Chapter 16
The inn was called the White Hare and had been serving travelers for longer than anyone currently associated with it could reliably verify.
Its yard was competently run, its ostlers moved with the briskness of men who understood that a carriage stopped was a carriage losing time, and the horses brought out for the exchange were sound animals, well rested and evenly matched.
Alistair noted all of this with the automatic appraisal honed from fifteen years spent moving goods and people across the north of England, and felt the faint satisfaction of things being done correctly, and then felt almost nothing else because his mind was somewhere entirely other than the inn.
Franklin had acquired coffee from inside and was standing in the yard with his collar up against the March wind, both hands wrapped around the cup, watching the ostlers work with the alert, assessing expression he wore whenever he was about to say something he had been thinking for longer than the conversation warranted.
“You have been quiet since Fortunestone,” Franklin said.
“I am often quiet.”
“You are often thinking loudly while remaining quiet. It is a different thing and you know it.” He took a careful sip of the coffee. “You are thinking about the duchess.”
Alistair did not dignify this with a response, which was itself a response, and they both knew it.
“It was to have been your wedding day,” Franklin said, without any inflection.
He was not the kind of man who pursued an advantage in conversation once he had established it.
He simply established it and waited. Alistair did not know how his brother knew this, but perhaps Franklin had done his reconnaissance with their coachman.
“I am aware of what day it is.”
“And yet here we are, miles away.”
“And yet here we are,” Alistair agreed, accepting a fact he found entirely unsatisfying.
The ostlers finished the exchange. One of them spoke briefly to the coachman, who nodded and climbed back to his box.
The yard settled into the interim quiet of a place between arrivals.
Somewhere inside the inn, a dog was barking with the monotonous persistence of an animal that had forgotten why it had started.
Franklin set down his cup on the mounting block and assessed his brother with the expression Alistair recognized from many years of being assessed by Franklin, the one that meant he had arrived at a conclusion and was deciding whether his brother was ready to hear it.
“Tell me about Goss,” Alistair said, because the conversation needed to be steered toward something actionable and because he was not prepared to discuss Josephine on a yard with an ostler within earshot. “Not the message. What is actually driving this?”
Franklin accepted the redirection without comment.
“Goss is sixty-three years old and has been the senior partner at Hollingford & Goss for twenty-two of them. He has spent his entire professional life building relationships with manufacturers on the basis of personal acquaintance and mutual accountability. He does not do business with institutions. He does business with men.” He paused.
“What he has received, for the past six weeks, is letters. Very good letters, carefully argued, accurately figured, representing his interests with complete competence. But letters. No introduction to the man who runs the mill.”
“You are telling me this is entirely about confidence.”
“I am telling you this is entirely about confidence. He is not concerned about the mill’s capacity.
He is not concerned about the worsted quality.
He has seen the samples and they are, in his own word, exceptional.
He is concerned that the man he understood himself to be entering into a five-year partnership with has not seen fit to meet him.
” Franklin looked at him levelly. “In his experience, that means one of two things. Either the man does not regard the contract as sufficiently important to warrant his personal attention, or the man is no longer in a position to give it.”
“Because of the title.”
“Yes. He has been making inquiries, Alistair. He knows about the dukedom. He knows about Fortunestone Hall. I do not know from whom, but he has heard that the estate is in considerable disrepair and that the new duke will be occupied with its management. He is drawing the conclusion that Fraser & Oxley is about to become someone else’s concern.
” Franklin’s voice was measured, but his eyes were direct.
“He wants to know whom he is actually dealing with. And he wants to hear it from you.”
The carriage was ready. The coachman was waiting.
Alistair stood in the yard and looked at the road running south, pale and straight in the thin morning light, and thought about Goss and the contract and the three hundred people in Irwyn and the mill his maternal grandfather and his father had built and he had expanded and his brothers managed with a competence that had never quite received its proper accounting because Alistair had always been the name at the top.
“If I were not going to London,” he said slowly, “what would you do?”
Franklin blinked. It was the closest he came to visible surprise. “I would go to London in your place, as I have been doing, and attempt to manage the situation as best I could without the one thing that would actually resolve it.”
“And if you went to London in my place, not as my representative but as the head of Fraser & Oxley?”
A silence. The dog inside the inn had stopped barking. The wind moved through the yard and lifted a handful of loose straw from the cobblestones and distributed it along the wall.
“That is not the current arrangement,” Franklin said carefully.
“I am asking whether you would want it to be.”
Franklin looked at him for a long moment.
Then he looked at the road and at the carriage and back at Alistair.
“Benedict can manage the floor,” he said slowly, as though working through the thought as he spoke it.
“He has been doing it effectively for the past year, with proper oversight. If I were to take the senior position formally, he would need the title to match the responsibility.” He paused. “You are serious?”
“I am serious.”
“You would hand me the mill.”
“I would. You would run it with full authority and your name on the correspondence, and Goss would be dealing with the man who is actually in charge.” Alistair looked at his brother.
“You have built as much of that business as I have. You have negotiated every major contract in the last three years. You put together the Hollingford deal from nothing. The primary reason your name is not already at the top is that I was there first and neither of us thought to question it.”
Franklin was quiet for what felt like a long time.
When he spoke, his voice had lost its careful, calibrated quality, and what came through instead was plainer and, Alistair thought, considerably more honest. “I would love it,” he said.
“I have never considered it because you never gave any indication of being willing to step back.”
“I am not stepping back. I am stepping sideways.” Alistair looked at the road.
“There is an estate in Yorkshire that has not been properly managed in a century and a great deal of work to be done there, and I find I am not as reluctant to do it as I expected.” He paused.
“The dukedom comes with land, Franklin. A great deal of it. Pasture land, most of it ungrazed or badly managed. If we were to increase the sheep count at Fortunestone Hall significantly and supply the mill directly, as you once suggested, we would control the wool chain from flock to fabric. No suppliers, no price fluctuations, no delays from the Dales in a bad winter.”
Franklin stared at him. “A partnership,” he said. “The estate supplying the mill.”
“At favorable rates, with a formal agreement. Your name at the head of Fraser & Oxley. My name on the wool supply. Goss gets the brother of a duke and a guaranteed supply chain, which is, if you think about it, considerably more than he was originally offered.”
Franklin was silent for a moment. Then a slow smile moved across his face, the one he reserved for ideas that were both very good and slightly audacious, and he picked up his cup from the mounting block, found it empty, and set it down again. “He will want it in writing.”
“Then put it in writing.” Alistair reached for the carriage door and held it open.
“Go to London. Tell Goss you are the new head of Fraser & Oxley and that the Duke of Oxley will be supplying the mill with first-quality Yorkshire wool, which will be reflected in the revised contract terms. Take Benedict’s promotion as already decided and draw up the papers accordingly.
I will sign whatever needs signing when you return from London.
I trust you to arrange the best terms for us. ”
Franklin climbed into the carriage and then turned in the doorway with a recalculating expression. “You said when I return from London.”
“I am going back to Fortunestone Hall.”
“How?”
“There will be something at the inn.” Alistair stepped back from the carriage. “If not, I will walk until there is.”
Franklin gazed at him for a moment with not quite amusement and not quite sentiment. “You are going back for her,” he said.
“I am going back for all of them … and for her.”
Franklin cocked his head, his expression rather astonished.
“Go,” Alistair said. “Every hour before London is an hour Goss entertains alternatives.”
Franklin laughed, recognizing his own logic turned back on him, and pulled the carriage door shut.
The coachman lifted the reins. The horses moved, and the carriage rolled out of the yard and onto the south road, and Alistair stood and watched it go until it rounded the bend in the road and was gone.