Chapter 14
The knock came around seven on Sunday.
Alistair was at the library desk, working through his preliminary notes on the flood damage by the light of two candles.
He had been at it since six. The mill’s revised production schedule, a letter to Beckwith about the drainage work that could no longer be deferred, the details for the Hollingford order that needed to leave before the week was out.
The list had been longer than he liked and shorter than he feared, and he had been making reasonable progress until the knock interrupted him.
The footman who entered was one of the senior ones, a man whose tenure had survived two changes of duke and showed no signs of strain. He stopped at a formal distance from the desk. “Lord Franklin has arrived, Your Grace. He is asking for you.”
Alistair set down his quill. He glanced at the clock on the mantel, noted the hour, and looked back at the footman.
“At this time?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
Franklin did not ride through the night for convenience.
“Bring him here,” Alistair said. “And have someone see to his horse.”
The footman withdrew. Alistair set his papers aside, and waited.
Franklin came through the door two minutes later with his coat still on, his hat in his hands, and a look on his face that Alistair had last seen six years ago when a supplier’s warehouse had burned to the ground three weeks before a major shipment.
Not panic. Franklin did not panic. Something more contained than that, and therefore more alarming.
“Brother.” Alistair read his face in one practiced sweep. “How bad.”
“Bad enough that I rode straight from London to tell you in person rather than trust it to a letter.” Franklin turned his hat by its brim, a nervous habit he had possessed since childhood and never quite shed.
“I had a message yesterday evening from Hollingford’s man in London.
Mr. Goss himself has been asking questions.
Specifically, he has been asking why, in the months since the preliminary agreement was drafted, he has not once sat across a table from the owner of Fraser & Oxley Textile Mill. ”
Alistair frowned. “He has sat across a table from you.”
“He has. On three occasions. And each time I have explained that you are managing the estate and will come to London when the matter is sufficiently advanced to warrant it, and each time he has nodded and smiled and said he quite understood.” Franklin stopped turning the hat.
“He does not quite understand. What he understands is that a man who has inherited a dukedom might be too distracted, or perhaps too arrogant, to himself appear at the negotiating table. He says either the new duke does not require the contract sufficiently or does not consider Hollingford & Goss worth his personal attention. He is entertaining the theory that both are true.”
Alistair ran a hand through his hair, trying to think what to do. “That is absurd.”
“It is, and it is also the position of a man whose firm has been supplying military textiles to the Crown for thirty years and who has never in that time conducted business with a tradesman turned titled nobleman.” Franklin met his eyes.
“He has given a deadline. He will see you in London within the week or the contract goes to Whitmore & Sons.”
The name landed in the room with the weight Goss had intended.
Whitmore & Sons. A Manchester operation with half the capacity of Fraser & Oxley, inferior worsted, and a history of late deliveries that had cost them two contracts in the last decade.
The fact that Goss was prepared to fall back on Whitmore told Alistair more squarely than any words could the severity of the situation.
The man was not bluffing. He was genuinely prepared to walk away.
Alistair rose from the desk and crossed to the window.
The grounds of Fortunestone Hall lay before him in the gray morning light, the lawns still waterlogged from the week’s rain, the avenue of elms dark and bare against a sky that had not decided yet what kind of day it intended to be.
Three hundred workers in Irwyn. The weeks of repair ahead.
A mill running on reduced capacity. And now the largest opportunity in the history of Fraser & Oxley balanced on the temperament of a London merchant who had not been accorded the deference he believed he was owed.
Alistair thought about the contract with the thorough consideration it required, because he could not afford to think about it any other way.
Five years of exclusive supply for military uniforms to be distributed across Hollingford & Goss’s network, which stretched from London to Lisbon.
The canal investment that would halve the transit time from Irwyn to Liverpool.
The expansion of the mill that the revenue would fund.
Two additional weaving halls, a second engine house, another hundred positions for workers in a town where the work was not always reliably there.
It was not simply profit. It was the kind of contract that changed the shape of a place for a generation.
He had been building toward it with the patience and planning he brought to everything he considered worth having. And now, because he had spent time in Yorkshire managing a collapsing estate, the whole structure was threatening to come apart.
He felt neither patient, nor well-planned at this moment. At this moment, he felt that two behemoths had collided headfirst, with him smashed in the middle, not to mention the shifting of sand beneath his feet as he attempted to calculate a solution.
“He believes the title has made me unreliable,” Alistair said.
“He believes the title has made you unavailable,” Franklin said carefully, “which in his experience amounts to the same thing.”
It was a fair distinction. He had seen it himself.
Men who had spent their lives in trade, who had built something with their hands and their nerve and their capacity for sustained effort, who once wealthy quietly released their grip on the thing that had made them.
Who allowed themselves to become figureheads rather than practitioners, comfortable in the rooms built by their exertion and absent from the floor where the exertion continued.
He had sworn, when his father died and left the mill to him, that he would never become such a man.
He had kept that oath until recently, when Fortune’s Fall had required him to divide himself in ways he was still calculating the cost of.
The irony was not lost on him. He had resisted the dukedom because he understood what it would do.
The gravitational pull of it, the way a title of that magnitude reorganized a man’s obligations whether he consented to the reorganization or not.
He had been right, and being right had not made the slightest difference.
“I will go to London,” he said. It was not a decision so much as the recognition of a fact that had been true since Franklin’s arrival.
This, despite any feelings he had on the matter, was the priority.
With this contract, he could solve all his obligations, without it … Without it was not an option. “Today.”
Franklin let out a breath he had evidently been holding since he walked through the door. “We can be in London by Tuesday if the roads are passable. I have the horses.”
“The roads from here to York are still heavy from the flooding.” Alistair turned from the window. “We take my carriage to the Great North Road and make better time from there. The valley tracks would cost us two days we do not have.”
Franklin nodded. “I thought the same.” A beat of hesitation that Alistair recognized. “He wants assurances about the upcoming delivery.”
“Then he will have them. His order is safe and on schedule.” Alistair set down the letter he had been holding and reached for his coat. “Have something to eat and warm up. I need to send for the duchess.”
He said it with the even tone he applied to logistical necessities and felt, as the words left his mouth, the weight of what they meant.
The wedding was today. The vicar was expecting them at the town church before noon.
He had arranged it himself, with the deliberateness he brought to commitments he intended to keep, and he was now going to tell the woman who had agreed to marry him that the arrangement was being deferred, by him, on the morning it was supposed to take place.
He had given her his word. He intended to keep it. Those two facts existed in direct tension with each other, and there was nothing to be done about it except to say so plainly and accept whatever followed.
He sent the footman to the Duchess’s Wing and stood at the desk and wrote, rapidly, the letters that could not wait for his return.
The revised instructions to Beckwith, a note to the assessors in Leeds.
The work was familiar, and he moved through it without effort, which was the one reliable element of work he knew well.
It did not ask him to feel anything while he was doing it.
Only in the pauses between one letter and the next did the morning assert itself.
The vicar before noon. The girls, who knew what today was and would be waiting with anticipation.
And Josephine, who had survived one marriage conducted entirely on terms not her own and who had asked him for very little except the one thing he was about to fail to provide on the first occasion it was required of him.
He soughed, set down his quill, and waited.
When she came through the door, she was dressed and contained, which did not surprise him.
She was the epitome of grace. Her hair was up, her gown was correct for the hour and the season, and only in the set of her hands at her sides, composed and restrained, did he detect the careful management of something that was not as settled as her face suggested.