Farnsworth was trying to buy a shipyard? Yuri rubbed the back of his neck. Why? He already had a beautiful one.
“They should sell it for a pittance. With Dwayne Hollister dead, they’ll lose the business.” Farnsworth dragged a hand over his mustache, then nodded at Yuri. “Sorry to bore you with this,Amos. We’ve been trying to acquire a small shipyard now that the owner is dead. He had four daughters and no sons. No one there knows how to build ships.”
“The foreman knows a great deal.” Farnsworth’s clerk pressed his spectacles higher onto his nose. “He did that repair work on theHouston, remember?”
“That’s not the same as having an owner who understands shipbuilding.”
“Perhaps, but they’d be foolish to sell so soon for the price you offered.”
Farnsworth scowled, then shoved the crumpled letter back at his clerk. “Raise my next offer by three hundred dollars.”
The clerk shook his head. “That will still be less than half of what the shipyard’s worth.”
“Yes, but it will be three hundred dollars more than I offered them last time.”
“You should offer more. If they put the shipyard up for sale on the open market, they’ll be able to get a much better price, and then you’d be competing against other offers.”
“Hollister has been dead for five months, and they’ve yet to try to sell it. That leads me to believe there’s a good chance they’ll take one of my offers without looking at other options.”
“Yes, sir.” The clerk left, and Farnsworth turned back to Yuri.
“Sorry about that interruption, Amos. So where were we?”
Nowhere. They were absolutely nowhere. The last thing he was going to do was buy theEmberfall, but he had a rather sudden interest in finding this Hollister family and touring their shipyard.
8
Sitka; Two Days Later
Her father hadn’t found out. Rosalind’s heart had pounded when she returned home with the letters from Bryony burning in her pocket, but her father hadn’t suspected a thing.
Rosalind knelt beside the small hearth in her room where the rug met the corner floorboard. She pried the floorboard up carefully, then slid her newest stack of four letters into the narrow cavity beneath. It wasn’t much space, but she liked to keep her letters for at least a couple months before burning them in the fire, just in case she needed to reference one later.
She pressed the board back down and smoothed the rug over it, then rose to her feet and glanced around. The room was quiet, her writing desk was in order, and her bed was neatly made.
But she listened for a moment, just to make sure no one was lurking outside her door, then moved to the window seat that overlooked the small garden behind the house and picked up her copy ofPride and Prejudice.
Everything about the letters made her unbearably nervous. It was so very impossible to do anything without her fatherlearning of it, and part of her was amazed she’d secretly managed to donate money beneath his nose for three years. Now that the Amos family knew what Yuri was doing for her, would her father find out?
She knew what would happen if he did. He’d find a way to strip from her the trust account her mother had left her, never mind that it was in her name. Her father was very good at getting what he wanted, and she had no doubt he was powerful enough to bribe the owner of the bank in Washington, DC, into putting his name on her account.
Then he’d transfer the money out.
And if he didn’t do that exact thing, he’d think of something else.
If Yuri were here, he would probably tell her not to fear because God was with her and could make her strong, like that verse in Isaiah talked about. But she wasn’t sure how to be strong when it came to her father, wasn’t sure how to be anything other than fearful.
Sometimes she felt like Joseph from the Bible, cast into a pit and then sold into slavery for years and years. God eventually brought Joseph out of slavery and made him a powerful man. Was that what the verse in Isaiah meant? Would God one day deliver her from everything if she trusted him instead of being so afraid of her father?
A knock sounded at her bedroom door. She recognized it as Foster’s, but she found her body tensing anyway, her fingers tightening around the novel she’d opened but hadn’t yet started to read.
“Come in.” She tried to appear calm as she turned to face the door.
The long-time servant poked his head inside the doorway. “Miss Rosalind, your father would like to see you in his study.”
Sweat slickened her hands. “He would?”
“Yes, miss.” Though the words were simple, there was something soft about how he said them.
