuing an argument.
“I’ll not promise you the piece as submitted, Lord Hartwell.
Four pages is a great deal to give any one man on any one subject, whatever his title…
but there’s room for a shortened letter in Thursday’s edition, under your name.
That much I’ll grant without further persuading. ”
Roman did not smile, but he did not frown. “That is more than fair, Mr. Hargrove.”
“Don’t mistake it for agreement,” the man warned.
“I have printed better arguments than yours for causes I thought entirely foolish. It is not my task to agree with a man before I’ll set his type.
” He was already turning toward the press room, the matter apparently settled.
“Thursday, then. Bring the fair copy by Wednesday evening, and mind you, keep it short this time. Make your point in a page or two.”
“I will be concise,” Roman promised. “Good day, Mr. Hargrove.”
Mr. Hargrove’s answer was an abbreviated bow before he went through the door, already occupied with whatever came next. Their audience, such as it was, had ended.
As they left the noise of the press faded, and Tamsin found she was still turning the exchange over, recounting the way Roman had reasoned his way through Mr. Hargrove’s challenge without once raising his voice or seeming the least bit rattled at having to explain himself.
“You did not know what you were going to say,” she remarked quietly, once they’d reached the street. “Even though you wrote out an argument, you stopped to consider how best to explain to Mr. Hargrove. Specifically.”
“Indeed.” Roman considered this, treating the observation itself as new information. “I generally know precisely what I mean to say, before I say it. I am not certain I care for the alternative. But there are times when one must consider the audience and adapt, I suppose.”
“I thought you rather good at it.”
That produced a look she recognized from that very morning—surprised, again. It seemed she was becoming rather good at sparking that reaction from him.
Her husband put his hand over hers where it rested on his arm. “Thank you, Lady Hartwell.”
Her lips curved upward. “You are most welcome, Lord Hartwell.”