Chapter 8
Rain had fallen without pause since the evening before, showing no sign of mercy. It struck the library windows in relentless sheets, a dull roar filling every silence between sentences and turning the hearth fire into little more than a feeble protest against the creeping damp.
The library carried the smell of old oak and wet stone, a scent that found its way through every crack in the casements despite the blaze Alistair had ordered built up at dawn.
Volumes no one had opened in a generation lined the shelves along three walls, spines cracked and faded, and above the mantel hung the portrait of some ancestral Oxley whose expression suggested he found the entire century beneath him.
Nathaniel Beckwith sat across the walnut desk from him, a map of the Fortunestone estates spread out between them, its curling edges pinned flat under stacked books. He traced a line along the western boundary with one blunt finger while Alistair listened, running costs in his head as he went.
“The western pastures could carry two hundred head, if we fence and drain them properly, but I will not lie to you. Your Grace would anger half the tenants and every opinionated gentleman in Irwyn besides. They still hold that the only thing worse than a tradesman’s son is a tradesman’s sheep.”
Alistair leaned back, two fingers pressed to the bridge of his nose.
The remark arrived with the candor he had come to expect from Beckwith, a man who saw what wanted doing and said so without dressing it up.
Since taking him on, Beckwith had earned every shilling of his generous salary many times over.
“And the drainage?” Alistair lowered his hand to the map. “What would it take to make the land fit for use?”
Beckwith exhaled slowly, the sort of breath that always came before figures no one wanted to hear.
“Six months’ labor, at the least. Ditching, tile drainage, new fencing throughout.
The tenants you have now will not lend their backs to a scheme they do not trust, so outside men would be needed.
And then there is breeding stock to consider.
Decent ewes cost dear, and most breeders worth the name have their stock spoken for well in advance, so you would be starting from nothing at all.
” He tapped the map where the Irwyn wound through the low meadows.
“The flood risk here is no exaggeration. Last night’s rain alone has turned the lower fields to marsh.
Without proper channels dug, you would lose lambs the moment spring arrived. ”
Alistair traced the inked contour lines with his eyes, following the flood path across the page. It painted a grim picture, though he had expanded a mill from worse odds than these.
“Every estate in Yorkshire turns a profit on wool,” Alistair muttered, more to himself than to his steward.
“Every one but this. The whole region lives on the fleece trade, and yet the local gentry carry on as though raising sheep were beneath their dignity. My grandfather thought the same. My uncle was too consumed with his own vices to ever correct the error. Two generations of stubborn pride, and the result is a duchy that cannot even fund the repair of its own roof.”
“Aye, this estate has held to its crop rents for decades now, convinced that anything smelling of industry would cheapen the title. That Irwyn’s whole prosperity flows straight from your family’s mill never once troubled that reasoning.”
Outside, the rain gathered force, hammering the glass as if to underline the futility of any agricultural ambition in such weather.
Alistair watched water stream down the diamond-paned glass, smearing the gray gardens beyond into a blur.
He thought of the mill, its great chimneys breathing steam into the sky above Irwyn, where a decision made today could show results within weeks.
Here at Fortunestone Hall, every step forward met resistance from ghosts and the living men who still served them.
He and Beckwith had toured three tenant farms that very morning, finding roofs patched with rotting thatch, rain dripping straight onto furniture, drainage ditches choked with a decade of neglect, and families stretching their winter stores near to breaking.
The previous steward had collected the rents and put the proceeds toward nothing beyond the dowager’s household accounts, and, in all likelihood, his own pockets besides.
Alistair sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “The sheep can wait. Not with everything else demanding attention first, the roof, the tenants’ cottages, the roads. We shall take the question up again once what already exists has been stabilized.”
Beckwith dipped his head. “A sound plan. Better to earn the tenants’ trust before laying new schemes on them.”
“Just so.” Alistair stood and crossed to the window, hands clasped behind his back.
Beyond the glass the rain kept up its dull roar, a curtain of gray blotting out the horizon entirely.
He could just discern the shadow of the stone gatehouse in the distance, though the avenue of trees had vanished altogether beneath the downpour.
“This weather shows no sign of relenting. Left much longer, the roads will become impassable.”
“Nearly there already,” Beckwith said. “The track from the gatehouse to the village stood ankle-deep in mud when I rode in yesterday.”
They both went quiet for a moment, watching rain trace unbroken rivulets down the glass. The sky held no promise of easing. If anything the clouds had thickened since morning, settling low over the valley like a heavy gray blanket thrown across the hills.
“I cannot spare much more time here, Beckwith. The mill has urgent business waiting, and I must leave for London soon to close an important contract. Hollingford & Goss will not wait forever, and my brother Franklin has been holding them off with promises of my imminent arrival for longer than is wise.”
“How long will you be away?”
“A fortnight, perhaps more. It depends on the negotiations, and on the roads.” He turned back into the room, his gaze sweeping over Beckwith’s careful notes, the ledgers with their bleak columns of arithmetic, the map marked up in pencil.
So much still to be done, and never quite the hours to finish it.
Alistair had always thrived under competing demands, but the sheer scale of Fortunestone’s decline tested even his appetite for work.
At the mill, problems came with solutions attached.
Here, problems came with histories attached instead.
“I am leaving the estate in your hands. You carry my full authority. If the household gives you any trouble, invoke my name without a moment’s hesitation.”
Beckwith’s mouth curved thinly. “By household, Your Grace means Her Grace the elder.”
“I mean anyone at all who stands in the way of progress. But yes. The dowager will test you. Do not let her cow you. Whatever she may believe, she holds no legal authority here.”
Alistair had already begun a letter to his own solicitors in Leeds, meant to set the legal position down.
Margaret would receive a copy in due course.
He took no pleasure in threatening litigation against family, but he neither trusted her nor counted her as family, not after what she had done to his father.
Before Beckwith could answer, a soft knock cut across the room, and the library door eased open a few cautious inches.
Genevieve appeared in the gap and went still at once, her silver-blonde hair catching the low firelight. Her pale eyes flicked from Alistair to Beckwith, and color rushed into her cheeks.
“Forgive me. I had not realized you were in conference.” She was already stepping back. “I only meant to find something from the shelves. I shall come back another time.”
“Come in,” Alistair said, waving her forward. “We are nearly finished. Find what you need.”
She hesitated, then came in with all the caution of someone crossing a frozen pond.
Her eyes stayed fixed on the bookshelves along the far wall, and she made her way past Beckwith as though he were a piece of furniture rather than a person worth noticing.
Still, Alistair caught the stiffness in her posture, the set of her chin, the slight tremor in her fingers as she reached for a leather-bound volume.
Her hand closed around a slim green book, poetry by the look of the gilt lettering, and she drew it from the shelf with exaggerated care, as if the tiniest sound might give her away.
His youngest cousin was seventeen years old, and outside the vicar and the household staff, she had barely exchanged a word with another soul her whole life.
Jerome had kept his daughters shut away like relics in a cabinet, hidden from the world and mostly forgotten by it.
It was cruelty dressed up as protection, and Alistair intended to put an end to it.
Little wonder the girl startled at the sight of a stranger in her own library.
Alistair sighed, considering what it would mean to introduce these girls to a world that had been withheld from them for years. They stood desperately unready to begin lives of their own, and readying them had become an unforeseen complication on top of many other complications.
“I shall leave you to it, Your Grace,” Beckwith said, tucking the rolled map beneath his arm. “The drainage estimates will be ready by morning, and I mean to ride out to the eastern tenant farms this afternoon, weather notwithstanding.”
“Very good. Take care on those roads.”
“I have ridden through far worse than this.” He inclined his head, offered Genevieve a polite nod she did not seem to notice, and took his leave.
Genevieve pressed her book to her bodice, color still high in her cheeks, and turned for the door. “Thank you, Your Grace. I am sorry for the interruption.” She said it with dignity, though she moved with the haste of someone eager to be anywhere else.
“Genevieve.”
She stopped, casting a wary glance over her shoulder.