Chapter 16
The inn was called the White Hare and had served travelers for longer than anyone currently attached to it could reliably confirm.
Its yard ran competently, its ostlers moving with the briskness of men who understood that a stopped carriage was a carriage losing time, and the horses brought out for the exchange were sound animals, well rested and evenly matched.
Alistair took all of this in with the automatic appraisal fifteen years of moving goods and people across the north of England had honed in him, felt the faint satisfaction of a thing done correctly, and then felt almost nothing else at all, because his mind had settled somewhere entirely apart from the inn.
Franklin had fetched coffee from inside and stood in the yard with his collar turned up against the March wind, both hands wrapped around the cup, watching the ostlers work with the alert, assessing look he wore whenever he meant to say something he had been thinking a good deal longer than the conversation itself had run.
“You have been quiet since Fortunestone,” Franklin said.
“I am often quiet.”
“You are often thinking loudly while remaining quiet. That is a different matter, and you know it.” He took a careful sip of the coffee. “You are thinking about the duchess.”
Alistair did not dignify this with an answer, which was itself an answer, and both of them knew it.
“It was to have been your wedding day,” Franklin said, without any inflection at all.
He was not a man who pressed an advantage once he had secured one in conversation.
He simply secured it and waited. Alistair could not say how his brother knew, though he suspected Franklin had done his reconnaissance with the coachman.
“I am aware of what day it is.”
“And yet here we are, miles distant.”
“And yet here we are,” Alistair agreed, accepting a fact he found thoroughly unsatisfying.
The ostlers finished the exchange. One spoke briefly to the coachman, who nodded and climbed back to his box.
The yard settled into that interim quiet belonging to any place caught between arrivals.
Somewhere inside the inn a dog barked on with the monotonous persistence of an animal that had long since forgotten why it started.
Franklin set his cup down on the mounting block and studied his older brother.
“Tell me about Goss,” Alistair said, because the conversation wanted steering toward the matter they could actually resolve, and because he had no wish to discuss Josephine in a yard with an ostler in earshot. “Not the message itself but what is truly driving this.”
Franklin accepted the redirection without comment.
“Goss has seen sixty-three years and stood senior partner at Hollingford & Goss for twenty-two of those. His whole professional life has gone into building relationships with manufacturers through personal acquaintance and a man’s willingness to answer for his own promises.
Institutions hold no interest for him. Men do.
” He paused. “What he has received these past six weeks is letters. Very good letters, carefully argued, accurately figured, representing his interests with complete competence. But letters, all the same. No introduction to the man who actually runs the mill.”
“You are telling me this comes down entirely to confidence.”
“Precisely. The mill’s capacity troubles him not at all.
Nor does the worsted’s quality. He has seen the samples himself, and calls them, in his own word, exceptional.
What troubles him is that the man he understood himself to be entering a five-year partnership with has not seen fit to meet him face to face.
” Franklin held his gaze evenly. “In his experience, that suggests one of two things. Either the man does not consider the contract important enough to merit his personal attention, or the man is no longer in any position to give it.”
“Because of the title.”
“Yes. He has made inquiries, Alistair. The dukedom is known to him. Fortunestone Hall likewise. I could not tell you from whom, but word has reached him that the estate stands in considerable disrepair, and that the new duke’s time will go to managing it.
He is drawing the conclusion that Fraser & Oxley is about to become someone else’s concern entirely.
” Franklin’s voice stayed level, though his eyes were direct.
“He wants to know whom he is actually dealing with. And he wants to hear it from you.”
The carriage waited, ready, the coachman already in his seat.
Alistair remained in the yard, studying the road running south, pale and straight under the thin morning light, thinking of Goss, of the contract, of the three hundred souls in Irwyn, of the mill his maternal grandfather and his own father had raised up and he had since expanded and his brothers now ran with a competence that had never once received its proper due, simply because Alistair’s name had always occupied the top of the letterhead.
“If I were not going to London,” he said slowly, “what would you do?”
Franklin blinked. It was as close as he came to visible surprise. “I would go to London in your place, as I have been doing, and manage the situation as best I could without the one thing that would actually resolve it.”
“And if you went to London in my place, not as my representative, but as head of Fraser & Oxley in your own right?”
Silence fell between them. The dog inside had finally quieted down. Wind stirred through the yard, lifting a handful of loose straw from the cobblestones and scattering it against the wall.
“That is not the current arrangement,” Franklin said carefully.
“I am asking whether you would want it to become one.”
For a long moment Franklin only looked at him.
Then his gaze traveled to the road, to the carriage, and back again to his brother.
“Benedict could manage the floor,” he said slowly, working the thought out as he spoke it aloud.
“He has done it well enough this past year, given proper oversight. Were I to take the senior position formally, he would want a title to match the responsibility … You are in earnest?”
“I am in earnest.”
“You would hand me the mill?”
“I would. You would run it with full authority, your name on the correspondence, and Goss would find himself dealing with the man actually in charge.” Alistair looked at his brother directly.
“You have built as much of that business as I have. You negotiated every major contract these last three years. You put the Hollingford deal together from nothing at all. The only real reason your name is not already at the top is that I arrived there first, and neither of us thought to question it since.”
Franklin said nothing for what felt a long while.
When he finally spoke, the careful, controlled quality had gone out of his voice, and what remained was simpler, and, Alistair thought, considerably more honest for it.
“I would love it,” he said. “I never once considered it, because you never gave the smallest sign of being willing to step back.”
“I am not stepping back. I am stepping sideways.” Alistair looked out at the road.
“There is an estate in Yorkshire gone unmanaged for the better part of a century, with a great deal of work still wanting there, and I find myself considerably less reluctant to do it than I expected to be.” He paused.
“The dukedom carries land with it, Franklin. A great deal of it. Pasture, most of it ungrazed or poorly kept. Were we to increase the flocks at Fortunestone Hall in earnest and supply the mill directly, the way you once proposed, we would control every stage, from flock to finished cloth. No outside suppliers. No erratic price swings. No delays out of the Dales in a hard winter.”
Franklin stared at him. “A partnership,” he said. “The estate supplying the mill.”
“At favorable rates, under formal agreement. Your name at the head of Fraser & Oxley. My name on the wool supply. Goss gains the brother of a duke and a guaranteed source of Yorkshire wool, which, when you consider it, amounts to considerably more than what he was originally offered.”
A moment passed in silence. Then a slow smile spread across Franklin’s face, the same one he saved for ideas that were both genuinely sound and just faintly audacious, and he reached for his cup off the mounting block, discovered it empty, and set it back down. “He will want it in writing.”
“Then put it in writing.” Alistair reached for the carriage door and held it open.
“Go to London. Tell Goss you are the new head of Fraser & Oxley, and that the Duke of Oxley will be supplying the mill with first-quality Yorkshire wool, reflected in the revised contract terms. Treat Benedict’s promotion as settled and draw up the papers accordingly.
I shall sign whatever wants signing once you are back from London.
I trust you to secure the best terms for us both. ”
Franklin climbed into the carriage, then turned in the doorway, his expression recalculating everything. “You said once I return from London.”
“I am going back to Fortunestone Hall.”
“How?”
“There will be a horse or conveyance available at the inn.” Alistair stepped back from the carriage. “If not, I shall walk until I find one.”
Franklin regarded him with startled amusement, softened by an affection he made no attempt to conceal. “You are going back for her,” he said.
“I am going back for all of them. And for her.”
Franklin’s head tilted, his expression frankly astonished now.
“Go,” Alistair said. “Every hour before London is an hour Goss spends weighing his alternatives.”
Franklin laughed, recognizing his own logic turned back against him, and pulled the carriage door shut.
The coachman lifted the reins. The horses moved off, and the carriage rolled out of the yard onto the south road, and Alistair stood watching it go until it rounded the bend and vanished from sight.