Page 58 of The Virtues of Christmas
Chapter Four
The yuletide season was bringing Patience all manner of insights, about herself, about life, about Mr. MacHugh. She occasionally slipped and referred to him as Dougal in her thoughts, because Mr. MacHugh might be a penny-pinching, ambitious merchant, but only Dougal could acquit himself so impressively beneath the mistletoe.
Only Dougal escorted her home, giving her companionship as she left the hum and bustle of the office for the near silence of her home. Only Dougal lent her his copy of Mrs. Wollstonecraft and told her to keep it.
Wednesday morning, though, he was very much Mr. MacHugh.
“If the professor has followed us to Oxford Street, then we should remove to Piccadilly,” Patience said. “He’ll take up at least part of a day finding Jake, and in that time we’ll sell to throngs of holiday shoppers the professor will miss entirely.”
Dougal—Mr. MacHugh, rather—plucked away the pencil Patience had tucked behind her ear and tossed it among the foolscap, pen trimmings, sand, and crumbs on the table.
“Madam, you do not understand. What sells so many copies is the very competition between you and Pennypacker. You and he are putting on a prize fight for the literate. Piccadilly is that much farther from Bloomsbury for Jake to travel, and next you’ll be telling us we should sell in Haymarket.”
Mr. MacHugh looked tired, as if even the effort to explain—his term for denigrating Patience’s logic—wearied him.
“We should do both” Patience said. “Sell in Haymarket and Piccadilly. They’re crowded locations, and we’ll be a novelty. We should do a special edition, one that’s out the previous evening, and give away a few copies so that by morning—”
Mr. MacHugh rose, pinching the bridge of his nose in a gesture reminiscent of a longsuffering governess Patience recalled from nearly a quarter century past.
“Need I remind you, Miss Friendly, we are doing twelve special editions, and to compensate the printer for an evening run would be costly, if he could do it at all with virtually no notice. You’d have Jake shivering in the dark, wasting his health, your time, and my money, all to prove to some gold-plated pompous ass of a professor that you can sell more copies of a broadsheet than he can.”
Patience liked that Mr. MacHugh would raise his voice when a point mattered to him. That was one of the revelations this holiday project had brought.
“Mr. MacHugh—Dougal—sit down, please. The professor and I often disagree about how a problem ought to be solved, but he’s not pompous. He’s erudite, compared to me. Far better read than I am, as is obvious from the literature he quotes. I’m better at Scripture, but that’s because my mother inclined toward the Dissenters.”
Mr. MacHugh didn’t sit so much as he collapsed into his char. “You defend Pennypacker now?”
Patience fished among the detritus on the table for her pencil. “The professor, as you’ve pointed out, has made me a significant sum of money, and you as well. I doubt he’s a gold-plated anything. I know how hard we’re working to get these columns. He has to be putting in comparable effort. Shall we order from the chophouse?”
“I don’t want to order from the blasted chophouse.”
Something was troubling Mr. MacHugh, which made no sense. He was never happier than when the business thrived and he could pit his wits against his competitors. The clerks and newsboys were in a fine humor of late, and the printer had sent around a basket of holiday fruit. Even King George seemed less cranky.
“You are worried this whole scheme will collapse,” Patience said, thinking out loud. “You anticipate that because all is unfolding exactly according to your plan—you’ve increased the print run twice already—disaster will soon strike. This is the thinking of a jilted debutante, sir, and I’ll thank you to put it behind you.”
He ran his hand through his hair, then sat back in one of the poses Patience found most fetching. His ankle crossed over his knee, one arm hooked over the back of the chair. A gentleman would never sit thus before a lady, and a dandy’s breeches would have been too tight to even attempt such a position.
“I’m a jilted debutante? Madam, were you up too late reading that drivel from Mrs. Wollstonecraft?”
Patience had devoured the entire treatise in a single sitting on Monday night.
“You can’t bait me that easily, Mr. MacHugh. I’m speaking from experience. When I realized the viscount had been in love with my settlements, not me, I saw betrayal everywhere. If the coal man made a mistake on his bill, if the pastor failed to greet me personally on the church steps, I was certain they intended thievery and insult.”
He sat forward and organized the loose papers into a stack, then swept the crumbs and trimmings into his palm. “How do you know the coal man wasn’t trying to cheat you, or the pastor trying to cut his association with you?”
“The coal man had never cheated us previously, not in years of service. The pastor was a busy man. They hadn’t changed, I had. You planned on modest success, you didn’t plan on this scheme making you the talk of the town.”
The orts and leavings from the table went into the dustbin. “I’m not a problem to be solved, Patience. What will you do about the lady who’s overspent her holiday shopping budget?”
“Why won’t you let me answer the woman whose husband is drinking away the rent money?”
He lifted the cat off the mantel and resettled in his chair. “I’m working on that one. Give me some time. You can’t suborn petit treason and expect this publishing house to stand.”
A week ago, Patience would have argued this issue too, but since then, she’d seen the publishing house from the inside. Most of the staff was young, just starting out, and if the business failed, they’d face a long, expensive journey home to Scotland. Some of them wouldn’t have the means to make that journey.
Jake was the oldest of six, with another on the way. His father was a groom at a coaching house, his mother took in mending.
Harry aspired to become a man of business.
