Jeffrey slid down off his horse, not very gracefully, and took a few tentative steps in her direction. Her words rang in his ears. Not leaving. It was so much what he’d wanted to hear he couldn’t believe it was true. “Not leaving?”
Imogen shook her head. “I want to stay in Tremontane. To stay with you.”
“Are you sure you want to give the Kirkellan up? It’s your whole life, and I don’t want you ending up resenting me for it.” He didn’t know why he was stupidly trying to talk her out of it, except that he knew deep down he couldn’t gain his own happiness at the cost of hers.
She shook her head again, and her eyes grew distant, as if she were thinking hard about something. “It is…only part of my life,” she said, “and this is another part, and I want to live in the part that has you in it, because you are my home.”
He closed his eyes briefly and let out a long breath. “You are my home,” he echoed. “You are. Oh, Imogen—”
She closed the distance between them and put her arms around him. “I love you,” she said, “and—”
He smiled. “You’ve never said that to me before.”
Imogen’s brow furrowed. “I have not?”
“I promise I would have remembered.” He was smiling like a fool and didn’t care.
“Well, I will say it again if you want, because it is true.”
“I hope so, if you’re going to marry me,” Jeffrey said, and leaned in to kiss her. It felt like the first time and it felt like nothing else in the world, and it felt like coming home. He didn’t know what had changed her mind and he didn’t care; it was a miracle, and in his experience, miracles weren’t something you questioned.
How long they stood in the middle of the road, kissing and holding each other close, Jeffrey didn’t know, but at some point he became aware of Harlequin snuffling at the grass that grew along the verge, and just then Imogen said, “We should not stand here. People will come.”
“They can walk around us,” Jeffrey said, but he let her go as far as holding her hand would allow. He couldn’t stop looking at her. “I can’t believe you came back. I thought I would have to chase you down and then beg you to love me in front of all your people, at which point you would tell me to leave and never return.”
Imogen’s eyebrows went up. “If you think it is hopeless, why do you try?”
When he heard his thoughts said out loud, Jeffrey couldn’t imagine how he’d had the nerve to go after her. “Because I didn’t want to spend my life wondering what might have been.”
“Well, you do not need to beg me, because I loved you before.” She released his hand and mounted Victory. “You just have the face that says you do not want to speak to me.”
Jeffrey pulled himself into Harlequin’s saddle. “That was actually the face that says I want you to have what’s best for you even if it kills me, which it almost did.”
Imogen scowled playfully at him. “You do not decide what is best for me, Jeffrey. But I chose to give up who I love, so we are both stupid together.”
Jeffrey laughed. “Then let us return to Aurilien, where I will possibly be shouted at by Micheline—”
“Why will she shout?”
“I didn’t take an armed escort when I came after you just now. I did leave a note. It wasn’t a very informative note, but it was enough to make her have kittens knowing I was gallivanting around the countryside unescorted. Then we will have breakfast, and then you and I and Mother will plan the quickest royal wedding this country has ever seen.”
Imogen brought Victory up beside him. “It must be quick?”
He thought back to sitting beside her as she slept, naked but for a few thin blankets, with her magnificent hair cascading over her bare shoulders, and his body stirred with the memory. “Very quick,” he said.
Imogen’s eyes lit with understanding, and she laughed.
They came around a curve in the road, and suddenly there was Aurilien before them, golden in the morning sunlight. Imogen drew in a startled breath. “Something wrong?” Jeffrey asked.
She shook her head. “Let us go home,” she said.
Home. It thrilled him that she already thought of his home as hers—but what had she said? Home wasn’t Aurilien. It was him. And you are my home, he thought. For the first time in his life, he had no doubts whatsoever.
Exile of the Crown Part Three: Autumn, 945 Y.B.
The loom was as old as Miss Merriwether had described, but in the patchwork way of something that had been repaired often over the years. The batten might be original, as worn as it was along the facing side; the heddles fairly shone with newness; the frame itself was seasoned with age except for one upright that was a different color from the rest. What had happened to require that single piece to be replaced? At any rate, it was a sturdy thing, and Zara didn’t regret buying it.
She was less certain about the house, which was much, much older than the loom, and while someone had kept it clean, it had all sorts of little problems that said Miss Merriwether’s illness had gone on longer than the woman had implied. But she’d bought the business, house, loom, and all, and now those problems were hers. Challenges, not problems, and Zara had never walked away from a challenge.
She left the large front room where the loom hulked in one corner, intimidating the spinning wheels, and went into the drawing room, which was a quarter the size and filled to overflowing with a couple of angular chairs upholstered in worn green twill and a narrow table holding an empty vase. Miss Merriwether sat in one of the chairs, placidly knitting despite the room’s darkness; heavy curtains matching the chairs blocked most of the afternoon sunlight from reaching the room. Between the curtains and the chairs, Zara felt suffocated, as if the room were a tomb filled to bursting with funerary cloths.
She sat on the other chair, which dug into her spine, so she edged forward until she was perched on its edge and said, “Seems satisfactory.”
Miss Merriwether nodded, her attention still on her complicated knitting. Maybe Zara could learn to knit; it seemed as soothing in its way as weaving. “Not regretting your purchase?” Miss Merriwether said.
“I don’t think so. You didn’t say how dilapidated the sheds were. I think the outhouse will have to come down.” Zara had never owned an outhouse before, and the idea of using it made her cringe, but she’d put all her savings into purchasing Miss Merriwether’s weaving business, and installing proper plumbing would have to wait.
“I’m sorry about that. I don’t get outside much anymore.”
“It’s all right. Everything else is as you described.”
“Good. Then I suppose it’s time to tell you why you might want to change your mind.”
Zara leaned back, startled, and regretted it instantly as the chair dug its knuckles into her spine. “Change my mind? Is there something you failed to tell me? If you’ve concealed material information, I’m within my rights to cancel the contract.”
“It’s something that came up after we came to an agreement. I thought you should see the possibilities before you made your decision.” Miss Merriwether lowered her knitting to her lap. Her wrinkled face lacked its usual pleasant smile that Zara suspected concealed a world of pain. “Did you notice the large building in the town square? The one with no sign?”
“I did. What of it?”
“It’s newly built. The owner, Quincy Pierpont, intends to set up a factory there. A weaving factory. He’s been bringing in Devices for the last two weeks. It should open for business soon.”
“A factory.”
“He’s already made overtures to many of the local weavers, offering them the…opportunity…to take advantage of the new Devices. Says it will save time and increase productivity. There’s a lot of weavers in Longbourne, Mistress Weaver, and they’re all in a tizzy wondering what to do.”
Zara shook her head. “They have to realize this can’t end well for them. It doesn’t take skilled labor to run those Devices. All Mister Pierpont needs is to be able to pay mor
e for wool than the rest of them do, and they’re out of business.”
“That’s exactly true. So I’m offering you the chance to go back on our deal. It doesn’t really matter to me; I’ll be dead in a matter of weeks. But you came here expecting to make a life for yourself and happen it’s not the life you might’ve wanted.”
“I’m…not sure.” This was bad. Factory goods wouldn’t have the quality of home-crafted, but when it came to buying, most people wanted cheap more than they wanted good. “Does Mister Pierpont live here?”
“He’s got a room at the hostel, next door to the tavern, but he works out of the tavern most days. You reckon on seeing him?”
“Might as well talk to him. Happen he’s not intent on putting anyone out of business, and this factory will be good for Longbourne.” This northeastern lilt, the odd vocabulary, was infectious.
Miss Merriwether put a withered hand over Zara’s. It was hard to remember she was only a few years older than Zara; illness had not been kind to her. “I built this business from nothing,” she said. “Built the customer base, refined my techniques, trained a dozen apprentices…and I’d hate to see it swallowed up by that man and his Devices. And I think you might be the woman to stop that happening.”
“I’m not going to promise you anything, Miss Merriwether.”
“Call me Sabrina. And I don’t want promises.”
Zara nodded and stood, grateful to relieve the pressure on her back. “I’ll be back soon. Probably very soon.”
She let herself out by the back door, which was strangely intimate, but Miss Merriwether—Sabrina—had insisted that real business in Longbourne was conducted via the back door. And if everything went well, it would be her back door. The small back yard was bare of grass, just hard-packed earth with some tall, autumn-dead weeds along the walls and around the two sheds, both of which were as weathered as the house. The narrow one, the outhouse, tilted a little, which made Zara nervous about using it; the larger one had once been painted a bright yellow that time had scoured into faded, peeling cream.
The main house, like most of what she’d seen in Longbourne, had a ground floor made of irregular stones pieced together and a smaller upper story of wood weathered silvery by hundreds of winter storms. She tried to imagine the wind blowing about the house, whether those storms really were as bad as Sabrina had said, but the day was warm, the wind merely a breeze, and winter seemed a thousand years away. Time enough to worry about it if she chose to stay.
She came around to the front of the house and set off down the street toward the distant plinking sound of the forge. Longbourne was bigger than most of the little towns she’d lived in over the last twenty-odd years, but still smaller than, say, Ravensholm or Ellismere, which was the last stop at the base of the mountains that marked the boundary of Barony Steepridge. The men and women she passed nodded and smiled politely, and she smiled back, but most of her attention was given to the large building ahead, facing the town square and the little white gazebo that sat at the center of it.
Unlike its neighbors, it was built entirely of wood, a deeply-grained oak stained dark brown that made it look heavyset and sullen. Windows lined both its stories, large-paned and dim in the light of the afternoon sun that backlit it. They’d let in plenty of light during the morning, maybe more than the workers would want, but they still didn’t dispel the building’s ominous air. Or maybe that was just Zara’s knowledge of what it meant. She stopped in front of the building briefly and glared at it. It regarded her with indifference, which irritated her. Then she had to laugh at herself, privately. Irritated by a building. She must be getting old. Sixty-eight wasn’t that old, was it?
The hostel was, unusually for Longbourne, three stories tall and shaped like a chimney. The tavern squatted next to it, friendly as a lapdog, with its door wide open and its many-paned windows shining with light even at three o’clock in the afternoon. The taproom was almost empty at this time of day, with one man seated at the bar eating a bowl of soup, a woman standing behind the bar setting bottles on the shelf there, and another man seated at a table near the window, a couple of bound notebooks in a pile beside him and a pen in hand. Zara crossed the room to stand in front of him. “Mister Pierpont?” she said.
The man looked up, scowling. Despite his expression, he was attractive, young—all right, mid-forties, but that was young to Zara—and dressed too well for Longbourne. His scowl vanished. “Can I help you, miss?” His smile was appreciative, and Zara felt irritated again. There was nothing wrong with being admired, granted, but the appraising way with which he looked at her said he wasn’t going to take her seriously because she looked young and attractive.
“Agatha Weaver,” she said, controlling her irritation and extending her hand. “I want to talk to you about your factory.”
“Then you know who I am,” Pierpont said, rising to take her hand and bowing over it the way a fashionable gentleman would. “Please, sit down. What’s your interest in my factory?”
“I’m looking at buying a weaving business in Longbourne and I want to know how your plans are going to affect that.”
Pierpont threw back his head and laughed, longer than he really had to. “A weaver named Weaver! You and the smith named Smith should become friends! That’s hilarious.”
“I really think it isn’t,” Zara said. “How disruptive do you plan to be?” After twenty years of aliases, she’d returned to Weaver as if coming back to her roots, and it angered her to hear him make light of that choice.
“Miss Weaver—it is ‘miss,’ isn’t it?—Miss Weaver, I hope not to be disruptive at all. I intend to bring greater economic prosperity to Longbourne and, by extension, the beautiful Barony Steepridge. Mass production is the way of the future. It’s more efficient and faster and allows for better yields. I’m hoping to entice the weavers of Longbourne to take advantage of the Devices I offer, give them more leisure time and relieve them of some of the burdens of their work.”
“And how will that happen? I don’t know much about weaving Devices.” A lie, to test him.
“Of course not.” His condescending tone made her want to slap him. “Weaving Devices are made to set the warp of a loom faster than can be done by a single weaver—you must know how much of a difference that can make. And the shuttle is powered by a Device that regularizes its path, improving speed by up to forty percent. The operator—”
“The weaver.”
“Of course. The operator monitors the heddles and makes sure there’s no irregularities. You see weavers are still important to the process.”
“I do. I assume you chose Steepridge because of the sheep.”
“That’s correct. The sheep of Barony Steepridge produce a quarter again what their lowland counterparts do, and it’s the finest wool in Tremontane. Longbourne’s wool fabric is renowned for its quality and softness—but you probably already know that.”
“Yes.” It was one of the reasons she’d leapt at Sabrina’s offer; the reputation alone would be enough to make her wealthy, if she cared about wealth. “What about the demand for homespun?”
“I don’t see why we, all of us working together, can’t teach the world that Device-woven wool is just as good as homespun. After all, there’s no reason it should be of lower quality, right?”
Zara watched him closely. He seemed sincere, but that was no guarantee of honesty. “You make good points,” she said, and stood, prompting him to rise as well. “I’ll consider them.”
“Please do,” he said, taking her hand even though she hadn’t offered it. “I’d love to work with such a forthright and, dare I say, attractive young woman.”
Zara smiled at him, though once again she itched to slap him. “We’ll see.”
She strode rapidly back to Sabrina’s house and accidentally let the back door slam shut. Maybe it wasn’t so accidental. The more she thought on the meeting, the angrier she became.
Sabrina was still sitting in the drawing room, though her knitting lay in a ba
sket beside her. She looked as if she were in pain. “Do you need to lie down?” Zara asked, alarmed.
Sabrina shook her head. “It’s worse when I lie down,” she said. “Did you speak to him?”
Zara sat in the uncomfortable chair and leaned forward. “He’s either stupid or a liar,” she said. “There’s no way a factory can do anything but put all the weavers of Longbourne out of business. He can’t increase the wool production—I’m guessing as much land as possible is given over to raising sheep?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’ll have to take hold of the supply, which means reducing the supply available to the weavers and forcing them either to go out of business or work for him. Based on what he told me, he wants people to believe his machines are more efficient, which they aren’t—”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve seen them work before.” They were a good idea for large cities, places where the supply of raw materials was elastic, but Longbourne couldn’t afford to import wool, particularly wool of a lower quality than their own. “The only thing they are is faster, and he’s right that they automate certain processes, but at a cost to the quality of the final product.”
“But can he sell it cheaply?”
“Possibly.” Zara tapped her finger on her lips. “How many weavers are there in Longbourne?”
“Thirty, maybe thirty-five. And then there are all those men and women living elsewhere in Barony Steepridge.”
“How hard would it be to bring them all together for a meeting?”
Sabrina smiled. “Happen you’re planning to stay?”
Zara smiled back. Hers was a good deal nastier than Sabrina’s. “I’ve put everything I have into buying this business,” she said, “and I’m not about to let it be taken away from me before I have the chance to see what I can make of it. And men like Pierpont remind me of…someone I used to know.” She hadn’t thought of Roger Lestrange in years, but he’d been just like Pierpont: smiling, self-righteous, convinced his way was best and condescending to anyone who disagreed with him. Crushing him had been one of the most satisfying things she’d done as Queen. She had no doubt she could crush Pierpont as readily.
Tales of the Crown Page 31
