Franklin looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at the road and at the carriage and back at Alistair. “Benedict can manage the floor,” he said slowly, as though working through the thought as he spoke it. “He has been doing it effectively for the past year, with proper oversight. If I were to take the senior position formally, he would need the title to match the responsibility.” He paused. “You are serious?”
“I am serious.”
“You would hand me the mill.”
“I would. You would run it with full authority and your name on the correspondence, and Goss would be dealing with the man who is actually in charge.” Alistair looked at his brother. “You have built as much of that business as I have. You have negotiated every major contract in the last three years. You puttogether the Hollingford deal from nothing. The primary reason your name is not already at the top is that I was there first and neither of us thought to question it.”
Franklin was quiet for what felt like a long time. When he spoke, his voice had lost its careful, calibrated quality, and what came through instead was plainer and, Alistair thought, considerably more honest. “I would love it,” he said. “I have never considered it because you never gave any indication of being willing to step back.”
“I am not stepping back. I am stepping sideways.” Alistair looked at the road. “There is an estate in Yorkshire that has not been properly managed in a century and a great deal of work to be done there, and I find I am not as reluctant to do it as I expected.” He paused. “The dukedom comes with land, Franklin. A great deal of it. Pasture land, most of it ungrazed or badly managed. If we were to increase the sheep count at Fortunestone Hall significantly and supply the mill directly, as you once suggested, we would control the wool chain from flock to fabric. No suppliers, no price fluctuations, no delays from the Dales in a bad winter.”
Franklin stared at him. “A partnership,” he said. “The estate supplying the mill.”
“At favorable rates, with a formal agreement. Your name at the head of Fraser & Oxley. My name on the wool supply. Goss gets the brother of a duke and a guaranteed supply chain, which is, if you think about it, considerably more than he was originally offered.”
Franklin was silent for a moment. Then a slow smile moved across his face, the one he reserved for ideas that were both very good and slightly audacious, and he picked up his cup from the mounting block, found it empty, and set it down again. “He will want it in writing.”
“Then put it in writing.” Alistair reached for the carriage door and held it open. “Go to London. Tell Goss you are the new head of Fraser & Oxley and that the Duke of Oxley will be supplying the mill with first-quality Yorkshire wool, which will be reflected in the revised contract terms. Take Benedict’s promotion as already decided and draw up the papers accordingly. I will sign whatever needs signing when you return from London. I trust you to arrange the best terms for us.”
Franklin climbed into the carriage and then turned in the doorway with a recalculating expression. “You said whenIreturn from London.”
“I am going back to Fortunestone Hall.”
“How?”
“There will be something at the inn.” Alistair stepped back from the carriage. “If not, I will walk until there is.”
Franklin gazed at him for a moment with not quite amusement and not quite sentiment. “You are going back for her,” he said.
“I am going back for all of them … and for her.”
Franklin cocked his head, his expression rather astonished.
“Go,” Alistair said. “Every hour before London is an hour Goss entertains alternatives.”
Franklin laughed, recognizing his own logic turned back on him, and pulled the carriage door shut. The coachman lifted the reins. The horses moved, and the carriage rolled out of the yard and onto the south road, and Alistair stood and watched it go until it rounded the bend in the road and was gone.
There had been something missing from his life all these years. The mill had been a source of great challenges, and it had made him a better man to climb that mountain, but as each year brought greater and greater success, he had lost himself in the work. He no longer knew who he was outside of the mill. Josephine had made him want things outside of work.Had made him yearn for peace and perhaps a new challenge of making the estate reach its full potential, something no Duke of Oxley had achieved in more than a century. She had cooled the fires that drove him, and he wanted to be at her side. To share the joy of bringing a baby into the world.
He stood in the inn yard for a moment longer, the March wind finding the gap between his collar and his hat, and let the thought settle into the shape it had been trying to take all morning.
Then he went inside to see about a horse.
* * *
Seraphina did not weep.She stood on the steps of Fortunestone Hall in the cold morning air with her spine straight and her chin level and her eyes very bright, and she took Josephine’s hands in both of hers and held them tightly.
“You will come back,” she said. It was not entirely a question.
“I will come back,” Josephine said. She meant it. She was not certain how it would be possible, and she had not permitted herself to think too carefully about the mechanics of it, because the mechanics were contingent on a great many things that were not currently within her control. But she meant it with complete sincerity, understanding that some promises had to be made before their execution could be guaranteed, because the people receiving them needed the promise more than they needed dissemblance.
Seraphina looked at her for a long moment with those sharp, assessing eyes that missed very little. Then she released her hands and stepped back with the calm of a decision to believe in something not entirely certain, because the alternative was worse.
Arabella stood behind her sister, as was her habit, her hands clasped lightly before her and her face arranged with the careful serenity she maintained in all circumstances. She also did not weep. She would not weep here, on the steps, where anyone might see it. But when Josephine took her hands, she felt the slight, deliberate pressure of her grip, conveying in that small contact everything she would not permit her face to show.
“You have been very good to us,” Arabella said quietly. It was simply stated, without decoration, which made it land harder than any more elaborate expression of feeling would have. She held Josephine’s gaze for a moment, and in it was the look of a young woman who saw considerably more than she acknowledged and had made her own private accounting of everything that was being lost this morning.
Then she released her hands and stepped back, poised and unreachable as ever, and Josephine understood that the poise was not indifference but the most Arabella knew how to give.
