Chapter 14
Shortly after seven on Sunday morning, a knock sounded at the door.
Alistair sat at the library desk, working through his preliminary notes on the flood damage by the light of two candles.
He had been at it since six. The mill’s revised production schedule.
A letter to Beckwith about drainage work that could no longer wait.
The details of the Hollingford order, which needed to leave before the week was out.
The list had run longer than he liked and shorter than he feared, and he had been making reasonable headway until the knock broke his concentration.
The footman who entered was one of the senior men, his tenure having survived two changes of duke without visible strain. He halted at a formal distance from the desk. “A Lord Franklin has arrived, Your Grace. He is asking for you.”
Alistair set down his quill. He glanced at the clock on the mantel, noted the hour, and looked back at the footman.
“At this hour?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
Franklin did not ride through the night for the pleasure of it.
“Bring him here,” Alistair said. “And have someone see to his horse.”
The footman took his leave. Alistair pushed his papers aside and waited.
Franklin came through the door two minutes later, coat still on, hat in hand, wearing an expression Alistair had last seen six years past, when a supplier’s warehouse burned to the ground three weeks ahead of a major shipment.
Not panic. Franklin did not panic. His tension was subdued and therefore far more alarming.
“Brother.” Alistair read the whole of it in one practiced glance. “How bad?”
“Bad enough that I rode straight from London to tell you myself rather than trust it to a letter.” Franklin turned his hat by the brim, a nervous habit carried since childhood and never quite outgrown.
“I had word yesterday evening from Hollingford’s man in London.
Mr. Goss himself has taken to asking questions.
Specifically, why, in all the months since the preliminary agreement was drawn up, he has not once sat across a table from the actual owner of Fraser & Oxley Textile Mill. ”
A frown crossed Alistair’s face. “He has sat across a table from you.”
“He has. Three times now. And each time I have told him you are occupied managing the estate and will come to London once matters here allow it, and each time he has nodded and smiled and claimed to understand perfectly.” Franklin stopped turning the hat.
“He does not understand at all. What he understands is that a man newly come into a dukedom might be too distracted, or perhaps too proud, to sit at his own negotiating table. He suspects either that the new duke does not need this contract badly enough, or that he does not think Hollingford & Goss worth his personal notice. He is inclined to believe both.”
Alistair raked a hand through his hair, already turning the problem over. “That is absurd.”
“It is. It is also the view of a man whose firm has supplied military textiles to the Crown for thirty years and has never once, in all that time, done business with a tradesman turned titled gentleman.” Franklin held his gaze.
“He has set a deadline. He will meet with you in London inside the week, or the contract goes to Whitmore & Sons.”
The name landed in the room with exactly the weight Goss had intended.
Whitmore & Sons. A Manchester operation running at half the capacity of Fraser & Oxley, with inferior worsted and a history of late deliveries that had cost them two contracts in the last decade alone.
That Goss stood ready to fall back on Whitmore told Alistair, more plainly than any words could, exactly how serious the matter had become.
The man was not posturing. He meant to walk away.
Alistair pushed back from the desk and crossed to the window.
The grounds of Fortunestone Hall lay before him under morning light, the lawns still waterlogged from a week of rain, the avenue of elms dark and bare against a sky still undecided what sort of day it meant to become.
Three hundred workers in Irwyn. Weeks of repair still ahead of them.
A mill running at reduced capacity. And now the single largest opportunity in the history of Fraser & Oxley hanging on the temper of a London merchant who felt he had not been given his proper due.
He forced himself to consider the contract methodically, despite the pressure building behind every calculation.
Five years of exclusive supply for military uniforms, distributed across a Hollingford & Goss network reaching from London to Lisbon.
The canal investment that would cut transit time between Irwyn and Liverpool by half.
The mill expansion that revenue would fund.
Two more weaving halls. A second engine house.
Another hundred positions for workers in a town where reliable work was never guaranteed.
It was not merely profit at stake. It was the sort of contract that could remake a whole town for a generation to come.
Months he had spent building toward this, with all the patience and planning he brought to anything worth the having. And now, simply because his time had gone to a collapsing Yorkshire estate instead, the whole structure stood ready to come apart in his hands.
For once, patience and careful planning offered him no clear path forward. He felt like a man caught square between two colliding forces, ground down in the space between them, the very earth shifting beneath his boots as he cast about for a way through.
“He believes the title has made me unreliable,” Alistair said.
“He believes the title has made you unavailable,” Franklin said carefully, “which in his experience amounts to much the same thing.”
A fair distinction, and one Alistair had seen play out before.
Men who spent their lives in trade, who built something real with their own hands and nerve and sustained effort, once they had grown wealthy, loosened their grip on the very thing that had made them.
Who let themselves become figureheads instead of practitioners, comfortable in rooms their exertion had built while absent from the floor where that exertion still had to continue.
He had sworn, the day his father died and left him the mill, that he would never become such a man.
He had kept that vow until Fortunestone pulled him in two, and he was only beginning to understand what the strain might cost him.
The irony was not lost on him. He had resisted the dukedom exactly because he understood what it would cost. The gravitational pull of a title that size, the way it reorganized a man’s obligations whether or not he consented to the reorganizing.
He had been right about all of it, and being right had made no difference whatsoever.
“I will go to London,” he said. Not so much a decision as the recognition of a fact that had been true since Franklin walked through the door.
Whatever he felt about the matter, this took priority.
With the contract secured, every other obligation could be managed.
Without it, there was no managing anything at all. “Today.”
Franklin exhaled, a breath he had been holding since he walked in. “Tuesday, we could reach London, if the roads hold firm. I have brought the horses along.”
“The roads from here to York are still heavy with the flood.” Alistair turned from the window. “We take my carriage to the Great North Road and make better time from there. The valley tracks would cost two days neither of us can spare.”
Franklin nodded. “I thought as much myself.” A brief hesitation Alistair recognized at once. “He wants assurance about the coming delivery.”
“Then he shall have it. His order is safe and on schedule.” Alistair set down the letter in his hand and reached for his coat. “Eat something and warm yourself. I must send for the duchess.”
He said it in the same even tone he reserved for logistical matters, and felt, as the words left him, the full weight of what they meant.
The wedding was today. The vicar expected them at the town church before noon.
He had arranged the whole of it himself, with the same care he brought to every commitment he meant to honor, and he was now obliged to tell the woman who had agreed to marry him that the arrangement was being set aside, by his own hand, on the very morning it was meant to take place.
His word had been given. He still meant to honor it, but not when he had promised. There was no remedy for that beyond saying it as it was and enduring whatever followed.
The footman went to the Duchess’s Wing, and Alistair stood at the desk and dashed off the letters that could not wait for his return.
Revised instructions for Beckwith. A note to the assessors in Leeds.
Familiar work, all of it, moving through his hands without effort, which was the one dependable thing about the whole business.
It asked nothing of his feelings while he did it.
Only in the gaps between one letter and the next did the morning press back in.
The vicar, waiting before noon. The girls, who knew what today was meant to be and would be waiting with real anticipation.
And Josephine, who had already survived one marriage conducted entirely on terms not her own, and who had asked so little of him beyond the one thing he was about to fail to provide.
He sighed, set down his quill, and waited.
When she came through the door, she was dressed and gracefully collected, which did not surprise him.
She was, as ever, the very picture of grace.
Her hair was pinned up, her gown correct for the hour and the season, and only in the set of her hands at her sides, held carefully still, did he catch any sign of the effort behind a face that otherwise gave away nothing at all.