Chapter Text
After several weeks of intensive preparation, with Margaret Hale working closely with Hannah Thornton, Nicholas Higgins, Mary Higgins and her fiancé John Thornton, Marlborough Mills was steadily heaving back into all its forms of business.
Margaret now lay, pleasantly exhausted yet unable to sleep, in the bed in Fanny Watson's old rooms in the Thornton house. Her mind felt like treacle, turning over all that she was learning in her new life. The training which she had coaxed from Henry Lennox in managing her business affairs, and her experience of running her parents' home alongside Dixon in those awful months of her mother's final illness, as well as the insights from her precious brief friendship with Bessy Higgins after years of visiting her father's rural parishioners, all stood her in good stead at the mill. But there were some complexities for which she felt very ill-prepared.
She, Hannah Thornton and John Thornton were cautiously treading a new path through the needs of the workers of Marlborough Mills and the constraints of the cotton milling business. Thanks to Mr Bell's more - mercenary? - approach, their capital was still substantial even with careful provision made for re-supply of raw materials, readying of machinery, and preparations for rudimentary schooling of the mill children in the re-established common dining room, and work on a new mill infirmary room besides. The present Mrs Thornton seemed almost relieved to negotiate a more simple household practice with Mr Thornton and the putative future Mrs Thornton. Having lost all for a second time, Hannah Thornton had grimly re-assessed her priorities, and had even once been seen taking a light lunch in the common room alongside John and Margaret.
The first new cotton cloth orders were now close to completion, the tale of workers now almost complete, and those workers seemed to be generally in good health and good spirits. The long workers' hours which were needed to parallel the output and prices of their competitors were a source of real vexation and anxiety to Margaret however. The quality of Marlborough Mills cloth used to command higher prices, but time would be needed to re-establish their reputation, and to sell the quantities of fine cloth needed to balance the mill books without exploiting the workers. Margaret frowned deeply, and sighed with frustration.
Knowing that sleep was needed to find a solution to these conundrums, Margaret calmed herself by breathing more slowly and thinking of her personal items, safely arrived from Edith Lennox and Aunt Shaw in London. The precious few letters from Frederick - she had already written to him to share all her wonderful news - her favourite of her mother's Indian shawls, her father's Homer, even Bessy Higgins' tin cup, all safely placed into bureau, closet and bedside cabinet.
Her restless mind turned to her invaluable little personal library, a few books each from her favoured London and Milton book sellers. On the shelf were the more genteel books - small French and Italian dictionaries, a well-thumbed copy of Austen's Persuasion, beside Brontë, Paine, Wollstonecraft and Smith ... Meanwhile, locked in her trunk, the key safely on a chain around her neck, were her most special books - such as the newly arrived "Narrative of the Life of James Watkins" - which even John Thornton had not yet seen in her possession.
Margaret's stomach clenched slightly as she thought of James Watkins' book, and that little she knew thusfar of what he had so lately and so narrowly escaped ... She resolved to read it on the very next Sunday ... so, she owned to herself, that she could put the unpleasant prospect to one side for a just few more days of accomplished ignorance.
Once again, Margaret took refuge in her personal privileges and comforts, to steady her mind disquieted by wrestling with seemingly intractable problems of humanity's oppression of humanity.
She quickly flushed as she turned to contemplating the most secret book in her small collection. Despite co-operating with Hannah Thornton's chaparonage of the betrothed couple, and despite the long hours which all at Marlborough Mills continued to work, still John and Margaret had been able to find a few private moments in which to embrace, indeed to kiss, and to speed one another's heart-beats and to steal one another's breath away.
Here was yet another barely tractable dilemma. Margaret found herself inexorably drawn in by the physical sensations that her love for John was increasingly stirring, and her desire to know everything about where those sensations were leading.
Yet, the more she contemplated the legal implications of becoming a married woman, the more conflicted she became. No matter the depth of her love for and trust of John Thornton, and her respect for Hannah Thornton, as she came to fully comprehend the legal status of married women, she found increasingly that the laws actually sickened her.
Margaret turned rapidly under her sheets and then felt another wave of frustration with herself. Sleep, sleep was what she needed - the new dawn would bring her rested body and mind, new hope and new inspiration: if only she could sleep.
Unbidden, the thought of how comforting it would be now to share an embrace with John Thornton, and in low tones exchange mutual re-assurances of how they would care for, love and support one another through every challenge, rose in Margaret's mind. Craving sleep, Margaret began to boldly indulge and swell this thought into a fantasy of the scent of John's soap-clean skin, the warmth of their lips together, the sound of their roughened breathing, the feeling of excitement and anticipation pooling in her lower abdomen, the idea of their hands pushing aside their sleeping garments, the ecstasy of hot naked skin on skin .. that other special, most secret book was revealing such pleasing secrets that Margaret soon found fulfilment for herself, and thus sleep.