The Duchess War (The Brothers Sinister) (38 page)

Robert tried to imagine what it would be like to have parents who actually considered what to tell their children, who cared about these details. Who assured him that they loved him.

I want to be that kind of parent.
His fists clenched.

“Hugo was very matter-of-fact about it, and so Oliver took it in stride. Until he found out about you. Then he had nightmares.”

“About me?” Robert repeated.

“Yes. He woke up crying one night, and wouldn’t stop. When I asked what was wrong, he said that the bad man had his brother, and we had to go get him.”

Robert felt a lump form in his throat. “Ah,” he managed carefully.

“I thought it was sweet, actually, and that stage passed. But…” She turned to look at him directly. “But now, it has been almost thirty years since I saw your father. What he did to me took all of ten minutes, and I still remember it.” She paused and then reached over and tapped him on the knee.

He looked over into her eyes. This time, she didn’t flinch from him.

“You,” she said quietly, “you grew up with him. That must have been awful.”

For a second, Robert saw his father looming over him, so much taller back then, so much bigger.

What kind of a son are you?
He’d thrown up his hands in aggravation.
Any other boy, and things would be so much better. Even your mother doesn’t want you enough to stay.

“Oh,” Robert said quietly. “It wasn’t so bad. Most of the time, my father didn’t even remember I was there.”

And perhaps Mrs. Marshall heard that tiny catch in his voice, because ever so slowly, she put her arm around him.

“You poor, poor boy,” she said.

Robert’s duty for the afternoon did not promise to be so enlightening as his morning.

“I have no idea what to think of you, Your Grace.”

Robert stood in the entry to the Charingfords’ home. It seemed a comfortable enough place, papered in cream and blue, the entry itself bright and cheerful. But Mr. Charingford, who stood across from him, looked neither bright nor happy. His hair was graying and thin, and he’d folded his arms over his chest.

“I’ve agreed to this,” the other man said, “because you showed good sense on precisely one occasion.”

“One occasion?” Robert raised an eyebrow. “When was that?”

“When you married Miss Pur—I suppose I cannot call her that now, can I?” Charingford tilted his head and almost smiled. “When you married your wife. I tried to convince my son to have a look at her, but he never could get past that scar. Her friendship with my daughter… We spent four months together in Cornwall on a journey, and I think I know her better than anyone in town besides her great-aunts. She was a good choice.”

She had been. Robert ached to think of what would come tomorrow.

“I can only hope that some of her sense has begun to seep into your consciousness. I cannot know what you were thinking to write those handbills. To come here and try to convince people like me to support voting reform.” Charingford gave him a look under lowered eyebrows.

“If you know I wrote those handbills,” Robert asked, “why did you indict Mr. Marshall?”

Charingford’s eyes dropped. “There was enough evidence to support his involvement. And…”

“And Stevens asked you,” Robert filled in.

Charingford bit his lip. “You know about that?”

“Don’t lecture me on sense,” Robert said. “I asked to see your factory, and you agreed to show me. Let’s get on with it.”

Charingford gestured and a footman opened the front door. As he did, the dull vibration that came from the factory across the street accelerated to a roar.

“If you will,” he said grimly. “Your Grace.”

The clatter of the machinery was almost overwhelming as they crossed the cobblestones of the street. The factory doors had been newly painted a gleaming green, standing out against the coal-streaked brick of the walls. The noise surrounded them, a cacophony of shrieking and shaking. Mr. Charingford ushered him inside with a series of gestures and then, when they’d made their way up a small staircase to stand on a metal platform that overlooked the operation, turned to face him.

“This is the main room,” he shouted, straining to be heard over the clatter of the machines below. “Here’s where the yarn is knitted into hose.”

He pointed down into the factory below. A woman, her white-streaked hair tied back in a careless bun, operated a machine that wound yarn onto metal bobbins on one side of the room. A handful of men strolled from one circular frame to the next, moving pieces when necessary, replacing bobbins, handing the products off to boys who scampered with them into an adjacent room. They moved with an economy of motion that seemed to spring more from weariness than expertise.

“Each machine can produce two pairs of stockings in nine minutes,” Charingford shouted. “And the men are needed only to take the work off the stitch hooks at the end and to reset the cylinder that guides the shape of the stocking. Look at them, Your Grace. They don’t even have to make decisions in their daily work. How could we trust them to decide the future of our country? To understand the workings of industry?”

Robert simply tilted his head, listening over the racket of the machines. “They’re singing,” he said. “Why are they singing?”

Mr. Charingford paused and put one hand to his ear, listening. “They’re happy to be at work, Your Grace. They’re singing a hymn—praise to God.”

Robert was a man looking down on a factory floor from above. All he had to do was
look,
while the workers below turned and wound and cut.

Lucky you,
he could hear Minnie say,
that you can consider the future without terror.
He didn’t think he could even understand what it meant to stand down there, to toil in this unrelenting noise for day after day. All he knew was that it wasn’t as simple as gratitude and hymns.

Over the short course of their marriage, he’d never been farther from Minnie than he was at this moment. He’d lied to her, and tomorrow he was going to break his promise to her and hurt her. And yet he could hear her right now over the thunder of the machinery.

“I don’t pretend to understand what it means to be a working man, Mr. Charingford, but I am a factory owner. I inherited a good bit of industry from my grandfather. And when I look at your factory floor, I don’t see men who are happy to be at work.”

A woman on the floor looked up at them as he spoke. There was no hatred in her eyes, no contempt. Just a soft look around the edge of her eyes—a quiet yearning.

Perhaps she had once been a genteel young lady who failed to marry. Maybe she’d had no choice but to take on work until her hair grayed before her time and her skin turned to leather. Still, she looked up. Like everyone else, her lips moved in song.

“Well?” Mr. Charingford said. “What is it that you see instead?”

“I see Minnie.” His voice caught. “I see who she might have been in ten years, when her great-aunts’ health faded away.”

Mr. Charingford drew in a sharp breath.

“I see your daughter if the market for hosiery should vanish.”

“Not Lydia,” Charingford said in shocked tones. “Surely not…” But he trailed away unhappily.

“I see who my brother might have been if another man hadn’t stepped in to raise him. I see my childhood cook, if I hadn’t pensioned her off. The only person I don’t see is myself.” He let his hands trail over the catwalk. “I have never been there, and I never will. The only thing I understand now is that I cannot comprehend what it is like to stand on a factory floor and look up and sing.”

Mr. Charingford tilted his head and looked at him, really listening now.

“I’ve a goodly share of faults. I rush in, where I should tread carefully. I speak, where I should listen. But when I hear them sing, I don’t just hear a hymn. They’re singing to God because they haven’t found anyone else who will listen.”

Charingford spoke cautiously. “Stevens says that if we listen once, we’ll only stir the workers on to greater unreasonableness.”

“Have you found that Stevens becomes more reasonable the more you give in to his demands?”

Charingford looked away.”

“How much has he asked of you, Charingford? You’re a magistrate. Has he said he won’t help you if you don’t do as he says? Has he asked for money? Or did he simply demand that he be awarded the hand of your beautiful daughter in exchange for his efforts?“

Charingford’s hands closed on the metal rail in front of him. He closed his eyes. “That,” he said. “He did—all of that.”

“I have found,” Robert said, “that in the long run, paying my workers enough that they do not consider the future with terror costs far less than employing men to terrorize them.”

“You sound like Minnie,” Charingford muttered. It sounded like a complaint.

Robert simply smiled and shook his head. It was, perhaps, the sweetest compliment he’d been given.

A young boy darted across the floor below, conveying a full bobbin to a man who had turned to one of the machines.

“If you don’t look carefully,” Robert said, “the men and women on the floor fade into indistinguishable browns and grays. You don’t have to see them as anything except the working arms of the machines, flesh and blood instead of steel and iron. Drawing wages, instead of being purchased upfront. But machines don’t sing. Machines don’t hope. And Charingford, I don’t think we could stop them, not with a thousand copies of Captain Stevens. I don’t intend to try.”

“You’re a radical.” There was no heat in the accusation. Charingford looked out over the factory. But now, his gaze stopped here and there—on women who bound the hose up in paper, on men who worked the machines.

“I know,” Robert said.

“If you’d talked to me when first you arrived, instead of writing handbills…”

“I’m growing up. And my wife, it appears, is having some effect on me.” Robert shrugged. “You never know. By the time I’m thirty, I might actually start making a difference.”

Chapter Twenty-five

I
T WAS LATE WHEN
M
INNIE’S HUSBAND
returned home—so late that all the servants except one solitary footman had gone to bed. Minnie heard the front door open and then close behind Robert. She could imagine him taking off his things—greatcoat, frock coat—and handing them to the footman. She waited to hear his footsteps on the stairs, but as the minutes ticked by, they didn’t come.

Minnie slowly stood and tiptoed out of their room. The house below had been doused in darkness. The only reason she could find her footing on the great staircase that led to the entrance was that a hint of light was coming from some room in the back. She followed that path of golden light down the hallway.

The door at the end was ajar. Robert sat at the table, a plate in front of him filled with the cold remains from dinner. He wasn’t eating; he simply held his fork in one hand, staring blankly off into nothingness. His head was bowed a fraction, as if he were supplicating the beef before him for some great thing. While she watched, his hand crept to the corner of his eye and brushed against it—almost as if he were swiping away a tear.

He wasn’t crying. He didn’t reach for a handkerchief. But his hand stayed there, next to his eye, as if to ward off any other emotion.

Her own breath caught.

She retreated down the hallway, cursing her soft silk slippers. He hadn’t even heard her coming. Loudly, she opened the door to the parlor and retrieved the package that she’d obtained earlier that day. Even more loudly, she slammed the parlor door shut.

It was impossible to scuff slippers against carpet, but she did her best. By the time she got to the door, he’d set his hand down. That look of intense bleakness had faded, and he even managed to manufacture a little smile for her.

“Minnie,” he said. “I didn’t think you would be awake.”

As if she would have been able to sleep, thinking of him and worrying about his brother. The trial was scheduled for tomorrow. She could see the toll the strain had taken on him. There were dark circles under his eyes, worry lines grooved on his forehead.

“I had a hard time sleeping without you,” she answered. She set the package on the table near him.