Thornton tried to muster a thin smile. “Early, I should think.”
Higgins studied him with that frank, unflinching gaze of his—so different from the deferential stares of the other hands. A man who had stared him down in their worst hour and learned to call him friend afterward.
“Folk are talkin’,” Higgins said at last.
“Let them talk,” Thornton replied, a touch too sharply.
“Aye,” Higgins answered mildly. “They will anyway. But some o’ them are frettin’ proper. They’ve reason to, sir.”
Thornton drew a slow breath. There had been a time he would have resented such directness from any worker—but Higgins was not any worker. The man had earned a right.
“I know they have reason,” Thornton said quietly.
Higgins nodded once. “If ye need a word passed to the men—steady their nerves a bit—I’ll say what I can.”
“Say nothing you don’t believe,” Thornton answered. “There is enough false comfort sold in Milton without my adding to it.”
Higgins’s mouth quirked. “Aye. That’s just it. Ye’re no liar, and ye’re no coward. That’s why they’re waitin’, sir. They want to hear from you.”
Thornton felt the words like a weight. “When I have something worth saying, Higgins, they shall hear it.”
“Aye,” Higgins grunted. “Good night, then.”
“Good night.”
Higgins strode through the gates into the white-capped dark. Thornton lingered, watching until the man’s silhouette vanished entirely. When he returned to the house, the drawing room door flew open before he had fully removed his coat.
“John!” his mother exclaimed, advancing at once. “You are chilled through—you will make yourself ill. Williams brought up the accounts at half-past four, and I have been waiting ever since for you to return so that we may discuss—”
“I have seen the accounts,” he said, hanging his coat with slow care.
Mrs. Thornton’s lips pressed into a thin line, a shield against the anxiety she refused to show. “Then you know how matters stand.”
“Yes.”
“And what do you intend to do?”
The question scraped inside him. “I… do not yet know.”
She faltered—only a moment, only a breath—but it was enough. Her eyes softened with something dangerously near fear. “John,” she murmured, “Marlborough Mills is not like the others. You have stood when they fell. You have survived every trial—every foolish whim of the trade—and you will survive this.”
He wished he believed her.
He wishedshebelieved her.
She said it with conviction. But her eyes flickered—just once—toward the slight bulge in his coat pocket.
He felt it too: the weight of the afternoon post. Half a dozen envelopes he had shoved there at the mill gate rather than open at his desk, in front of the clerks. Their stiff corners pressed through the wool against his chest, sharp as accusations.
“Something important?” she asked. She tried to sound casual, but a thread of something tighter—fear—ran beneath it.
Thornton straightened. “Merely correspondence. I shall look through it in my study.”
“John.” Her hand rested on his arm. “You are overburdened. I can see it plainly. You have taken on too much, and these letters”—her eyes cut to his pocket—“well. If the other masters had faced half the strain you bear, they would have collapsed months ago.”
He might have thanked her, but the words felt foreign. Instead, he reached for the only equilibrium he knew. “It is nothing I cannot manage. I will take my tea in the study.”
Her chin lifted, pride snapping back into place like armor. “Very well. I shall have it brought.”
