Chapter 1
Two months later
The carriage juddered along a road that could charitably be called neglected.
Ruts deep enough to swallow a boot pocked the track, and every third yard produced a lurch that rattled Alistair’s teeth in his skull.
Beside him, his companion braced one hand against the door frame and said nothing at all, which was among the traits Alistair valued most in Nathaniel Beckwith.
Beckwith was a renowned estate steward Alistair had lured away from a profitable post in Northumberland with the promise of a generous salary, a premium upon every increase in yield, and, better still, a challenge worthy of the name …
an estate so thoroughly mismanaged that its methods might have dated from before the Conquest. They had met twice before, once at a livestock auction in Harrogate and once over supper at a Leeds coaching inn, and both times Alistair had come away with the same impression.
Beckwith reckoned the world in yields per acre and suffered no fools.
Exactly the sort of fellow Alistair wanted at his side when inheriting a catastrophe.
“Your first task will be the account books,” Alistair said, pitching his voice above the rattle of wheels on broken ground. “Find them, assess their condition, and set things right. I want to know what is owed, what is earned, and what has vanished into thin air.”
Beckwith inclined his head. He was solidly built, thirty-four or thereabouts, with a square jaw softened by patient eyes, the kind that came from years spent negotiating with stubborn tenant farmers and even more stubborn sheep.
His coat was well-made and plain, without a trace of affectation.
“And the current steward? Am I to work alongside him, or—”
“The current steward is not to be paid any mind.” Alistair’s tone brooked no argument.
“The estate is infamous for being buried in the past. Tenants flee because the land is managed as though it were still the reign of the Tudors. Any man who has overseen that decline above a twelvemonth is either complicit or incompetent.”
Beckwith considered this, his gaze drifting to the window, where a line of bare elms flanked the avenue like the fingers of beggars. “It might not be entirely the steward’s doing, Your Grace. If the late duke gave him fool’s instructions, even a capable man would struggle to—”
“Then either he failed at managing his master,” Alistair cut in, “or he lacked the talent to find a better situation. Which failing would you prefer he lay claim to?”
Beckwith’s mouth twitched. “Fair point. There is no excuse for incompetence when it costs tenant farmers their livelihoods and impoverishes everyone dependent upon the estate.”
“Just so.” Alistair folded his arms, the leather of his gloves creaking in the cold. “I did not inherit excuses. I inherited obligations and responsibilities. There is no room for ineptitude when so many mouths depend upon it.”
They fell quiet as the carriage groaned past a pair of stone gateposts, their once-proud griffins missing a wing and half a beak between them. The iron gates hung open at a slant, one hinge long since surrendered to rust. A gatekeeper’s lodge sat dark and shuttered at the verge.
Not promising.
The avenue wound deeper, and the neglect deepened with it.
Fences sagged. A stone wall lay collapsed into a mossy heap that no one had troubled to rebuild.
The land itself was not poor, Alistair could see that much even through the thin March drizzle, but it had been squandered all the same.
His jaw tightened with every rut the carriage found.
His father had told him, on the rare evenings when Edmund Oxley allowed himself to speak of the family he had left behind, that the eighth duke, Alistair’s own grandfather, Peregrine Oxley, had been a man of iron conviction and glacial affection.
Peregrine had believed in bloodlines the way other men believed in scripture, and when his second son had dared fall in love with Moira Fraser, the old man had not merely disapproved. He had cut the branch away entire.
“Sullying the bloodline.”
Those had been his grandfather’s words to his father. As though love were a contagion and honest trade a disease.
The disinheritance had come swift and without mercy.
No farewell, no allowance, no sign the old duke’s second son had ever existed at all.
Edmund had walked into his marriage with nothing but the coat on his back and the bride on his arm, while his father likely drew a line through his name in the family Bible as a surgeon might excise a growth.
Alistair’s mother had told him as much, years later, her voice free of any bitterness.
Moira Fraser-Oxley had never been one to waste her days on resentment when there was work waiting to be done.
Alistair had inherited that same pragmatism, along with his mother’s auburn hair and his father’s stubborn jaw. He had also inherited his ducal grandfather’s relentless drive, though he would sooner have thrown himself into the Irwyn than admit to the likeness.
From his exile, Edmund had built something finer than anything the Oxleys had managed in generations. Fraser & Oxley Textile Mill stood as proof of what a man could build when he chose merit over inheritance, grit over gilt.
The mill had belonged to the Fraser family first, and when Edmund married the owner’s daughter, he had entered the business as a partner rather than a master.
Even after old Grandfather Alistair passed, the maternal name kept its place first in the firm’s title.
It was no accident. It was a small, deliberate mutiny, a declaration that the Fraser-Oxleys felt no shame in trade.
Quite the opposite. They wore it like a badge of honor.
And now, by some perverse arithmetic of inheritance, everything Edmund had turned his back on had come to rest on his eldest son’s shoulders instead.
Alistair had lived his whole life a bare two miles from this estate and had never once set eyes upon the manor before today. Not as a duke’s grandson. Not as a duke’s nephew. Not … well … not as a duke.
It still refused to sit right in his mind, even as he tried to set his unwanted duties down in a notebook, line by line.
He would see to them with dispatch, then be off to London to sign the contract with Hollingford & Goss.
That partnership would carry Fraser & Oxley Textile Mill to heights it had never known, and the profits from it would be wanted here too, to drag this behemoth of antiquated land management into the present century, once he had finished with the far more interesting business waiting for him at home.
As the carriage rattled on toward the hall, Alistair cataloged the disrepair as it passed.
Neglect piled on neglect, as if the estate had been left to rot on purpose out of spite.
Then, as if fate itself meant to mock his new circumstances, the carriage broke free of the trees, and Fortunestone Hall rose into view for the first time.
Medieval at its bones, though extensively rebuilt during the sixteenth century, the hall perched at the very lip of a dramatic gorge, its stone towers wrapped in the morning mist as though the place existed half a step outside the present day.
It was as if he had traveled back in time to some bygone era.
Fortunestone Hall.
Or Fortune’s Fall, as the locals called it, a cutting joke that served two purposes at once, mocking both its perch above the gorge and the shameful mismanagement that had plagued the dukedom for as long as anyone in the district could recall.
The Dukes of Oxley had never been famed for good stewardship, and his uncle’s fatal tumble down those very cliffs had only cemented the nickname beyond dispute.
The whole estate stood as a monument to noblemen too lost in the old world to notice the new one closing in around them, oblivious to the changing world where ordinary people lived and worked.
Fortune’s Fall, indeed.
This unwelcome title was an albatross round his neck, and Alistair meant to find some way to set the weight of it down before it dragged him under altogether.
“Handsome pile,” Beckwith observed, leaning forward to take it in, though caution colored his tone. He was likely already reckoning the cost of a roof that size.
“It is a millstone.” Alistair drew the notebook from his coat and added roof beneath gatehouse and fencing, then snapped the cover shut. “I intend to be in London within the week. Whatever arrangements need making here, we shall make them fast.”
Beckwith said nothing to that either, and Alistair was glad of it. The man understood what mattered. He understood the mill was not merely a business, that it was the engine keeping an entire town breathing. Fortunestone Hall, by contrast, looked like nothing so much as a monument to ruin.
The carriage clattered over a stone bridge whose balustrades were chipped and streaked green with lichen, then rattled up the final stretch of drive toward the entrance.
Up close, the decay was impossible to miss.
One of the great oak doors stood slightly crooked.
As the coachman drew the horses to a halt, Alistair drew a long breath.
Wet stone, damp earth, the faint green tang of moss.
The smell of a place that had spent decades quietly giving itself back to nature.
Right, then. In and out. Assess, instruct, arrange, depart. I am here to untangle a mess, not to adopt one.
He stepped down, boots meeting gravel with a satisfying crunch, and looked up at Fortunestone Hall in full.
Towers, chimneys, a roof that seemed to run the width of a small village.
For one unguarded moment the whole weight of what he had inherited pressed down upon his shoulders.
He shook it off before he could bear the brunt of it.
He had not come here to stand about being awed.