New York City — January 1764
January made liars of men who claimed they did not fear cold.
It did not always arrive with snow. Sometimes it arrived as wind that cut through wool as if cloth were a suggestion, as damp that crept into bone and stayed there, as ice that formed overnight and turned a simple step into a broken wrist. Work did not stop—New York was too hungry to allow that—but work became slower and more expensive, and every man in trade began to look for someone else to blame.
Thomas Hawthorne did not blame winter.
He treated it the way he treated everything else: a condition to be measured, not a feeling to be indulged.
The shop woke before dawn. Margaret lit the stove and set the ledger out before the others arrived. Pieter came next, moving quietly, stamping snow from his boots at the threshold without being told. Samuel Pike and Jonah Mercer followed, shoulders hunched, faces set into the same expression Thomas had seen on the wharf: endurance without complaint, because complaint did not buy bread.
By the time the light turned from black to gray, the shop was already working.
Oak waited stacked where it would not drink damp from the wall. Iron waited wrapped in oiled cloth. Coal sat under canvas, protected like a soldier's powder. The forge, small but reliable, held its heat like a secret.
Outside, other shops argued with the season.
A cart rolled past with a load of half-warped staves, the driver shouting about how the yard had cheated him. Later that morning, a chairmaker Thomas vaguely recognized banged on the door, red-faced with anger.
"You've got timber," the man said the moment Thomas opened. "Where are you getting it? The yards won't sell for less than robbery now."
Thomas looked at him for a moment. "I pay what I owe," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're entitled to."
The chairmaker's mouth opened, then closed. Pride wrestled with desperation. Desperation won.
"I've got an order I can't fill," the man said, quieter. "If I fail, I lose the customer. If I lose the customer, I lose the year."
Thomas watched him carefully. He would not be moved by panic. Panic was contagious.
"What is the order?" Thomas asked.
"Crates. Twenty. For a merchant house."
Thomas nodded once. Crates were not food. Not finished luxury. Wood shaped into usefulness. Simple.
"I'll sell you boards," Thomas said. "Raw cut. You build your own crates."
The man blinked. "You're not making them?"
"I'm not saving you," Thomas replied. "I'm selling you what you need to do your work."
The chairmaker swallowed, then nodded, humiliated and relieved at once. "How much?"
Margaret's eyes flicked up from the ledger, ready.
Thomas named a fair price—low enough to keep the man alive, high enough to prevent him from returning every week like a beggar. Charity destroyed discipline. Discipline created loyalty.
When the chairmaker left with his boards, Margaret exhaled slowly. "He'll talk."
"Let him," Thomas said. "He'll say I sell wood. Not miracles."
Pieter muttered something in Dutch that Thomas did not catch, but the tone was approval.
By mid-January, the war's end had begun to show its teeth.
Not with cannon. With ink.
Customs men appeared more often by the docks. Clerks asked questions that sounded innocent until you heard them twice. Merchants complained about "new attention" from London, the sort that always arrived after victory—order, measurement, control.
Caleb Thorn came again, not polished this time, but annoyed.
"They've passed something," Thorn said, standing just inside the doorway as though cold might seep into his bones from the floorboards. "A revenue act. Sugar. Molasses. Paperwork. They want money without calling it tax."
Thomas did not stop working. "And you want me to panic."
"I want you to understand the direction of the wind," Thorn snapped. "They're building garrisons. Permanent ones. Soldiers cost coin. Coin comes from somewhere."
"From here," Margaret said softly, eyes on her figures.
Thorn pointed at her as if offended by truth spoken plainly. "Exactly."
Thomas set down his tool and looked at Thorn fully. "What do you want?"
Thorn hesitated—he had not expected the question to be asked so directly. "I want steady supply," he said. "When the paperwork strangles everyone else, the men who can still deliver will own the year."
"I don't sell exclusivity," Thomas said.
"You'll be crushed," Thorn insisted. "They'll pick favorites."
Thomas held Thorn's gaze a moment longer than comfort allowed. "Then I'll make myself too useful to crush," he said.
Thorn's mouth tightened. He left without agreement, which meant he would return again later, either humbled or sharpened.
That same week, Ensign Hale came to the shop after dusk.
He did not knock loudly. He was learning caution.
Thomas opened the door and saw him standing in the dark with his hat in his hands, breath visible.
"They're talking about quartering," Hale said quietly. "Not yet, but… talk."
"Where?" Thomas asked.
Hale hesitated. "The officers. The commissary men. They say it like it's a matter of tidiness."
Tidiness. The word made Thomas almost smile.
"And your men?" Thomas asked.
"They don't like it," Hale admitted. "Nobody says so out loud."
Thomas nodded. "Then you're here for barrels."
Hale flinched at the accuracy. "And crates. And fittings. The north stores are a mess. If the war is done, they want to look like they planned it."
Thomas let him stand in the cold a moment longer, not out of cruelty, but to let Hale feel the weight of asking.
"I will supply," Thomas said at last. "Paid on delivery. No promises that bind me beyond what I agree to."
Hale nodded quickly. "That's fair."
"Nothing is fair," Thomas corrected. "This is simply clean."
Margaret, listening from behind the desk, wrote the order down without being told.
After Hale left, she looked up. "That ties you to them."
Thomas did not deny it. "It ties them to me," he replied.
Late January brought the first real failure of other men's supply.
Elias Brouwer arrived with a face pinched hard by worry.
"Staves," Brouwer said immediately. "The yard says they can't deliver what they promised. They blame the river. They blame the war. They blame God."
"And you blame me?" Thomas asked.
Brouwer spread his hands helplessly. "I blame anyone who can answer."
Thomas nodded once. Brouwer was not a fool. Brouwer was a man whose business survived on wood and hoops and the mercy of fishermen who could not wait.
"I can give you raw staves," Thomas said. "You finish them."
Brouwer blinked. "You're giving me the hard part."
"I'm giving you the part you cannot obtain," Thomas replied. "You keep your men working, you keep your customers fed, and you keep your name alive."
Brouwer's throat bobbed. "And what do you want?"
"Nothing you can't afford," Thomas said. "A fair price. Paid on delivery. And one thing more."
Brouwer tensed. "What?"
"Introduce me," Thomas said, "to the man who controls cartage on Water Street."
Brouwer stared. "Cartage?"
Thomas held his gaze. "Wood is useless if it cannot move."
Brouwer hesitated, then nodded slowly. "Matthew Crowell," he said. "He's a stubborn bastard. He'll try to charge you twice."
"Then I'll pay him once," Thomas replied. "And remember."
Brouwer left with his staves.
Margaret watched him go, then looked back at Thomas. "You're not just a shop anymore."
"No," Thomas agreed. "A shop waits for work. A supplier decides where work goes."
Two days later, Thomas met Matthew Crowell.
Not in a parlor or an office, but by the docks, where men shouted and ice floes bumped against pilings like dull teeth. Crowell was broad and red-faced, a man built like a barrel and dressed like a man who wanted you to know he could afford better but chose not to.
"So you're Hawthorne," Crowell said, looking Thomas up and down. "Brouwer says you have wood when nobody else does."
"I have wood," Thomas said. He did not add anything else.
Crowell's eyes narrowed. "How?"
Thomas let the silence answer.
Crowell spat into the river. "Fine. You want cartage. My men move your loads. I charge—"
Thomas interrupted, calmly. "You charge fair," he said.
Crowell barked a laugh. "Fair is for priests."
"Then charge what keeps your men alive without making you greedy," Thomas replied. "If you try to squeeze me, I will stop using you, and you will never know why."
Crowell's grin faded. Men like Crowell did not fear threats. They feared uncertainty.
"You talk like a man with choices," Crowell said carefully.
Thomas nodded. "I am."
Crowell stared a moment longer, then jerked his chin once. "Two wagons a week," he said. "First run tomorrow. Paid on delivery."
"Agreed," Thomas said.
They shook hands. Crowell's grip was hard. Thomas's was harder.
That night, Thomas returned to the shop and found Father Keane waiting inside, warmed by the stove, hands folded as if he belonged there.
"Brick arrived," the priest said quietly.
Thomas nodded. "Keep it out of sight."
"We will," Father Keane said. "But you should know—some men are asking why our parish suddenly has materials when other people can't even get boards."
Thomas did not show irritation. He had expected suspicion. Suspicion was the price of competence in a world built on shortage.
"What did you tell them?" Thomas asked.
"That God provides," Father Keane said, and for the first time Thomas saw something like amusement in the priest's eyes. "They don't like that answer, but they can't argue with it."
Thomas allowed himself the smallest breath of laughter—silent, gone instantly.
"Tell them," Thomas said, "that we buy plain and we build slow. No show. No pride."
Father Keane nodded. "Slow," he repeated, as if tasting the word. "That I can promise."
January ended with snow.
Not a storm, not a spectacle—just steady whiteness that muffled the city and made every footstep sound like a decision. The river iced more fully. Ships sat longer. Merchants argued more. Men who had served in the war began to look for other wars to justify their pay.
Thomas did not argue with them. He watched. He recorded. He adjusted.
In the ledger, Margaret had begun keeping a second list—not wages, not costs, but names of families tied to the shop by need and by work. Widows. Veterans. Apprentices. The kind of people who remembered who paid when payment was not fashionable.
Patrick Doyle came by after school, slate under his arm, cheeks red from cold.
"I can write cleaner now," he said, proud.
Thomas took the slate, checked the numbers, then handed it back. "Good," he said. "Now learn to keep your eyes down when men speak loudly."
Patrick frowned. "Why?"
"Because loud men want witnesses," Thomas replied. "Quiet men want results."
Patrick nodded slowly, absorbing more than sums.
Pieter watched the exchange and said, carefully, in broken English, "Boy… future."
"Yes," Thomas said. "Future."
Outside, peace continued to harden into something sharp.
And inside the shop, oak became crates, iron became bands, names became a network, and the first parish walls began to rise—not high enough to offend anyone, not fast enough to invite a crackdown, but real enough that the city could not pretend it hadn't begun.
Thomas locked the door that night and listened to the forge tick as it cooled.
Winter had weight.
So did he.
And history, he suspected, was about to discover that weight was not the same thing as noise.