Margaret controlled the household. The servants answered to Margaret. The solicitors, for all Alistair knew, answered to Margaret. And if he left for London, as he must, as the Hollingford contract demanded, the old woman would haveweeks, perhaps months, to reassert her authority over every gain he had made in three days.
He needed a structure. A framework that would hold even in his absence. Beckwith could manage the estate, but Beckwith had no authority over Margaret’s personal household. The servants needed replacing, but replacing them took time, and in the interim, the old guard would report every movement, every conversation, every small rebellion to the woman with the walking stick and the milky eyes and the absolute conviction that control was her birthright.
There was a solution. It had the obvious, unwelcome clarity of a conclusion he had been avoiding because accepting it meant accepting everything it carried with it. The proximity, the complication, the devastating possibility that?—
“Your Grace?”
Genevieve stood before him, clutching a slim volume to her chest with both hands. Her eyes were enormous. “Might I have this one? It is only two shillings.”
He looked at the book.The Old English Baron.Clara Reeve, of course.
“You may havethree,” he said, and the smile she gave him was so bright and so unguarded that it cracked the armor he had spent the morning reinforcing.
He left the women at the modiste’s, where Seraphina and Arabella were being measured with an enthusiasm that suggested Mrs.Pruett, the proprietress, had not seen ducal custom in some years and intended to make the most of it. Josephine remained to supervise, and Alistair caught her eye as he moved toward the door.
“I have an errand,” he said. “I shall return within the hour.”
She did not ask where he was going. She simply nodded, and the trust in that gesture, the willingness to let him go withoutinterrogation, settled into him with a weight that was both gratifying and undeserved.
St.Elinor’s stood at the top of the high street, its square Norman tower dark against the pewter sky. Alistair climbed the steps and pushed open the heavy oak door, and the interior received him with the accustomed hush of a place that had been absorbing human trouble for eight hundred years without comment. The vicar was in the vestry, a mild, spectacled man whom Alistair had known these many years and was well-acquainted with his family.
Their conversation lasted twenty minutes. When Alistair emerged, the first drops of rain were falling on the cobblestones of Merchant Row, fat and deliberate, the advance guard of something heavier.
He collected the women from the modiste’s with the briskness born of a life spent managing matters and understanding that the difference between a damp ride home and a soaking one was measured in minutes. The parcels were loaded, the girls bundled into the carriage with their gingerbread crumbs and their new gloves and their books, and the coachman urged the horses forward just as the sky opened in earnest, rain hammering the carriage roof like applause.
Genevieve was already reading. Juliet leaned against her twin, watching the rain streak across the glass. Seraphina sat with her new gloves in her lap, smoothing the leather with her thumb in a gesture so tender that it might have been a caress. And Arabella held her card of embroidery silks on her knees, her thumb tracing the edge of the wrapping with a quiet contentment she likely thought no one noticed.
Josephine sat beside Alistair, her shoulder not quite touching his, her hands folded in her lap, her face turned toward the window. She had said very little since Merchant Row. He wondered if she was thinking about Hertfordshire, about thefather who was aging and the mother and sister who would one day have nowhere to go. He wondered if she was thinking about the library or the bakery.
He was thinking about all of it. And about the fact that the woman beside him deserved considerably more than she had. She had married a stranger to save her family, endured a year of cruelty to protect his cousins, and offered herself to a man she barely knew because it was all she had to barter.
The rain drummed on. The carriage climbed the hill toward Fortunestone Hall, and the towers emerged from the mist like sentinels who had been watching for their return. Alistair looked at the house he had inherited and did not want, thought about the conversation he had just had with the vicar, and knew, with the calm certainty from spending his life making decisions and living with their consequences, that the next one he made would change everything.
CHAPTER 8
Rain had been falling since the previous evening and showed no inclination toward mercy. It struck the library windows in relentless sheets, a dull roar that filled the silences between sentences and made the fire in the hearth seem a feeble protest against the encroaching damp. The west library smelled of old oak and wet stone, the scent creeping through the cracks in the casements despite the blaze that Alistair had ordered stoked before dawn. The shelves that lined three walls held volumes no one had opened in a generation, their spines cracked and faded, and above the mantel hung a portrait of some ancestral Oxley whose expression suggested he found the entire century distasteful.
Nathaniel Beckwith sat across the walnut desk, a map of the Fortunestone estates unrolled between them with its edges weighted by books. He traced a line along the western boundary with a blunt finger while Alistair listened closely, calculating costs in his head.
“The western pastures could hold two hundred head if we fence and drain them proper. But I’ll not lie. Your Grace would anger half the tenants and all of Irwyn’s opinionated gentry.They still think the only thing worse than a tradesman’s son is a tradesman’s sheep.”
Alistair leaned back in his chair, pressing two fingers against the bridge of his nose. The remark was delivered with the flat candor he had come to expect from Beckwith, a man who saw what needed doing and said so without embellishment. Since hiring him, Beckwith had proven himself worth every penny of his generous salary. The man had arrived with references from two northern estates and a reputation for bluntness that bordered on insolence. Alistair had hired him within ten minutes of their first conversation.
“And the drainage?” Alistair asked, lowering his hand to study the map. “What would it take to make the land suitable?”
Beckwith blew out a slow breath, the kind that preceded figures no one wished to hear. “Six months of labor, at minimum. Ditching, tile drainage, fencing. The current tenants will not volunteer their backs for a scheme they mistrust, so you would need to bring in outside men. And there is the matter of breeding stock. Decent ewes are not cheap, and most reputable breeders have their stock engaged by prior agreement, so you would be starting from nothing.” He tapped the map where the River Irwyn wound through the low meadows. “The flooding risk along here is real. Last night’s rain has already turned the lower fields to marsh. Without proper channels, you would lose lambs come spring.”
Alistair studied the blue-inked contour lines on the map, tracing the flood path with his eyes. The picture was bleak, but he had built up a mill on worse odds.
“Every estate in Yorkshire profits from wool,” Alistair muttered, more to himself than to Beckwith. “Every estate but these ones. The whole region thrives on the fleece trade, and yet the local gentry treat it as though raising beasts were an affront to their reputations. My grandfather thought sheep beneath hisdignity. My uncle was too occupied with his own vices to correct the error. Two generations of stubborn aristocratic pride, and the result is a duchy that cannot fund its own roof repairs.”
“Aye, this estate has clung to its crop rents for decades, convinced that anything resembling industry will lower the tone of the title. The fact that Irwyn’s prosperity flows directly from your family’s mill did not trouble their reasoning in the slightest.”
The rain intensified outside, hammering the glass with renewed vigor as if to underscore the futility of agricultural ambitions in such a season. Alistair watched the water stream down the diamond-paned windows, blurring the view of the gray gardens beyond. He thought of his mill, its great chimneys breathing steam into the Irwyn sky, where decisions yielded results within weeks. Here at Fortunestone Hall, every step forward invited resistance from ghosts and their living confederates. He had toured three tenant farms with Beckwith this morning and found roofs patched with rotting thatch, rainwater dripping on the furniture, drainage ditches clogged with a decade of neglect, and families stretching their winter stores to the breaking point. The previous steward had collected rents and done nothing with the proceeds but line the dowager’s household accounts. And his own pockets, likely.
Alistair sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “The sheep are not the priority. Not with everything else that requires attention. The roof, the tenants’ cottages, the roads. We shall revisit the question once we have stabilized what already exists.”
Beckwith inclined his head. “A sound approach. Better to win the tenants’ confidence before imposing new schemes.”
