He needed to conclude this business quickly. Not because the contract could not wait, it could not, but because every day he was in London was a day he was not in Yorkshire, and there was someone in Yorkshire he was finding he did not wish to be without.
He turned from the window, pulled the leather satchel onto his knee, and opened it. The preliminary figures for Hollingford were on top. He found his graphite pencil, and got to work.
Franklin slept on. The road unrolled ahead of them, pale and straight and leading south. Outside, England conducted its ordinary Sunday business in the rain.
Alistair wrote and thought and calculated and felt beneath all of it the persistent and inconvenient certainty that the most important thing he had to return to was not in any of the figures before him.
CHAPTER 16
The inn was called the White Hare and had been serving travelers for longer than anyone currently associated with it could reliably verify. Its yard was competently run, its ostlers moved with the briskness of men who understood that a carriage stopped was a carriage losing time, and the horses brought out for the exchange were sound animals, well rested and evenly matched. Alistair noted all of this with the automatic appraisal honed from fifteen years spent moving goods and people across the north of England, and felt the faint satisfaction of things being done correctly, and then felt almost nothing else because his mind was somewhere entirely other than the inn.
Franklin had acquired coffee from inside and was standing in the yard with his collar up against the March wind, both hands wrapped around the cup, watching the ostlers work with the alert, assessing expression he wore whenever he was about to say something he had been thinking for longer than the conversation warranted.
“You have been quiet since Fortunestone,” Franklin said.
“I am often quiet.”
“You are often thinking loudly while remaining quiet. It is a different thing and you know it.” He took a careful sip of the coffee. “You are thinking about the duchess.”
Alistair did not dignify this with a response, which was itself a response, and they both knew it.
“It was to have been your wedding day,” Franklin said, without any inflection. He was not the kind of man who pursued an advantage in conversation once he had established it. He simply established it and waited. Alistair did not know how his brother knew this, but perhaps Franklin had done his reconnaissance with their coachman.
“I am aware of what day it is.”
“And yet here we are, miles away.”
“And yet here we are,” Alistair agreed, accepting a fact he found entirely unsatisfying.
The ostlers finished the exchange. One of them spoke briefly to the coachman, who nodded and climbed back to his box. The yard settled into the interim quiet of a place between arrivals. Somewhere inside the inn, a dog was barking with the monotonous persistence of an animal that had forgotten why it had started.
Franklin set down his cup on the mounting block and assessed his brother with the expression Alistair recognized from many years of being assessed by Franklin, the one that meant he had arrived at a conclusion and was deciding whether his brother was ready to hear it.
“Tell me about Goss,” Alistair said, because the conversation needed to be steered toward something actionable and because he was not prepared to discuss Josephine on a yard with an ostler within earshot. “Not the message. What is actually driving this?”
Franklin accepted the redirection without comment. “Goss is sixty-three years old and has been the senior partnerat Hollingford & Goss for twenty-two of them. He has spent his entire professional life building relationships with manufacturers on the basis of personal acquaintance and mutual accountability. He does not do business with institutions. He does business with men.” He paused. “What he has received, for the past six weeks, is letters. Very good letters, carefully argued, accurately figured, representing his interests with complete competence. But letters. No introduction to the man who runs the mill.”
“You are telling me this is entirely about confidence.”
“I am telling you this is entirely about confidence. He is not concerned about the mill’s capacity. He is not concerned about the worsted quality. He has seen the samples and they are, in his own word, exceptional. He is concerned that the man he understood himself to be entering into a five-year partnership with has not seen fit to meet him.” Franklin looked at him levelly. “In his experience, that means one of two things. Either the man does not regard the contract as sufficiently important to warrant his personal attention, or the man is no longer in a position to give it.”
“Because of the title.”
“Yes. He has been making inquiries, Alistair. He knows about the dukedom. He knows about Fortunestone Hall. I do not know from whom, but he has heard that the estate is in considerable disrepair and that the new duke will be occupied with its management. He is drawing the conclusion that Fraser & Oxley is about to become someone else’s concern.” Franklin’s voice was measured, but his eyes were direct. “He wants to know whom he is actually dealing with. And he wants to hear it from you.”
The carriage was ready. The coachman was waiting. Alistair stood in the yard and looked at the road running south, pale and straight in the thin morning light, and thought about Goss andthe contract and the three hundred people in Irwyn and the mill his maternal grandfather and his father had built and he had expanded and his brothers managed with a competence that had never quite received its proper accounting because Alistair had always been the name at the top.
“If I were not going to London,” he said slowly, “what would you do?”
Franklin blinked. It was the closest he came to visible surprise. “I would go to London in your place, as I have been doing, and attempt to 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 the head of Fraser & Oxley?”
A silence. The dog inside the inn had stopped barking. The wind moved through the yard and lifted a handful of loose straw from the cobblestones and distributed it along the wall.
“That is not the current arrangement,” Franklin said carefully.
“I am asking whether you would want it to be.”
