Chapter Two #2
"It was believed, until quite recently, that his line had ended with him," Harrow continued. "But it did not. Records of his marriage, and of your father's birth, were located in a parish register in Southwark, and from there the trail led, eventually, to you."
Tom picked up one of the documents and turned it over.
"With the extinction of the direct line of inheritance," Harrow continued, "the barony, together with Rowan Hall in Yorkshire, its surrounding lands, tenant farms, and associated investments, pass to you as the ninth Baron Rowan."
Isaac continued to stare at the lawyer, certain he was imagining all this.
"You will also hold a seat in the House of Lords, should you choose to take it up. I must ask that you travel north as soon as may be arranged, to formally claim the estate and begin the process of assuming your responsibilities there."
It happened all at once, a great roar of noise breaking the stunned silence as the tavern erupted.
"A lord! Isaac Rowan, a bloody lord!"
Tankards raised in mocking toast, a few men clapping him on the back with rough congratulation.
Isaac sat through all of it in a kind of fog, the noise reaching him from some distance.
His eyes were fixed on the seals and signatures spread across the rough tavern table.
This is impossible, he thought. It can't be true.
He had grown up in two rooms in Southwark with a father who mucked stables for men who would not have looked at him twice and a mother who took in washing until her hands cracked and bled in winter.
He had fought for money since he was sixteen because it was the only trade that paid a boy from nowhere anything close to what his fists were worth.
He had never, in thirty-two years, imagined himself as anything but exactly what he was, until a stranger in fine black wool had walked into a Hounslow tavern and told him he was a baron.
"There will be difficulties,” Harrow shifted, lowering his voice.
"What kind of difficulties?" Tom asked.
"Several distant relations of the Rowan family have indicated they intend to challenge the succession in court," Harrow explained. "Although our examination of the records leaves little doubt as to the legitimacy of your claim."
He paused, as if he were choosing how best to say what needed to be relayed.
"More troubling, perhaps, is the matter of society itself.
You will hold the title and the lands by right of law, Mr Rowan, and no court in England can take that from you.
But a title does not compel acceptance. The local gentry in Yorkshire, and society more broadly, will know precisely where you have come from, and I would not wish you to travel north believing your reception there will be a warm one. "
"I've never once had a warm reception anywhere in my life," Isaac said. "Can't imagine that's about to change on account of a title."
Harrow studied him for a moment with something that might almost have been sympathy. He then gathered his documents, bowed with the same formal precision he had entered with, and took his leave, pausing at the door.
"A letter with further instructions will follow within the week."
Then he vanished back out into the London night, leaving the tavern to erupt into fresh speculation the moment the door closed behind him.
"My Lord," Tom said, testing the words with evident relish. "Lord Rowan. I'll have to mind my manners around you now, won't I? Bow when you enter a room. Call you 'My Lord' instead of 'you great ugly article,' which I confess doesn't feel half so satisfying."
"Don't you dare," Isaac said, though there was no real heat in it, his mind still turning over Harrow's words.
"A baron."
Tom shook his head, laughing outright now, though there was something beneath the laughter that Isaac recognised as his friend's own disbelief working itself loose.
"Isaac Rowan, of Southwark, prizefighter and general terror of the London rings, about to become a peer of the realm. If someone had told me this morning I'd live to see it, I'd have called them a liar and bought them a drink for the joke."
Isaac said nothing. He turned one of the papers Harrow had left behind toward the candlelight, studying the elegant, unfamiliar script of his own name rendered in a solicitor's careful hand.
He felt none of the triumph he supposed a man ought to feel upon learning he had inherited a title. Instead, a kind of quiet dread settled low and unfamiliar in his chest, separate from the ordinary ache of split knuckles and bruised ribs.
He had spent thirty-two years knowing precisely what he was, a fighter, a Southwark boy, a man who earned his bread with his fists. He had made a kind of peace with the limits of that life, however hard-won.
He did not know what he was meant to be now. A title did not undo thirty-two years of being told, in a hundred small and large ways, exactly where a man like him belonged and exactly how far above it he was never meant to rise.
Harrow's warning echoed in him louder than his news.
A title does not compel acceptance.
Isaac understood, with the particular clear-eyed instinct that had kept him alive through fifteen years of prize rings, that whatever waited for him in Yorkshire would very likely be its own kind of fight, one he had considerably less notion of how to win than any he had faced before.