Chapter 12
The boy from the mill reached the house a quarter before five that morning.
Josephine had returned to her own room an hour earlier, and Alistair, who had found no more sleep than she likely had, was already dressed.
The habit of early rising was too deeply ingrained to surrender to a sleepless night, and he heard the commotion in the entrance hall before any servant thought to carry him word of it.
Coming down the main stair, he found a mill clerk no older than seventeen standing in a spreading puddle, his coat soaked through, his breath coming in ragged gulps, as though he had covered most of the road from Irwyn on foot rather than wait for a horse to be readied.
The boy’s name was Timms. Alistair knew him the same way he knew all of them, every clerk and carder and loom-hand drawing wages from Fraser & Oxley, and the pallor of Timms’s face told him the news was serious before a single word was uttered.
“The Irwyn’s over her banks, sir,” Timms said, then seemed to recall himself.
“Your Grace. The lower sheds are taking water. Mr. Hawkes has the men up, salvaging what they can, but the coal stores—” He stopped to catch his breath.
“The coal stores are on the low ground, sir. If they flood, we lose the steam.”
Alistair let none of this show on his face, which took a discipline of its own. “The sluices at Irwyn Lock?”
“Holding, sir. Mr. Benedict had them checked at midnight. But the thaw’s still coming off the hills, and the rain hasn’t—” Timms cast an involuntary glance toward the great windows, where March continued making its arguments against optimism. “—hasn’t let up.”
“The packed shipments.”
“In the upper warehouse. Dry for now, but if the canal walls—”
“Yes.” Alistair had already run the calculation through. He turned toward the footman hovering at the edge of the hall. “Have my horse saddled. Now.” He was already moving to retrieve his heaviest riding coat. “And where is Franklin?”
Timms’s silence lasted long enough to answer the question before his words caught up to it. “Mr. Franklin has not returned from London yet, Your Grace.”
Alistair went still, one arm halfway into his coat. “He was due back this last Monday.”
“Yes, sir.”
Now it was Friday.
He finished putting on his coat without another word.
Franklin had business in London, the Hollingford correspondence, the preliminary contract review, and Alistair had drawn a specific promise from him before setting out for Fortune’s Fall, that he would return to the mill by Monday morning and hold the enterprise together in his absence.
It was not a complicated instruction. Franklin was no child, and the mill was as much his life’s work as it was Alistair’s own.
That he had chosen this exact week of all weeks to extend his stay in London was, to put it plainly, aggravating.
Those thoughts could wait their turn. Just now, he had a flood on his hands.
“And you,” he said to Timms, “get yourself something hot from the kitchens before you drown from the inside out.”
He offered the house no farewell. The house, he suspected, would hardly have missed it.
Fortune’s Fall had gone unattended by him for a good deal longer than three days and could bear a few hours more.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he thought of Josephine, likely asleep by now in the Duchess’s Wing, and then the door was behind him, and the mill ahead.
It was a brutal ride. The Fortune’s Fall road had turned itself into what could be called a riverbed, ruts filled deep with water, and he kept to the verge, where grass at least offered his horse’s hooves a place to grip.
The rain drove sideways into him, and the wind coming off the moors fought him at every mile.
Forty minutes it took him to reach the mill, ten longer than it should have, and he was wet through to the thigh before his boots had even touched the yard.
The mill-yard was organized chaos, which was to say, it bore the unmistakable stamp of Benedict’s management.
His brother stood sheltered at the entrance to the lower loom-house, a ledger under one arm and a lantern in the other, his silver-blond hair plastered flat by the rain and his expression carrying signs that he had been awake since midnight and found the whole business rather invigorating.
Three workers waited behind him for instruction. He addressed all three at once.
“… the second tier only, leave the bottom bales. Henderson, get the coal boards raised before that water moves another inch. Wilson, count the packed bolts in the upper warehouse, every bolt—” He paused. “Ah. Your Grace.”
“Lord Benedict,” Alistair returned, swinging down from his horse.
Benedict’s mouth curved, and he took his time about looking impressed. “You look considerably less ducal than usual.”
“You look considerably less dissolute.” Alistair took the ledger from beneath his brother’s arm and scanned it.
Stock tallies, worker assignments, a rough reckoning of the sluice capacity scrawled in the margin in Benedict’s loping hand, more thorough than Alistair had expected and exactly what the morning called for.
He had always known Benedict capable of a great deal more than he was generally asked to produce.
Perhaps his own absence was forcing his brother to discover as much for himself.
“I trust you have not ridden out here on account of pressing ducal obligations,” Benedict said, falling into step beside him as they crossed toward the loom-house.
“I am here because Franklin remains in London.”
“Ah.” He paused. “Unlike him.”
“Franklin is a great many things. Absent from a flooding mill is not generally among them.” He ducked through the low entrance to the loom-house and stopped.
Ankle-deep water stood at the far end, dark with silt, winding between the iron legs of the stilled looms. Mud and wet wool hung in the air, along with that metallic tang standing water always seemed to take on against iron.
Three men waded through it, trouser legs rolled, hauling the lighter machinery to higher ground with the careful urgency of people who knew exactly what was at stake for them.
“Hawkes has the steam valves isolated,” Benedict said at his shoulder. “Gregory says we lose the lower looms for the week regardless, but if we can shift the coal in the next two hours, the upper loom-house keeps running. That saves the Hollingford bolts.”
“Show me the coal stores.”
The whole morning was given over to the work.
Alistair had the coal boards raised and sandbags carried in from the outbuilding.
He went into the shed himself to move the last of what could be saved, boots cold in the water, sleeves shoved past his elbows, doing exactly the kind of labor polite society liked to imagine was beneath a man of his rank.
Benedict, meanwhile, ran the upper works with a competence Alistair noted but did not remark on.
Charm had always been the thing people saw first in his brother, obscuring the sturdier structure underneath.
That structure, it turned out, held up rather well under pressure.
Somewhere late into Saturday, the coal was finally secure and the upper looms had begun turning once more.
Gregory’s prediction held. The lower loom-house was lost for the week, two bales of finished worsted ruined past saving, but the Hollingford shipment survived intact.
Given what might have been lost, they had escaped remarkably well, and Alistair discovered a real pride in what his people, and his own brothers, had managed to pull off together.
In those soaked hours, he stood at the edge of the mill-yard with a mug of tea that Hawkes’s wife had produced from somewhere, rain still coming down in sheets, and allowed himself a single moment of satisfaction before his mind moved on to the next set of problems waiting behind it.
Benedict appeared at his elbow, similarly furnished with tea, his hair beginning to dry into its usual fashionably unruly state.
“Your Friday evening plans,” Alistair said. “My condolences.”
His brother waved this off, long past minding disruption of any kind. “Bannister took my place at the table. He shall lose badly and owe me a sizable favor for the trouble, which suits me a good deal better than winning the hand myself would have.”
It was a poorly kept secret that Benedict hosted high-stakes gambling most Friday nights. Not a habit Alistair found commendable. The sums some men wagered could have been put to far wiser use elsewhere. But it was not his place to dictate what a man did with his own coin.
“There is something almost respectable in that arithmetic.”
“Almost.” Benedict studied his tea. “The flood damage. The assessors will want a look before the insurers settle the claim, and that will take weeks. We shall need to cover repairs ourselves in the meantime.”
“I know.” He had been working the figures since the second hour.
Replacing the coal alone would not come cheap.
The loom repairs wanted a proper assessment before anyone could put a number to them.
Wages through the stoppage, though, admitted no debate.
His people would not go without pay simply because the river had chosen theatrics, and their goodwill mattered besides, once the mill needed rebuilding to full strength.
Every shilling of it had to be found before the Hollingford payment arrived, which left him no choice but to dip into reserves he had hoped to leave untouched.
London was what he needed. That contract, signed and dated, its first payment already in motion.
In short, he needed to trade a flooded Yorkshire mill-yard for a London desk and a quill in hand.
“I shall need you to hold the mill until Monday,” he told Benedict. “I must return to Fortunestone today.”