They worked through the morning. Alistair directed the coal boards raised and sandbags brought from the outbuilding. He climbed into the shed himself to shift the last salvageable bales, water cold around his boots, sleeves rolled past his elbows, a sight the nobility crowd would have found deplorable. Benedict managed the upper works with a smooth competence that Alistair watched with sideways attention and said nothing about. His brother’s charm had always obscured the architecture beneath it. It was genuinely good architecture.
By the early hours of Saturday morning, the coal was secured and the upper looms were running. As Gregory had predicted, the lower loom-house was a loss for the week, and two bales of finished worsted were beyond salvaging, but the Hollingford shipment was intact. It was an excellent outcome given the circumstances, and Alistair found he was rather proud of what his people, and his brothers, had accomplished.
In the wee hours of Saturday morning, he stood at the edge of the mill-yard with a mug of tea that Hawkes’s wife had appeared with from somewhere, rain still coming down in sheets, and permitted himself a single moment of satisfaction before his mind moved on to the next set of problems.
Benedict materialized at his elbow, similarly equipped with tea, his hair beginning to dry into its usual carefully unruly state.
“Your Friday evening plans,” Alistair said. “My condolences.”
His brother waved this off with the ease of a man who has long since made peace with disruption. “Bannister was standing in for me. He will lose badly and owe me a considerable favor, which serves my purposes rather better than winning it myself would have done.”
It was a well-known secret that Benedict hosted high-stakes gambling on Friday nights. Not something that Alistair found commendable, appalled at the wagers of men when that money could be invested far more wisely. But it was not his place to judge what men chose to do with their own coin.
“There is something almost respectable about that calculation.”
“Almost.” Benedict examined his tea. “The flood damage … the assessors will want to come out before the insurance pays, and that will take weeks. We’ll need to cover the repair costs ourselves in the short term.”
“I know.” Alistair had been running the figures since the second hour. The coal replenishment alone would be significant. The loom repairs would take longer to assess. Wages through the stoppage were not a point of concession. He would not have his people going without pay because the Irwyn had decided to be dramatic, and besides, he would need their help restoring the mill to full production. And all of those expenses would need to be covered before the Hollingford contract money arrived, which meant drawing on reserves he had intended to leave untouched.
He needed London. He needed that contract signed and dated and the first payment moving.
He needed, in short, not to be standing in a flooded mill-yard in Yorkshire when he could be sitting in a London office with a quill in his hand.
“I will need you to hold the mill through the weekend,” he said to Benedict. “I must return to Fortunestone today.”
Benedict turned to look at him with the expression of a younger brother who has just been handed both responsibility and a piece of information. “‘Return to Fortunestone,’” he repeated. “How very domesticated of you.”
“I am getting married on Sunday.”
Benedict’s mug stopped halfway to his mouth. Then it continued. “Are you?” he asked in an incredulous tone.
“I am.” Alistair handed back the empty mug. “Do try to keep the mill upright while I am away.”
“Always do,” Benedict said. “Give my regards to your … bride. Whomever she may be.”
“You will meet her in due course.” Despite himself, a smile played on his lips at the thought of Josephine, and their night together. It had been a long time for him, but bedding someone as exceptional as her had been an enjoyment he had not previously experienced.
One of the boys brought out his horse, and he swung back up and turned it toward the unlit road. Behind him, Benedict was almost certainly wearing an expression of undisguised curiosity, because subtlety was not among his brother’s more developed qualities. The rain, which had not received notice of any schedule, continued as though it had nowhere else to be.
* * *
He was not at breakfast.
This was not, in itself, remarkable. Alistair kept early hours and had every morning already been buried deep in the library with Beckwith before the household had finished its toast. But there was a shape to his absence this morning that was different, some atmospheric change that Josephine’s nerves registered before her reason had the information to account for it. She found Mr. Beckwith in the passage outside the dining room, carrying a rolled survey map and the expression of a man with a great deal to do.
“Mr. Beckwith. The duke … has he breakfasted already?”
Beckwith stopped and turned, and the slight hesitation before he spoke was enough. “His Grace rode out before fivethis morning, Your Grace. A clerk came from the mill. There is flooding. The River Irwyn has breached, and the lower sheds are taking water.”
Josephine absorbed this. “Before five,” she said.
“I am told he did not wait for the carriage. The roads, in this rain …” Beckwith glanced toward the window, where March was making its position on the matter quite clear. “He went on horseback.”
She thanked him and let him go, and stood for a moment in the empty passage while the news completed its arrangements inside her head.
Of course, the mill. She was not surprised, not entirely. He had warned her often enough in the various forms of a sensible man offering his warnings … the ledgers on the worktable, the letters to Franklin, the way his attention sharpened whenever the mill arose, as though Fortune’s Fall were an obligation he was managing with good grace until the real work resumed. The mill was the real work. She had understood that from the first, and she did not begrudge him the understanding.
She only wished the Irwyn had chosen a different week to lose its temper. She reminded herself of the hundreds of people whose livelihoods depended on that mill, against which her own concerns were, in strict arithmetic, very small, and went to find Seraphina.
