The Duchess War (Brothers Sinister 1)

“Maybe,” she said slowly. “Maybe. But what I can’t help thinking is this.”

The sky was blue overhead, without a single cloud in it. It seemed impossible at this time of year, and yet there it was. Robert tilted his head back and shut his eyes.

“We told Oliver the truth about his birth when he was quite young. Or, I should say, Hugo told him. Not everything, you understand, but a child’s version. There was a bad man. He hurt me. Some people might say that other man was his father, but we loved him, and it wasn’t true. I didn’t want to say anything at all, but Hugo convinced me.” She sighed.

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.