by Carrie Lofty
“You could lose everything.”
“No worries on that score.” A single word repeated as a droning chant in her mind. Annulment. “I have all that I need when I stand with my kin.”
He faced the setting sun. His beard obscured the set of his mouth. “Well, well. Seems one of the masters thought to pay his respects.”
Eyes narrowed, he nodded to the walkway leading to the church.
Polly knew whom she’d find, even before she turned.
Alex Christie wore a suit that cut close to his lean hips and flared across his shoulders, accentuating their breadth. He didn’t hesitate but strode forward, face straight ahead. The eyes that followed him up the walkway did not alter his focus. With his top hat in place and walking stick in hand, he played the part of the mill master to a most convincing end.
Only, now she knew it wasn’t an act.
Curses bunched on her tongue, but she kept silent. He greeted the reverend. He bowed respectfully to her mother where she sat among dear friends. He shook hands with her brothers. Polly squished her sense of disloyalty. Her family couldn’t possibly know that she and Alex had fallen out. Coming home to comfort her mother for a few days didn’t imply permanence.
Hamish touched her on the shoulder. A conspiratorial gleam in his eyes filled her with a dread she couldn’t name. “We decided to move quickly. The meeting’s tonight. Eight o’clock at the old Gorman warehouse.”
“Why not the meeting hall? We’ve held our assemblies there for ten years.”
“We can’t trust anyone from outside our circle to make plans. Understand?”
“Hamish,” she said, trying to stay composed. “It’s a bad precedent to set. The meeting hall is available to any peaceful organization in the city. It’s one of our few claims to legitimacy. We’ll look like anarchists!”
He flicked his small green eyes back toward the church, where Alex still mingled with the mourners. That he remained, offering his condolences, constricted a place in her chest that had flared hot and greedy at the mere sight of him.
“Make your choice,” Hamish said. “Eight o’clock.”
Polly swallowed. Her father was dead. Hamish was not the man she wanted to take his place—or even her place. But she knew where his loyalties were. Maybe with a little luck and the right words, she could keep him from pushing the membership toward disaster.
Alex had taken his side. She would take hers.
“I’ll be there.”
“You’re your father’s daughter, girl.” He snubbed his cigarette out in the grass. “Now, I think I’ll leave you two alone.”
“Hello, Polly.”
She closed her eyes. Breathed in. When she faced daylight once again, Hamish had walked away to rejoin the congregants. Alex took his place.
The setting sun burnished his sandy hair. Hard lines radiated from his eyes toward his temples, and deep grooves dug around his mouth. His expression was rife with sympathy that made her knees weak. The unrelenting cleverness that shone out from his green-and-gold eyes admired her every feature—as concentrated as a caress and as eloquent as a thousand questions.
Kissing. Touching. Making love. He’d ruined all of it.
Even declaring her love hadn’t been enough.
She wanted to hate him but found only sadness. How could she feel any grief beyond what was due her da? Yet it was right there, pounding out from her bones. She mourned for the marriage she’d been forced into accepting, and for the loss of the man she’d only just come to adore.
“Hello,” she said quietly.
“I’m glad so many people are here for you and your family. That support must be reassuring.” His mouth drew downward in an even deeper frown.
She wanted to shout at him. I don’t have your support! My own husband!
But her heart went out to him, as it always did when people suffered. Maybe all those years, letting the happiness in, she’d been holding the ugliness at bay by reaching out to others. At that moment, no matter their differences, she sympathized with a fellow human being who had also recently lost his father. Six months on from Sir William’s passing, and eleven months on from Mamie’s, Alex appeared weary from the grief she’d only just been forced to bear.
“Did you have . . . support?” she asked.
He looked down to where his walking stick dug into the soft spring loam. “Many people attended his funeral.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No, it’s not. But my siblings were there. We’ve always had one another.”
Polly smoothed her hands across her stomach. Inside crocheted black gloves, her palms were damp with sweat. “I’m glad you came.”
He faced the sun easing toward the western horizon. She’d always admired the strength of his profile, the aristocratic surety of it. Beautiful, yet stalwart and capable of great passions. The thought of passion, so recently shared and so recently lost, was particularly devastating. “I’m sorry for your loss, Polly. I wish I could’ve come to know him better.”
The line of his back seemed especially straight, his shoulders square and stiff, as he turned to walk away.
A mistake. One of them was making a mistake, but she could no longer tell who or what. His name was on her tongue when he stopped. Returned. His nostrils flared, as did some unspoken emotion in his hypnotic eyes.
“I’m asking you, Polly. Come home.”
Polly backed against the tree. There was nowhere else to go. All she could do was stare and try to breathe. He stole her reason and her pride, only to replace it with selfish, youthful urges—and to sweep it all away when they’d stood on the brink of happiness.
“You told me once that you thought yourself a progressive man,” she said. “You drafted petitions and marched alongside Mamie. Now you’re ready to throw all of us into a fire as big as Winchester’s. Whose side will you take when the constables come to arrest Tommy? They will, you know.” Polly shook her head. “Can’t have the truth get in the way of profit.”
“That’s not fair.”
“None of this is fair. So tell me, Alex. What happened to the man you were?”
He didn’t flinch, didn’t drop his eyes. “I became a father. And I learned how to fight.”
“Not hard enough. You’re settling all over again. I was taught that settling was no better than failure. If you’d learned that, we might still have a chance. But I bloody hell can’t do it on my own.”
She might as well have been talking to the tree at her back.
The grim line of his mouth fit the day’s mood. He tipped his hat like a stranger. “Good evening, Mrs. Christie.”
Alex walked away. He climbed into his carriage and didn’t look back.
Once inside, he leaned against the leather. His head weighed a hundred pounds. His heart weighed more.
What happened to the man you were?
The drive home wasn’t long enough to escape the echo of her question. He’d given her an answer—a true answer. But it wasn’t enough.
He played games of chess with business possibilities. The weavers would strike. Polly had all but said so. Many started peacefully enough. He had witnessed them in the United States, avidly following their progress in the papers. For every one that was amicably resolved, another ten ended in violence. Decreasing wages would fan hot tempers on one side, while the damage done to the mills made the masters implacable. A strike now would mean bloodshed.
Could he carry that on his conscience?
He knew the answer. It would mean being wed to a woman who hated the man he’d become, just as he would hate himself. Assumptions that he would have more time to pick through the threads had come to naught. His deliberations and reason had little place in Glasgow.
Evening crept up on him as he worked in his study. He lost focus for minutes at a time, as if sleepwalking between duties. Numbness had pervaded his body, his mind, ever since making love to Polly during that early dawn. Nothing else held the same intensity.
He shoved
away his ledgers and penned the letter he’d been dreading. Each word scraped across the paper as if made indelible by a tattooist. The petition for an annulment. Once he had satisfied the terms of his father’s will, he would do what he could to aid Polly and her family. In the meantime he would give back her freedom. It hadn’t been his to control.
When that dreadful missive sat drying on his desk, he found that the light had nearly gone. A gentle rap on the door pulled him back to reality.
“Mr. Christie, sir?”
“What is it, Agnes?”
“I’m putting Edmund down for the night. Would you like to say good night?”
This had become a ritual. No matter how exhausting his day, he always made time to see his son off to sleep. Edmund would be walking soon. Already he was making sounds that approximated words. The idea that he would, very soon, become a fully functioning little boy dragged thorns across Alex’s heart.
What was worse, he and Polly had taken to saying good night to him together. She’d hummed some Scots lullaby as she kissed Edmund on the head, smoothing his hair. Now she was gone. She hadn’t come home after the funeral, nor did he expect her to.
He shoved those pains aside as rocked Edmund.
Agnes folded a blanket. “Have I ever told you about your father when he was a lad?”
Alex frowned. He’d never heard the woman speak so informally. Beyond that, the subject set him on edge. His father? As a boy? Part of him didn’t want to know. Thinking of William Christie as a stern old bastard was much easier. Clearer.
Yet reminders of his goodness would not accommodate Alex’s mood. What man would feel obligated to rescue the daughter he’d sired off a French dancer? After Viv’s mother died, their father had done just that. She’d became inextricable from their little clan because of his quiet kindness and implacable will. And always, his love for dear Catrin had been the bedrock of their family. The Welsh girl and the millionaire magnate. He had made choices out of love, when many in his place would have weighed expenses and aggravation.
The realization knotted Alex’s stomach.
“I don’t believe you have,” he said quietly.
“His da was a drunk. Died in a fight where someone brought a busted bottle.” She paused. “Does it hurt or help to hear it, sir?”
“Both. Go on, please.”
“His ma slipped between the cracks, if you take my meaning, sir. Left him on his own to grow up wild. He used his fists to start, making money from bareknuckle fights. And one day he just disappeared.”
Alex shifted Edmund to better cradle him. “Disappeared?”
“He hopped a schooner to America. A decade later, his name showed up in the papers from London. He’d become quite the success.” She smiled in a way that, oddly, made her look far older. “We’re not the English, you know. We don’t hold people back so much by order of rank and birth. Some may have been jealous of his success, but most were proud of what he’d managed.”
She exhaled heavily, looking quite tired. “Once all this fuss dies down, no one will think any less of Polly either. We’re proud of our girl and always will be. She’s never been wrong about people. Trusted the right ones. Suspected the guilty ones.” She shrugged. “I thought maybe you’d like to be told.”
“She isn’t an easy woman to know. Neither was my father.”
“Nor to be raised by, I’m sure. But doesn’t that make the undertaking all the more important?” As if closing a book, Agnes resumed her customary polite detachment. “Now, to get this young man off to bed.”
He let her take Edmund and watched as she bundled and shushed him. Alex needed air. Room. Answers. None of those would be found in the small nursery. More curtly than he intended, he kissed Edmund and bid Agnes good night. “I’m going out.”
Some power he couldn’t explain added vigor to his limbs as he climbed the stairs three at a time.
What happened to the man you were?
All he knew was that a tantalizing future beckoned, just beyond his reach. Polly was strong, determined, and one of the best people he’d ever known. Certainly the most selfless.
And he’d walked away. Like a stranger. Like a man who didn’t care.
He fisted his hands in his hair and pulled. He cared so much. Did anything else matter beyond the future they could make together?
If Alex had any say in the matter, and he certainly did, he would find the right balance. From the start he’d known that cooperation would yield better results. A heavy dose of strong emotion had stolen that clarity.
But he was clearheaded when he tossed the annulment into the fire. All doubt disappeared by the time that hated document shriveled to ash. He grabbed his coat, hat, and walking stick. She would be at her parents’ house. No, he thought with a pang of sympathy. Her mother’s house.
He’d only just stepped outside when a shadow moved among nearby shrubs. “Who’s there?”
“You know who I am, master,” came Tommy Larnach’s sneered reply.
Alex hefted his walking stick like a weapon. “Tell me why I shouldn’t smash your brains in right now. You little shit, you started this by blowing up my factory.”
“Keep insulting me, and I won’t say what I came to say.” Wiry and sleek, Tommy lurched into the faint light that shone from the parlor window. Blood had dried across his nose and upper lip. A nasty gash slit the top of his right cheekbone. He looked down at his shirt, then lifted that worn cotton. “Besides, Livingstone already had his way with me. He’s the man you want.”
Despite shadows that colored him in shades of midnight, his bruises were obvious. Cuts peppered his thin chest.
“Bloody Christ. Livingstone did that?”
“I was following him.”
“Why?”
“He’s never been clear of suspicion in Polly’s mind. We all have too much history with the bastard. Turns out one of his men tipped off the constables on the night you two were at Old Peter’s. And no coincidence Livingstone gave her tartan to the police.”
Tommy shuffled forward, more clearly illuminated by lamps in the front parlor. “He caught me tonight as he came out of Winchester’s office. And there was another man. Well-heeled. Don’t recognize him. Some agreement between them—laughing together like chums from a pub.”
Alex had gone numb from neck to hip—the whole of his guts. Just frozen. “Nothing to do with Jack Findley?”
“Bennett’s man? No. He’s more likely to wind up in a doxy’s bed than be traipsing around causing trouble. I learned what he’d been saying about me and we . . . Well, we had a little chat.” He grinned fiercely.
“Why should I trust you?”
“You can’t, I suppose. But we can start with something simple. I know where your wife is tonight.” The young man’s mouth pinched into a flat line before he exhaled. “I don’t want to see her hurt.”
Alex held back a flash of panic by will alone. “Tell me.”
“The union is voting to strike. Polly still thinks she can persuade them to keep it peaceful.” Although he still held his injured arm, Tommy stood up straight and looked Alex square in the eye. “She’ll fight for it, master, but she won’t win.”
Twenty-four
The temper in the old Gorman warehouse was already ugly. Polly sat beside Constance Nells on a pair of moldy crates that shouldn’t have been able to hold their weight. Companies with healthier bank balances had moved from the docks to the Woodlands, then farther west across the Clyde. Whatever enterprise used Gorman’s must be in desperate straits. She shivered although the air trapped in that squat, dilapidated stockroom was hot with sweat and the fervor of too many raised voices.
Only invoking her father’s memory had permitted her in the door. Walt Nells had never appeared more intimidating as he let her pass. Neither had he ever looked at her with more scorn. He was there for Connie’s sake, and for her protection.
Polly had only herself.
Hamish stood at the front of the mass of workers. A broad smile shaped
the curve of his beard. “We’ve been here before,” he said as the angered voices quieted. “We’ve been in dire situations, with no clear path to take. We’ve been betrayed by our own over the years. Although those slights won’t be forgotten, we can and must move on.” He stared pointedly toward where Polly sat on the crate.
Her face burned hot. So many words of defense leapt into her throat, but she swallowed them back. She had been too hopeful in believing that Hamish’s civil words at the funeral would continue after he took control.
“Now a strike is our only choice. The masters have been unable to find the perpetrators of the sabotage and arson, so they’re intent to blame us. And why not? They always have.”
Shouts from the crowd threatened to overwhelm his speech. His own fault, Polly thought. Because whipping them into a frenzy was his intent, nothing rational would be said that evening.
What should have been a quiet meeting of no more than a dozen key leaders—including the best, most levelheaded negotiators—had swelled to more than forty people. All believed that they knew the way clear. Polly doubted whether they even understood the extent of the troubles they faced. The union her father had labored to make effective was in tatters. They sat in a dockside warehouse like fugitives, wailing like children deprived of promised sweets.
“Now, to pay for the burned mills,” Hamish continued, “they plan to reduce our wages and cut benefits. Anyone who doesn’t agree to the decrease will be sacked. What are we going to do about it?”
“Strike!” came the sharp reply of dozens of voices.
Hamish raised his voice to be heard above the muddled roar of conversation—some of which spiked toward argument. “We need to make them see we won’t be bullied. We need to hold together!”
“But what are we to live on until then?” a woman called.
“The union has resources to cover the basics. We can do this if we stick close and stay intent on our demands.”
Les stood, lanky as ever, his clothing in disarray. “But what are our demands? Do we even have a consensus, or will the union devolve into a group of autocrats as bad as any masters? I will not support an organization that favors the dictates of a few! We must be in agreement or the center will not hold.”
