The Duke Brought His Mistress to Their Wedding Before Three Hundred Guests—So Beatrice Tossed Her Veil onto the Marble and Walked Away, Never Knowing Her Father Had Already Signed Away the One Thing That Could Destroy Her Freedom

 PART 5

Autumn tore through the valley, stripping the oaks bare and turning the courtyard mud to frozen ruts.

Beatrice sat by the meagre hearth with her fingers stiff around her pen. The ledger on her lap showed a fragile, teetering survival. Henry Tolbert’s mill had paid promptly for the first shipment, and that money had bought winter provisions, a mountain of coal, and enough raw timber to patch the leaking eastern roof.

She had begun to sleep through the night without waking in a cold sweat.

Then the second shipment of sorted wool sat in the barn for ten days, and Henry’s black wagons never came.

She did not write a letter. Letters are easily ignored. She had Griggs saddle the estate’s only riding horse — a massive, bad-tempered gelding called Brutus — and she rode the ten miles to the mill through a sleet-filled wind that took the skin off her cheeks.

The mill was a cathedral of industry: a sprawling brick monstrosity belching black smoke into a slate sky. The noise was a physical thing. It came up through the soles of her boots, hundreds of mechanised looms clattering in one deafening rhythm, devouring raw cotton and wool.

She pushed through the heavy doors, ignoring the stares of the floor workers, and found Henry Tolbert in his glass-walled office suspended above the factory floor. He was bent over a table strewn with shipping manifests, sleeves rolled past the elbow, forearms thick with muscle and dark grease.

He looked up. His jaw tightened.

“Lady Beatrice.”

He did not look pleased to see her. He looked exhausted. He had to raise his voice over the machines.

“My wool has been sitting in the damp for over a week, Mr. Tolbert.”

She stripped off her riding gloves and slapped them against her thigh.

“You gave me your word. You gave me a price. If you have found a cheaper supplier, you owe me the courtesy of a direct refusal.”

Henry let out a harsh laugh. He walked to the wash basin in the corner and began scrubbing the grease off his hands with a stiff brush.

“I have not found a cheaper supplier,” he said. “I have not found any supplier. Look out the window.”

She walked to the glass and looked down into the rail yard behind the mill. Three dozen of his freight cars sat idle on the tracks, their wooden sides weathering in the sleet. The yard was eerily silent compared to the roar beneath her feet.

“The Northern Line raised their freight tariffs yesterday,” Henry said, drying his hands on a coarse towel. “A general increase, they called it. But curiously, the tariffs on textile goods — raw wool and finished cloth specifically — went up four hundred per cent. It costs me more to ship my goods to the coast than the goods are worth.”

A cold dread pooled in Beatrice’s stomach.

“Angelo,” she said. “The Duke of Westford recently acquired a controlling interest in the Northern Line’s debt.”

“Correct.” Henry threw the towel onto a chair and leaned against his desk, crossing his arms. “He is choking my supply lines. He knows I cannot absorb the new tariffs and he knows I cannot survive without shipping my product. I have enough raw material to keep the looms running perhaps another fortnight. After that, I shut down. Three hundred local families lose their wages.”

He looked at her without a shred of accusation in his face, which somehow made it worse. He was simply stating facts, the way he stated the weight of a bale.

“He is doing this to break me,” Beatrice whispered.

The realisation settled over her like a wet blanket.

“He does not care about your mill. He wants to cut off my only source of income. He is burning down your livelihood just to smoke me out of Oak Haven.”

“Yes,” Henry said plainly. “He is.”

Beatrice’s voice shook, and she hated the tremor in it, hated that Angelo could still reach three hundred miles and make her small.

“Then I release you from our contract. If you publicly sever ties with Oak Haven, perhaps he will lift the tariffs.”

Henry pushed off the desk and walked toward her. He stopped an arm’s length away, towering over her, smelling of machine oil and strong tea and hard work.

“Do you honestly believe,” he said, dropping into a low, intense rumble, “that a man who alters national railway tariffs to spite a woman will simply walk away if I apologise? He is a predator, Lady Beatrice. If I show him my throat, he will take it out. I do not back down from aristocrats playing with ledgers. I built this mill out of nothing.”

“But your rail lines are blocked. How will you move the goods?”

“I don’t know yet.” He ran a hand through his dark hair. “I am looking into overland carting, but it is slow and agonisingly expensive, and the roads to the eastern ports are abysmal in winter.”

Beatrice closed her eyes and forced the panic down into the locked box at the back of her mind. She thought about her mother’s chaotic, messy account books. She thought about the estate maps she had studied by candlelight for weeks, because there was nothing else to do at night and she had wanted to know every acre she owned.

“Not all roads,” she said slowly, opening her eyes, “are roads. What about the water?”

“The canal?”

“The canal system.”

Henry scoffed. “It has been defunct for twenty years. The locks are rusted shut and half of it is silted over.”

“The river connects to the Humber estuary.” Her mind was moving faster than her mouth. “There is a deep-water canal spur that cuts directly through the western edge of Oak Haven property. It bypasses the Northern Line entirely. My grandfather built it to move timber, and he kept the transit rights private. It belongs to the estate. It belongs to me.”

Henry stared at her. The exhaustion in his eyes vanished and something sharp came in to replace it.

“Are the locks functional?”

“Griggs thinks so. He says the stone is sound. Just overgrown.”

She looked up at him, her heart hammering against her ribs.

“You have men. I have the transit rights. We clear the canal, load your goods onto flat-bottomed barges, and float them right under Angelo’s useless railway bridges.”

A slow, dangerous smile spread across Henry Tolbert’s face. It was not a polite smile. It was the smile of a bare-knuckle boxer who has just seen an opening.

“Lady Beatrice,” he murmured. “You are a profoundly dangerous woman.”

“Only to men who try to starve me.”

Clearing the canal was brutal, bone-snapping labour. Henry brought fifty of his strongest mill workers. Beatrice provided the axes, the heavy rope, and the land.

For three weeks they fought the earth. They hacked through decades of dense, frozen willow scrub and hauled massive rotting logs out of black water. Beatrice was there every day. She did not swing an axe, but she organised the camps, boiled gallons of bitter tea over open fires, and kept the ledgers of the men’s wages. She watched Henry work waist-deep in freezing mud, his shoulders straining as he threw his whole weight against a seized iron lock mechanism.

When it finally gave with a deafening groan and sent a rush of dark water surging forward, the men cheered loud enough to frighten the birds off the moor.

Beatrice found herself smiling. A real, unforced smile, and it felt foreign on her face.

Two days before Christmas, the first barges went out — heavily laden with Tolbert’s finished textiles, slipping quietly down the canal through a frozen landscape, entirely invisible to the railway magnates in London.

In the first week of January, Henry asked Griggs to ready the carriage before first light, and said nothing further about where he meant to take it. When Beatrice returned that evening, she carried no luggage — only a single folded document inside her coat — and she said nothing about it either. Griggs, to his credit, did not ask.

The victory was sweet, and intoxicating, and inevitably brief.

It was a bleak Tuesday morning in January. The sky was the colour of a bruised plum. Beatrice was in the library going over the newly drafted transit contracts with Henry, the fire roaring, and for the first time since she had come north the room actually felt warm.

Then the brass knocker thudded through the house, and shattered the peace.

Griggs’s heavy footsteps went down the hall. The front door groaned open. A cold draft swept into the library and set the candle flames dancing.

“You cannot go in there.”

Griggs’s voice, thick with outrage.

“Remove your hand from my coat, you filthy animal, or I will have my men break your jaw.”

The voice was smooth, cultured, and devastatingly familiar.

Beatrice’s blood turned to ice water. The pen slipped from her fingers and left a dark blot of ink spreading across the contract.

Angelo.