Chapter 3
The dowager’s walking stick struck the floor three times in rapid succession, a percussive command that the household had long since learned to interpret as a summons, a dismissal, or a declaration of war, depending on the angle of the old woman’s chin.
“Girls,” Margaret Oxley said, and the single word carried the temperature of a January frost. “You will remove yourselves. I wish to speak with His Grace privately. Josephine, you may go with them.”
The four sisters turned in unison, a choreography of obedience so practiced it had become instinctive.
Josephine caught the minute flex of muscle when Seraphina’s jaw tightened, the swallowed protest, but the eldest moved toward the door without argument, her sisters falling into line behind her like ducklings in black bombazine.
They had learned, all of them, that resistance in the dowager’s presence was a currency best spent sparingly.
Josephine did not move.
It was a small act of defiance, and her body punished her for it immediately with a hot surge of panic that began in her chest and radiated outward to her fingertips, which she pressed against the fabric of her skirt to still their trembling.
She had learned over the course of a year in this house that courage was not the absence of fear but rather the grim, teeth-clenched decision to act in spite of it.
And so she remained by the window, with her spine straight and her hands hidden in the folds of her mourning gown, and willed her voice to emerge even.
“With respect, Your Grace, I believe I shall stay.”
The silence that followed was the peculiar variety that precedes a storm.
Heavy, pressurized, and tasting faintly of copper.
Margaret Oxley’s pale blue eyes, already cold, hardened to something geological.
The walking stick tilted forward an inch, as though the old woman were considering whether to wield it as a weapon.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said I shall stay.” Josephine swallowed, but kept her chin level.
“I am, as you have often reminded me, the Dowager Duchess of Oxley. I have as much right to be present for discussions concerning the estate and the welfare of the family as any other member of this household. Indeed,” she added, and here the steadfastness of her own voice surprised her, “as there are two dowager duchesses in residence, it seems rather fitting that both should be included.”
At the now-open door, the girls had frozen.
Seraphina’s hand hovered on the handle, her blue-green eyes wide, emotions swirling in their depths.
Arabella’s porcelain poise cracked just enough to reveal the startled woman beneath.
Even the twins, pressed close together in the corridor, were peering back into the room with expressions of astonished fascination, as though Josephine had just performed a feat of acrobatics rather than spoken a few sentences.
Margaret’s mouth opened. Josephine braced herself for the verbal assault that would follow, but before the old woman could speak, a deep voice intervened.
“The duchess is quite right.”
Alistair Fraser-Oxley had not raised his voice.
He had not needed to. The words landed in the room with the flat, absolute authority of a cornerstone being set, and Josephine felt something loosen behind her ribs, a knot she had not known she was carrying, released by the simple, extraordinary act of being supported.
He was standing near the fireplace, his arms folded across his broad chest in a posture that managed to be both casual and immovable.
His stormy blue eyes moved from the dowager to Josephine and held there, for the span of a breath, with a flicker of warmth and approval that vanished almost as quickly as it appeared.
“She has every right to be present,” he continued, turning back to Margaret. “Moreover, as the late duke’s widow, she is likely to possess information that will be useful to me. Her Grace stays.”
Josephine schooled her features into the serene mask she had spent a year perfecting, though behind it her heart was hammering.
She thought of the secret she carried, the one that pressed against the walls of her dignity every hour of every day, and how swiftly everything would unravel if Margaret ever discovered it.
The old woman missed nothing. She cataloged every misstep, hoarded every suspicion.
Josephine could not afford to draw her scrutiny, and yet here she was, standing her ground in full view of the dragon’s pale blue gaze.
Do it anyway. You cannot protect them if you are invisible.
She glanced toward the door and gave the smallest nod. Seraphina hesitated a moment longer, her sharp gaze flicking between the dowager and the new duke with the wariness of a chess player assessing the board, then ushered her sisters into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind them.
The latch clicked, and the three of them were alone.
Margaret wasted no time. She settled her walking stick against the arm of her chair with the deliberateness of a general planting a standard and fixed Alistair with a stare that had, over the decades, reduced stronger constitutions than Josephine’s to stammering compliance.
“Very well, then, since we are apparently conducting a committee rather than a private audience, let us address the matter directly.” The old woman’s voice was thin and nasal, pitched to carry reprimand the way a church bell carries doom.
“You are now the Duke of Oxley. I trust you understand what that entails.”
“I have some notion,” Alistair said. Josephine caught the faintest thread of dry humor in his tone, a note so understated that Margaret, whose appreciation for irony had evidently atrophied decades ago, missed it entirely.
“It entails responsibility,” the dowager continued, as though he had not spoken.
“It entails the stewardship of eight hundred years of history, a seat in the House of Lords, and the upholding of a name that has been carried with dignity through the reigns of eleven monarchs. It does not entail the continued operation of a textile mill.”
Josephine watched Alistair’s face. She had positioned herself carefully, still by the window but angled now so that she could observe both the dowager and the new duke without appearing to study either.
It was a skill she had honed to an art form, the ability to watch without being watched, to catalog expressions while presenting to the world the serene, unreadable surface of a woman who had learned that visibility was danger.
Alistair’s expression did not change. That alone was remarkable.
Josephine had seen men twice his age quail beneath that certain tone of Margaret’s.
The late duke’s solicitor, the village physician, even the archdeacon who had come to deliver Christmas service had once gone pale and fumbled his sermon when the old woman remarked upon his pronunciation of the Nicene Creed.
But the man by the fireplace merely regarded his grandmother with the unimpressed stillness of someone who had been shouted at by far more formidable adversaries and found the experience educational rather than distressing.
“You will divest yourself of that shameful business,” Margaret continued, gathering momentum as a woman accustomed to monologue.
“It has been a source of unspeakable embarrassment to this family for decades. Your father’s little enterprise, parading the Oxley name through the gutters of commerce.
That a Duke of Oxley should be associated with manufacturing is beyond mortification.
” She drew a breath that quivered with righteous conviction.
“But I thank a generous and merciful Lord that Providence has seen fit to correct the error at last. You will take your rightful place at Lords, you will restore the family’s reputation amongst the peerage, and you will put an end to this sordid chapter of industrial dalliance. ”
She delivered this speech with unshakable conviction from spending seventy-six years being agreed with, and Josephine felt the familiar twist of nausea, the very blend of anger and helplessness that Margaret’s pronouncements always inspired.
The same sick feeling that had accompanied every one of the old woman’s edicts over the past year.
The girls would not go into society. The girls would not visit town.
The girls would not receive callers. Each decree delivered as though it were divine ordinance rather than the tyranny of a bitter old woman who could not relinquish control.
Josephine waited for Alistair to capitulate. She was so accustomed to watching men buckle beneath Margaret’s certainty that she had already begun forming the expression of polite disappointment she would wear when he agreed.
He did not capitulate.
“I should sell off a thriving family business, leave my loyal employees to their fate, and turn my back on the community of Irwyn all because some pompous arses at Lords will judge me as ungentlemanly for my business dealings? I think not. Fraser & Oxley Textile Mill will remain exactly as it is with direct supervision from me.”
The dowager flinched at his crassness, but Alistair Fraser-Oxley did not seem to give a whit.
Josephine pressed her lips together to prevent the smile that threatened to betray her.
Pompous arses at Lords. She had never, in all her years of navigating the razor-edged proprieties of the gentry, heard anyone speak with such magnificent disregard for decorum, and the effect on her was not unlike the first gasp of fresh air after emerging from a room that had been sealed too long.