Prologue #3
A crumbling relic by every account he had ever heard. Buried in debt, clinging to old habits that no longer paid their way. Estates to manage. Tenants to house. A whole family of aristocratic strangers to navigate as though they were his own blood, when they had never once claimed him as such.
“Blast the man, getting himself killed in the first place. Probably rode as though even the cliffs were obliged to get out of his way, out hunting like some dandy without a care for where he put his feet.”
“Perhaps.” A flicker of amusement crossed Franklin’s face. “But the solicitors will not be put off. It could be a boon, Alistair. Land, rents, influence in Parliament.”
Alistair let out a short, disbelieving breath. “Influence. I would sooner stand up for a quadrille at Almack’s than sit down with those powdered popinjays. This mill is my domain. The Hollingford & Goss deal, that is our future. Not some dusty title no one in this family ever wanted us to hold.”
Even as he said it, though, a thread of sense tugged at him despite himself. The Oxley lands bordered their own wool suppliers. Bringing them together could settle the whole supply, make it proof against bad seasons and market swings alike.
No.
The peerage had shunned his father for choosing trade over blood. Why should he go crawling to that world now, hat in hand, simply because a stranger had fallen off a cliff?
Franklin watched him a moment, reading him the way he always could. “At least speak with the solicitors. When you can spare an hour.”
Alistair grumbled something noncommittal and reached for another letter, glad of the excuse to look elsewhere.
“Fine. When I can spare it. And do not go getting ideas, Lord Franklin. Brother to a duke now, are you? Does that make you a lordling?” He put a touch of mockery into it, the only kind of levity he could manage just then.
Franklin laughed outright, the sound easing something in the room that had gone tight.
“Lord Franklin. Sounds absurd on my own tongue. I would rather stand second at Fraser & Oxley than first in some drafty old hall. But suit yourself, Your Grace. Only do not let it go to your head.” He clapped Alistair on the shoulder, a brotherly weight that settled him more than he cared to admit.
Alistair shot him a look, though there was no real heat behind it, only the old, familiar fellowship that had carried them through slow seasons and worse losses.
“Off with you. Draft that answer to Hollingford. And breathe not a word of this to anyone. Not yet. The last thing this mill needs is gossip running loose among the workers.”
Franklin went, his footsteps fading down the stairs, and Alistair crossed to the window, pressing his palm flat against the cool glass.
Below him the mill floor moved through its familiar pattern, spinners feeding the carders, weavers checking their bolts, dyers stirring their vats in patient circles.
This was his world. Solid. Useful. Built by his own hands rather than handed down by an accident of blood.
A dukedom felt like nothing so much as a chain, one meant to drag him toward a past he had never wanted and did not need now.
The solicitor’s letter sat on the desk behind him, seal cracked, waiting.
I will deal with it in time. On my terms.
He shrugged back into his coat and went down to the floor, losing himself in the familiar work of inspections and adjustments, a word here, a correction there. These were the things that held him upright.
By evening the shifts had changed, lanterns lit against the growing dark, casting their warm light over the cooling machines.
The day’s workers filed out in loose clusters, voices carrying the easy comfort of people bound for hearths and suppers and the ordinary comforts of lives built beyond these walls.
Alistair stood in the doorway and watched the last of them vanish into the January dusk, Tom walking alongside a father who ruffled his hair, Mrs. Wilkins arm in arm with the daughter who had come to walk her home.
The quiet outside settled over him along with the frost creeping up from the riverbank.
He drew the great doors shut, his breath fogging pale in the cold, and stood a moment in the empty yard.
Behind him the mill rose dark and solid against the sky, the evening shift’s low hum muffled by thick brick walls, though even that solid weight of stone could not fill the hush that always found him on the walk home.
It was always this way at the end of the day. The work fell away, and there was only Alistair, walking alone through the cold toward a house with no one waiting in it, the modest one he kept close by the mill while his mother and Charlotte lived in far grander comfort on the far side of Irwyn.
He did not dwell on it. Could not afford to.
There was too much left to be done to indulge in maudlin thoughts.
But tonight the quiet weighed heavier than usual, pressed down by a title he had never asked for and a life that had, in the space of one letter, stopped being the orderly thing he had spent years building.
The duke nobody wanted. Least of all himself.
What a farce.