The Duchess War (Brothers Sinister #1)

Someday…


Someday, Lydia would discover all that Minnie had withheld from her. Their friendship couldn’t survive it. It wasn’t the truth of what had happened that would destroy their intimacy, but the fact that she had held it back all those years. That she’d been the repository for her friend’s darkest secrets, while holding her own selfishly close to her chest.

It wasn’t a matter of if they would stop being friends. It was a question of when. And yet Minnie had been unable to give her up. Lydia was warm and hopeful and happy, and sometimes, despite Minnie’s logical bent, Lydia managed to infect her with sheer optimism.

Sometimes, she believed they would be happy. There would be no more fears for the future. It would all come out right, and they would be friends forever.

Of all the fool fantasies that Minnie could have indulged in, that was the one that hooked deep under her skin, the one that she could never let go. And so she simply held her friend and prayed that she would not be proven right too quickly.

“So,” Lydia said. “The Duke of Clermont spoke to you for a long while there. What did he say?”

“Nothing.” But Minnie smiled despite herself. “Nothing at all.”

THE DWELLING—IF YOU COULD CALL IT THAT, and Robert was uncertain it deserved the title—was the worst kind of slum. What plaster remained on the wall of the single room was cracked and streaked with soot. The single room smelt of sour vinegar and old cabbage. The chair he sat in was uncomfortably close to the ground, as if one leg had broken and they’d cut the rest down to match. If he leaned too far to either side, the chair squeaked and swayed. This squalid tenement represented everything that Robert’s father had put wrong in Leicester, and he’d come to fix it all.

It had taken Robert far too long to try to make amends. But in his defense, he’d only recently discovered what had gone wrong.

In front of him, the resident—a thin, coughing man by the name of Finney—pulled his coat around him.

“Graydon Boots.” Finney pushed back in his seat and stared at the ceiling. “Now that is a name I’ve not let myself think in years. I last worked for them back in…’58, was it?”

“That is what the records say,” Robert told him.

The man pointed his pipe at Robert. “And you’re telling me that after all these years, after Graydon Boots has been gone for over a decade, that some high Muck-a-Muck wants to award me a pension. Me.”

Robert nodded.

“Mr. Blaisdell, I spent four months in prison. It ruined my health, but my mind still works. I’ll not be believing that, I won’t. There’s some kind of trick.”

There wasn’t a trick. Robert’s grandfather had given the factory to his father as part of a devil’s bargain. His father—who had known nothing of industry—had handed the factory over to an overseer and ordered him to extract as much profit from it as he could get. Robert had only discovered the place while looking over his grandfather’s records from decades before. His father’s books, incomplete as they generally were, hadn’t even mentioned it.

“Mr. Finney,” Robert said, “I am not telling you that Graydon Boots is awarding you a pension. That would be absurd. The charity I represent has been looking into the events of that year. They’ve decided you were unfairly imprisoned.”

“I’ve been saying that for years.”

“In fact, Leicester has a curious history in that regard,” Robert said. “Did you know that more people have been convicted of criminal sedition in Leicester in the last decade than in the entirety of England?”

Another thing his father’s overseer had started, as best as Robert could tell, and that hadn’t ended when the factory went under.

“We speak our minds here, we do.”

Robert set the papers on the table. “Speaking your mind is only illegal if your words are intended to create disaffection with the government. Not with your masters; with the government.” At first, Robert had only wanted to try to make right what his father had destroyed. But the closer he’d looked, the more he’d found. He’d eventually gone through the records of those trials, and it was clear that the jury had not been correctly charged with the law. “You should never have been convicted simply for organizing a union.”

Finney looked at him, shaking his head. “As you say. But the masters get what the masters want. I don’t want to be involved any longer. I’ve my hands full with the Cooperative, I do.”

As if to emphasize this, the door to the tiny room opened. Two women stood in the doorframe. One, a thin elderly woman in a sagging brown gown had a sack of groceries. She shoved at a yellowing cap that was slipping from her head, and gestured to her companion. “I just don’t think it will work, is all I’m saying.”