Today's Reading
CHAPTER ONE
I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds. -Michael Faraday
London
1845
"How do you manage to make the words You know best sound like I know best?"
"Because...I know best?"
Oh, for feck's sake.
A large man sat opposite Sam Fenley at a cheap but polished wood desk. Sam considered him a friend.
He also considered punching him.
That's how it was sometimes with men. Clap them on the shoulder one day, punch them the next—no hard feelings.
When Sam was younger, that was how it was with his sisters until they learned Sam couldn't stand it when they cried. They would simply wobble their lower lip and he'd wind up punching himself to keep them from sobbing.
"Listen to me, Fenley. I understand your crusade against the Corn Laws." The Earl Grantham rubbed his face with a gloved hand. Dark smudges beneath his blue eyes made him seem older than his two and thirty years.
Sam had bought a newspaper from the earl last year and within six months made enough of a profit to buy a second. It said a good deal about Sam's generosity of spirit that he let the earl sit in his office and tell him what to print after Grantham had gone and sold him The Capital's Chronicle. Then again, Grantham was a giant of a man and ridiculously stubborn.
"However," the earl continued. "The last article The Chronicle printed has overestimated the scarcity of Britain's wheat crop. Yours and other anti-Corn Law broadsheets will panic the population. More trouble will come from your reporting than progress."
Sam knew Grantham meant well, but this wasn't about the earl's fears. It was about money and power. Or the lack thereof. Pleasure from watching his sales grow leaps and bounds was undeniable, but Sam also gained satisfaction from publishing articles informing regular folk about what their government was doing and why it mattered.
"If I back down now," Sam said, "it gives more fuel to the pro-Corn Law fires. The Corn Laws pour money into landowners' coffers and take it away from the majority of England's working folk."
Sam wasn't telling Grantham anything he didn't know, but he continued anyway, blood boiling as it often did when speaking of the advantages the titled classes held over the rest of the population.
The Corn Laws taxed corn—wheat, barley, and all other cereal grains—from outside Britain. On paper, this appeared to help domestic agriculture, but the taxes made food more expensive for everyone, while political power stayed in the hands of wealthy landowners who profited from the rising price of domestic corn.
"In this great country of ours, if you don't own land, you don't get to vote. How is that acceptable in our day and age?" Simply saying the words out loud angered Sam. The landowners didn't benefit only from the artificial pricing, they also handpicked their Members of Parliament and told them how to vote. "Universal suffrage is the goal, and I'm not above embellishing when it comes to a worthy goal."
Grantham opened his mouth to speak, but Sam beat him to it.
"As you are not above embellishing when it comes to stealing women away from other men."
Grantham's jaw clicked softly when he clamped his lips together, and the tips of his ears went red. It said much about the earl's good nature that he didn't fall for the bait.
Sam had tried his hardest to charm the engineer Margaret Gault, but she'd gone and married Grantham, her childhood sweetheart. Why she didn't prefer Sam, a man who had made a fortune of his family's business, turned around a failing newspaper, and set his sights on expanding his holdings even further, was a mystery.
Sam had fallen at Margaret's feet. In the most literal sense, unfortunately. Fallen, tripped, tumbled—a product of Sam's adversarial relationship with immovable objects. Not exactly the stuff of fevered dreams when a man reaches for your hand, loses his balance, and hits the floor with his face.
Huh. Perhaps Margaret's decision was not mysterious after all?
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