Chapter Four
Isaac and Tom sat in the hired carriage as it rattled down the road away from London.
Two days ago, a letter from Harrow had been delivered informing Isaac that he was expected in Yorkshire at his earliest convenience to assume his full duties and privileges attendant upon the barony.
Isaac had read that phrase perhaps a dozen times over the course of forty-eight hours and understood no better what duties and privileges a Southwark fighter was meant to possess.
"You'll want to practice your bow," Tom announced, settling back against the leather seat. "Can't go greeting tenants like you're about to knock their teeth out. Here, like this."
He attempted a seated approximation of a courtly bow, nearly striking his head against the carriage window in the process.
Isaac said nothing. He turned to the window, watching the city give way to the countryside. Hedgerows and pastures replaced rooftops and chimney smoke, the world opening into greenness.
He had rarely been in the country, spending almost his entire life in the city. But now he was on the way to his new home, an estate. He was now responsible for an entire estate. The notion was still as absurd as it had been since hearing it.
"You've gone quiet again," Tom observed.
"Just thinking."
"Dangerous business," Tom replied.
Isaac exhaled heavily. "How am I supposed to run an estate?" he asked.
"Look," Tom said, leaning forward in his seat. "I've watched you take on some pretty tough fights over the years."
"This is different," Isaac insisted. "Fighting is what I know. Not balancing ledgers and arranging harvest schedules.
"Perhaps," Tom agreed. "But you've never failed at anything you've set your mind to, so what makes you think you won't win this one?"
Isaac said nothing. Because what could he say? Tom was right; he'd always been able to achieve what he set out to do. But this wasn't the same. He was unprepared and unsuited for this kind of life.
"Stop worrying so much," Tom said as he settled back against the seat and closed his eyes.
Isaac watched him for a moment, envying his untroubled ease.
***
The journey from London to York took three days.
They stayed at various inns in small sleepy country towns that were different from the busy streets of London.
As they drew closer to their destination, Isaac found it increasingly difficult to silence the growing dread in the pit of his stomach. It only seemed to grow louder with each passing mile.
Then, on the third afternoon, Rowan Hall came into view, rising from the surrounding fields with a kind of weathered grandeur.
The manor was vast. Older by far than anything Isaac had ever set foot in, its grey stone exterior darkened by centuries of weather, ivy climbing thick and unchecked across one entire fa?ade in a way that spoke of a household too understaffed to keep it properly cut back.
Tall windows caught the late sun in scattered gleams along its front.
A drive lined with ancient, overgrown oaks led up toward an arched entrance flanked by stone pillars.
Beyond the house itself, the land stretched away in every direction, fields dotted with grazing sheep, distant farmhouses, and hedgerows marking boundaries that had likely stood unchanged for a hundred years or more.
"Christ," Tom breathed, leaning fully out the carriage window. "Isaac. Look at the size of it."
Isaac looked but said nothing. There was nothing in him equal to the size of what he was looking at.
The carriage drew up before the entrance and stopped. Isaac had barely set foot on the drive before the great doors opened and a small assembly of servants emerged to greet him.
An elderly butler at their head, spine straight despite his evident years, was followed by a stout, grey-haired housekeeper and a handful of younger servants arranged in careful order.
"My Lord." The butler bowed. "Whitby, My Lord. I had the honour of serving the late Baron Rowan for some forty years, and I welcome you most heartily to Rowan Hall."
"Mr Whitby."
Isaac extended his hand before he thought better of it, and he saw Mr Whitby's eyebrow twitch upward, so fractionally he might have missed it.
"And I am Mrs Ellis, My Lord," the housekeeper injected, dropping into a curtsy. "Housekeeper of Rowan Hall these fifteen years. We've been expecting you since the news reached us, My Lord, and I hope you'll find everything in order, so far as our situation allows."
Isaac nodded, aware of a dozen pairs of eyes on him.
The assembled servants studied him with the particular subtle attention of people trying very hard not to appear as though they were studying him at all.
He knew what they saw. He had seen it enough times in London's better neighbourhoods to recognise it instantly here.
The broken nose healed crooked, the scar through his eyebrow, the plain travelling coat.
All marked him as a man unaccustomed to fine things.
"Thank you," he said, because it seemed the right thing to say. "For the welcome. I didn't expect quite so grand a reception."
"It is only proper, My Lord," Whitby said, bowing his head.
Then Mrs Ellis stepped forward.
"I hope you'll forgive my presumption, My Lord," she said.
"But I've taken the liberty of sending word to the neighbouring villages about seeking additional staff.
The house has run on a skeleton crew these last few years.
The late baron kept to only a handful of us, and much of the manor has gone unused and rather neglected as a result.
I thought, given that the house is to be a proper household again, we ought to have maids enough to keep it, and a cook worth the name, and footmen sufficient to receive callers properly.
I should have asked your permission first, My Lord, and I do apologise for the liberty—"
"You did right," Isaac said.
Mrs Ellis stopped mid-sentence, visibly startled.
"My Lord?"
"You saw a house needed running properly and you set about running it, without waiting for someone to tell you it was allowed."
Isaac shrugged, uncomfortable now that every eye had turned toward him.
"Where I come from, that's not presumption. That's good sense. I'd rather have people around me who act on good sense than people who wait to be told what to do at every turn. So, you did right, Mrs Ellis. Hire whoever you need."
Mrs Ellis smiled faintly, the first unguarded expression Isaac had seen from any of them since the carriage drew up.
"Thank you, My Lord. I'll see it done at once."
The remainder of the day passed in a blur of rooms and names and explanations that Isaac struggled, despite his best effort, to fully absorb.
Whitby led him through the manor with the patient thoroughness of a man determined to leave nothing unexplained, narrating the history of each wing, each portrait, each piece of ancient furniture with evident pride, while Tom trailed behind them in a state of open delight, running his hand along carved banisters, staring up at chandeliers thick with dust and unlit candles, pausing before an enormous marble fireplace in the great hall to declare, with considerable satisfaction that he might very well become respectable himself if given long enough in a house like this.
"Don't," Isaac muttered, though there was no real force behind it.
"Can't promise anything," Tom said cheerfully. "This much marble does something to a man's character."
The steward arrived before supper with an armful of ledgers that Isaac suspected represented only a fraction of the estate's full accounting. The two of them spent the better part of an hour bent over rent rolls and repair estimates and outstanding debts.
The steward, a thin, careful man named Fletcher, uncertain how much financial detail a former prizefighter could be expected to follow, explained each figure with a slow, deliberate patience that Isaac found, after the third such explanation, faintly insulting.
"I can read a ledger, Mr Fletcher," he said, not unkindly.
"I've kept my own accounts since I was sixteen years old.
I may not know Latin, or how to address a duchess, but I know when a column doesn't add up, and I know the difference between an honest expense and a man skimming from an estate too disorganised to notice. "
Fletcher blinked. "Forgive me, My Lord. I did not mean to presume—"
"You did," Isaac said, "but no matter. Tell me about the tenants instead. How many farms, and how are they faring? I'd rather know whether a man's roof leaks than what his lordship's silver is worth."
"Of course, My Lord," he said, reaching for another leather-bound book.
A while later, when the candles had burned low, the ledgers were set aside for the evening.
As Fletcher gathered them and took his leave, Isaac mused that it was not very different from studying an opponent before a fight: look past what a man wanted you to see and find what was actually true beneath it.
After a few minutes he got up to find Tom, who turned out to be in the estate office.
As Isaac stepped inside, he looked around. The long room was lined floor to ceiling with leather-bound ledgers and yellowed maps of the property, a great oak desk dominating one end beneath a window already gone dark with evening.
Someone, Whitby probably, had left a bottle of good whisky and two glasses on the desk.
"Come and sit," Tom said. "I am sure after today you could use a drink."
He poured them each a generous measure before dropping into a chair beside Isaac with a contented sigh.
"To Lord Rowan," Tom said, raising his glass. "And the finest house I've ever set foot in."
Isaac took a long sip.
"I still can't believe it," Tom said, looking around. "After everything, this feels like fortune's finally decided to pay you back. All those years scraping by, all those fights, and now look at you. It's not every day a man goes from Southwark to a barony inside a single fortnight."
"It's not fortune paying me back, Tom," Isaac said.
"It's an accident. My grandfather eloped with a woman below his station sixty years ago, and every rule-abiding Rowan since happened to die without an heir, and so here I am.
Not because I earned it, or because anyone thought I deserved it, but because the alternative was letting an ancient title simply vanish.
That's not fortune smiling on me. That's a title with nowhere else to go. "
"Does it matter how you came by it?" Tom countered. "You're here now. A hundred generations of Rowans, and it falls to you to carry it forward. That's not nothing, Isaac, whatever accident put it in your hands."
Isaac looked around the office. He looked at the shelves heavy with centuries of accounts, at the maps marking boundaries drawn long before either of them was born, at the ledgers detailing the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of tenants who had woken this morning not knowing their new lord's name and would, within days, be dependent on his judgment for their futures.
Looking at all this, he felt none of the triumph Tom clearly wanted him to feel.
"That's exactly what worries me," he said quietly. "It's not privilege sitting in this office, Tom. It's weight. Hundreds of people out there tomorrow are going to look to me for decisions I've no training to make."
He shook his head, exhaling sharply.
"I've got a title now, and land, and more money than I ever thought to hold in my whole life, and none of it changes where I came from, or what I've done to survive it, or the fact that half the county's going to spend the next twenty years waiting for me to prove I don't belong here."
"So prove them wrong," Tom said simply. "You've done it before. Every fight you ever won, there was always more than one fool in the crowd certain you'd lose. You proved them wrong every time."
"This isn't a fight I know how to win, Tom.
I don't know the rules," Isaac argued. "I don't know how to bow to a duchess or which fork to use at supper or how to talk to a room full of lords without them hearing Southwark in every word I say.
I know how to hit a man until he stays down.
I don't know the first thing about being a baron. "
Tom was quiet for a moment, turning his glass slowly in his hands.
"You didn't know the first thing about fighting either, once. I remember you back then. Sixteen years old, skinny as a rake. Old Danny put you in the ring with a man twice your size because there was no one else willing to go."
Isaac could still remember that day, too. How afraid he'd been. And yet, something inside of him had told him he could do it.
"You didn't know the rules then, either. You just kept getting up until you'd learned them well enough to win."
Tom set his glass down and met Isaac's eyes squarely.
"I don't figure this is so very different, if I'm honest. You'll get knocked down plenty, I'd wager, before you learn how any of this works.
But I've never once known you to stay down, Isaac Rowan, and I can't see why that ought to change just because the ring's got better furniture in it this time. "
Isaac smiled, although it did not reach the unease sitting heavy in his chest.
He had wealth, land and a title older than either of their families had any right to claim proximity to. He had, by any measure the world outside this room would recognise, everything a man could want.
Yet he still did not know whether he belonged in it, or whether he ever truly would.