Josephine had left the ducal bedchamber an hour earlier, and Alistair was already dressed. Had been for twenty minutes, the habit of early rising too deeply ingrained to surrender to a sleepless night, and he heard the commotion in the entrance hall before any servant thought to bring word of it. He descended the main stair to find a clerk from the mill, no older than seventeen, standing in a spreading puddle of his own making, his coat soaked through to the skin, his breath coming in ragged gulps as though he had run the better part of the road from Irwyn rather than waiting for a horse to be made ready.
The boy’s name was Timms. Alistair knew him because he knew all of them, every clerk and carder and loom-hand who drew wages from Fraser & Oxley, and the white-faced variety of Timms’s distress told him the news was serious before a single word was spoken.
“The Irwyn’s over her banks, sir,” Timms said, and then appeared 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 breathe. “The coalstores are on the low ground, sir. If they flood, we lose the steam.”
Alistair absorbed this without visible reaction, which was itself a kind of discipline. “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 was continuing to make 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 completed the calculation. He turned toward the footman hovering at the edge of the hall. “Have my horse saddled. Now, not when it suits you … 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 the words did. “Mr. Franklin hasn’t returned from London yet, Your Grace.”
Alistair paused, one arm in his coat. “He was due back Monday.”
“Yes, sir.”
Today was Friday.
He finished putting on his coat in silence. Franklin had business in London, the Hollingford correspondence, the preliminary contract review, and Alistair had extracted a specific promise from him before departing 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 complex instruction. Franklin was not a child, and the mill was as much his life’s work as Alistair’s. That he had chosen thisspecific week, of all weeks, to extend his stay in London was … aggravating.
He would have thoughts about that later. At present, he had a flood.
“And you,” he said to Timms, “get yourself something hot from the kitchens before you drown from the inside out.”
He did not say goodbye to the house. The house, on reflection, did not appear to require it. Fortune’s Fall had been standing without his attention for considerably longer than three days and would manage a few more hours. He thought, briefly, of Josephine, asleep in the Duchess’s Wing, or perhaps still awake, and then he was through the door and into the rain, and the mill pulled him forward as it always had.
The ride was brutal. The road from Fortune’s Fall to Irwyn had taken on the character of a riverbed, the ruts deep with standing water, and he kept to the verge where the grass gave his horse’s hooves something to grip. The rain came sideways, and the wind off the moors made strenuous objections to his journey onward. He arrived at the mill in forty minutes, which was ten more than it ought to have taken, and he was soaked to the thigh before he had dismounted.
The mill-yard was organized chaos, which was to say, it was Benedict’s characteristic form of management.
His brother stood sheltered at the entrance to the lower loom-house with a ledger under one arm and a lantern in the other, his silver-blond hair plastered flat against his head by the rain and his expression carrying the alertness of a man who has been awake since midnight and found it, against all expectation, rather stimulating. Three workers were behind him, awaiting instructions. He was speaking to all of them simultaneously.
“… 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 retorted, swinging down from his horse.
Benedict’s mouth curved. He made a point of not hurrying to look impressed. “You look considerably less ducal than usual.”
“You look considerably less dissolute.” Alistair took the ledger from under his brother’s arm and scanned it. Stock tallies, worker assignments, a rough assessment of the sluice capacity scrawled in the margin in Benedict’s loping hand, more thorough than Alistair had expected and exactly what was needed. He had always known that Benedict was capable of a great deal more than he was generally asked to produce. Perhaps Alistair’s absence was forcing him to realize his potential.
“I trust you are not here because of pressing ducal obligations,” Benedict said, falling into step beside him as they moved toward the loom-house.
“I am here because Franklin is still in London.”
“Ah.” A pause. “It is unlike him.”
“Franklin is a great many things. Missing in London while the mill floods is not generally among them.” He stepped through the low entrance to the loom-house and stopped.
The water was ankle-deep at the far end, dark and silted, threading between the iron legs of the stilled looms with the patient industry of a thing that has been told it cannot come in and has come in regardless. The smell was mud and wet wool and the metallic edge of standing water against iron. Three men were wading through it with their trousers rolled, shifting the lighter machinery to higher ground with the careful haste of people who understood this was their livelihood.
“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 get the coal moved in the next twohours, we keep the upper loom-house running. That preserves the Hollingford bolts.”
“Show me the coal stores.”
