The Reluctant Countess

Chapter Seventeen: A Costly Shipment

Sedgwick’s failure with Calloway seemed, for a fortnight, to have quieted him entirely — a silence that James, by now well practiced in reading the particular stillness before a man like Charles or Sedgwick struck again, found considerably more unsettling than open aggression would have been. Aniya agreed. She’d grown up, she reminded him, watching her father navigate men exactly like this one, and she knew better than to mistake quiet for retreat.

The blow, when it came, landed against the one shipment the Rao company could least afford to lose — a consignment of textiles and spices representing nearly a third of the season’s expected profit, contracted to sail from the docks under an agreement Mr. Rao had spent months securing. It never left port. A dispute arose, conveniently, over the ship’s registration papers — a technicality, buried in maritime law, that Sedgwick’s own solicitors had apparently identified and quietly exploited through a connection at the customs house, delaying the shipment past the season’s final favorable winds and leaving the entire cargo, and the capital tied up in it, stranded.

Mr. Rao took the news harder than James had seen him take anything since Sedgwick first arrived at the warehouse door. It wasn’t simply the lost profit, he explained, sitting heavily at his own desk with the particular exhaustion of a man doing sums that refused to come out right — it was the ripple of it. Contracts he’d have honored with that season’s profit now sat unfunded. Partners he’d promised payment to would have to wait, or worse, would hear of the delay and wonder, as partners always did, whether the Rao company was finally beginning to falter the way Sedgwick had clearly been counting on all along.

Aniya, reading the shipping documents with the same sharp focus James had come to rely on, found the technicality itself within the hour — a registration clause so obscure that only a man with considerable resources and considerable malice would have thought to look for it at all. She said, grimly, that it could likely be fought and overturned, given time and the right maritime counsel. But time was exactly the resource Sedgwick had calculated they didn’t have, with the season’s winds already turning and every week of delay compounding the damage.

James, watching her work, felt something harden in his own chest — not fear, exactly, though there was fear in it too, but a fierce, protective anger on behalf of a family that had done nothing to deserve this beyond the simple crime of succeeding in a world that men like Sedgwick believed belonged to them alone. He told Aniya, and her father, that Wentmoor’s own reserves — modest, but real, rebuilt carefully over the two years since their marriage — were available to bridge whatever gap the delay created, without question, without hesitation.

Mr. Rao objected at once, with the particular stubborn pride James had come to recognize as a family trait shared fully by his daughter — he wouldn’t have James’s own hard-won solvency risked to cover a Rao company crisis, not after everything James had already given to secure it in the first place. James, for once, found himself considerably more stubborn than his father-in-law, and said so plainly: that Wentmoor’s solvency existed, in no small part, because of the marriage that had joined their two families together, and he had no intention of drawing some careful line now about whose crisis belonged to whom. Aniya’s family’s fight was his fight. It had been from the moment he’d married her, whatever contracts or arrangements had first brought them together.

Aniya, watching the exchange, said nothing for a long moment — and when James finally looked at her, he found her eyes bright in a way that had nothing to do with the crisis at hand.

That night, after her father had finally, reluctantly, accepted the offer, Aniya found James alone on the terrace, the same terrace where he’d first told her he loved her, nearly two years before, and told him that she didn’t think she’d ever properly explained what it had meant to her, watching him defend her family with no hesitation at all, as though the question of whether it was truly his fight had never seriously occurred to him.

James told her, simply, that it hadn’t. Somewhere in the two years since that first terrible drawing room, her family had become his family, as completely and unquestionably as Margaret or Wentmoor’s tenants had always been. He didn’t know precisely when that had happened. He only knew it had, and that he wouldn’t trade it back for anything Sedgwick or Charles or any other man might threaten him with.

Aniya kissed him then, slow and fierce, and told him that she loved him more with every single year that passed, which she’d have thought impossible, given how thoroughly she’d already loved him the day she agreed to marry a man she’d fully expected to despise.

James, laughing against her mouth, told her he was profoundly grateful, every single day, that she’d been wrong about that particular expectation.

The shipment, when Calloway’s maritime counsel finally forced the customs house to release it three weeks later, sailed late and cost the company dearly in lost contracts and damaged goodwill — a wound, not a fatal blow, but a wound all the same, and one that told James, watching Mr. Rao’s careful, worried accounting of the damage, that Sedgwick’s campaign was far from finished. If anything, the man’s failure to land a killing blow this time seemed only to have sharpened his resolve.

James understood, watching Aniya work late into the night beside her father, that whatever came next would demand more of all of them than anything Charles Ashworth had ever managed to throw their way.