Dr. Madsen returned with a ream of fine, cream-colored parchment, an inkwell, and a set of sharpened quills. He set them on the desk with the quiet reverence of a man humoring a patient's strange fixation.
"I will inform the staff you are not to be disturbed, my lord," the doctor said, "but I implore you, do not overtax your mind. Rest is the best medicine."
Christian gave a curt nod, his eyes already fixed on the blank sheets. "Thank you, Doctor. Your advice is noted."
The moment the door clicked shut, he was at the desk. The first thing he wrote was not a plan or a proclamation, but a simple list. It was a request for documents, addressed to the family's majordomo who ran the Copenhagen residence.
He needed the Eskildsgård ledgers for the past five years. He needed all geological and agricultural surveys of the barony, no matter how old. He needed maps, records of tenancy agreements, and all correspondence from the estate manager, a man named Henrik Madsen. To this, he added a request for the most recent naval budget reports, engineering journals from Britain and Germany, and any parliamentary records pertaining to trade and tariffs.
When the majordomo, a stout and balding man named Jens, received the list, he blinked in astonishment. He had served the Eskildsen family for thirty years. He remembered the young Christian as a boy who preferred a sword or the reins of a horse to a book. But the request was from his lord, the son of the Count who was at that very moment facing Prussian cannons. The order was to be obeyed.
For the next week, Christian's world shrank to the four walls of his room. The chamber became his command center, the desk his battlefield. A fortress of paper grew around him, each sheet a tile in the mosaic of his new reality. Food was brought by a quiet valet named Lars, a man whose face, from the boy's memories, was associated with gentle companionship.
"The fall seems to have knocked a love of ledgers into you, my lord," Lars remarked on the third day, placing a tray with bread and cheese beside a teetering stack of agricultural reports.
Christian didn't look up from a map of his estate's drainage systems. "It knocked the frivolity out, Lars. My father is at war. This is my battlefield now."
The valet said nothing, but he left with a new, troubled expression in his eyes. He was looking at his master, but seeing a stranger.
Christian worked with a furious, cold efficiency that was utterly alien to the 19th century. He mentally converted hectares to acres, rigsdaler to a theoretical gold standard he could manipulate. He cross-referenced grain prices in Odense with shipping costs to England. He scoffed at the pathetic returns of the three-field system still employed at Eskildsgård, a method centuries out of date. He saw forests not as landscapes, but as cubic meters of timber; he saw fallow fields not as resting land, but as wasted production capacity.
He read with horror and grim satisfaction the Danish naval reports. The fleet was a museum piece, filled with proud ships-of-the-line that a single British ironclad, a vessel like the HMS Warrior he knew was already five years old, could sink without receiving a scratch. The Danish military was preparing to fight the last war, while Prussia was methodically preparing to fight the next one. Everything he read confirmed the grim trajectory of history.
It was on the evening of the eighth day that he found it.
He was deep in the Eskildsgård timber ledgers. On the surface, they appeared orderly. A steady, modest income from the selective felling of oak in the barony's northern woods. But something nagged at him. He knew from his own timeline that the British Royal Navy was in a frantic shipbuilding race with France. High-quality oak, especially the straight-grained, resilient timber that grew in parts of Denmark, was a strategic resource. The prices being paid at the Portsmouth shipyards were astronomical.
The prices recorded in his father's ledger by Henrik Madsen were not.
With painstaking effort, Christian began a cross-analysis. He compared the recorded income with the estimated volume of felled trees, a number he had to painstakingly derive from separate supply requisitions for the estate's lumberjacks. A gap appeared. A small one at first, but consistent. Then he found a separate ledger for the estate's small port, tracking docking fees and cargo manifests.
He saw regular shipments from a timber merchant he did not recognize, a company with no other business with the estate. The shipments were small, but frequent. Their cargo was listed as "firewood" or "surplus lumber," sold for a pittance. But the dates of these shipments coincided perfectly with the felling of prime oak trees in the northern woods.
It was a classic, simple fraud. The estate manager, Henrik Madsen, was clear-felling the most valuable timber, selling it through a proxy company for its true, exorbitant market price, and recording only a fraction of the income in the official ledgers. He was not merely skimming from the estate; he was liquidating its most valuable long-term asset to line his own pockets while the Count, his master, was risking his life for the nation.
The rage that filled Christian was cold and pure. It was not the hot-headed anger of the boy whose inheritance was being stolen. It was the icy fury of a CEO who has discovered a traitor in the boardroom. This man was not just a thief; he was an obstacle. A piece of rot in the foundation he was about to lay.
He slowly closed the final ledger. The soft click echoed in the quiet room. He stared at the flickering candlelight, his blue eyes turning hard as chips of winter ice.
Before you build an empire, you must first have a kingdom. Before you have a kingdom, you must have a barony. And before you can command a barony, it must be yours in fact, not just in name.
His first act as the true Baron of Eskildsgård was now clear. It would not be to sow new seeds or design new machines.
It would be to wield an axe.