Chapter 4
The previous evening’s dinner had been an exercise in excruciating silence.
Josephine had sat through it with the applied tranquility earned through survival of a year’s worth of such meals, but last night had been of a different character entirely. Margaret at the head of the table, walking stick propped like a scepter. But the new element had been the new duke.
Alistair Fraser-Oxley had taken the seat opposite the dowager and matched the old woman remark for remark.
When Margaret had observed that the soup was too rich for ladies who wished to maintain their figures, Alistair had replied that the soup was too thin for anyone who wished to maintain their health.
When she had commented that the girls’ silence was a credit to their breeding, he had said he found silence at table rather more indicative of fear than good manners.
It had been, Josephine reflected, rather like watching a prize-fighter discover that his opponent had longer arms.
But the girls had not spoken. They were too afraid, too accustomed to the dowager’s swift punishments, too uncertain of whether the new duke’s defiance would prove lasting or merely a brilliant flare that would leave them in deeper darkness.
Josephine understood their caution. She shared it. But she could not afford to indulge it.
He leaves within the week.
The words had circled her mind through the sleepless hours of the night.
He leaves, and we are as we were. The girls grow another year older in this prison. Seraphina’s chances of a good match narrow. And the dowager remains.
She had made her decision before dawn, lying alone in the great canopied bed, a bed far too large for one person and all the more lonely for it.
She would seek the duke out. She would find him alone, away from Margaret’s scrutiny and the butler’s pale, watchful eyes, and she would make her case, not with feminine wiles but with the plain, unflinching truth of what life in this house had become.
The difficulty, of course, was reaching him undetected.
Fortunestone Hall was a house of eyes. Margaret’s grip on the staff was absolute, a network of loyalty that had calcified over decades into something approaching omniscience.
Hobbs was the worst, that tall shadow who appeared in thresholds with unnerving regularity.
But the housekeeper reported to the dowager every morning, and the footmen watched Josephine through the halls with an attentiveness that had nothing to do with service and everything to do with surveillance.
Clara understood the geography of danger better than anyone.
“Hobbs is in the kitchens,” Clara murmured, pressing herself flat against the wall of the upper corridor and peering around the corner with the vigilance of a scout reconnoitering enemy territory.
Her hazel eyes darted left, then right, and she beckoned with a quick flutter of her fingers.
“Quick now. The back staircase is clear.”
They moved through the house like a pair of mice navigating a larder full of cats, Clara leading and Josephine following.
Along the upper corridor of the Duchess’s Wing, down the narrow back staircase to the first floor, past the housekeeper’s sitting room with its door mercifully shut, and through the long gallery where the ancestral portraits watched their progress with collective disdain.
At the far end, the gallery gave way to the western corridor, and the library door came into view.
Here Clara stopped, her hand raised. Voices, faint but distinct, filtered through the library’s heavy oak door.
Josephine pressed herself into the shadow of a stone alcove, deep enough to conceal a person from casual observation, and listened.
The first voice must belong to Mr. Beckwith, the new steward. Josephine had caught only a glimpse of the man, but his voice was not known by her. Calm, nonchalant, with a mild Hertfordshire inflection.
“The accounting books are in a lamentable state, Your Grace,” Beckwith was saying.
“Entries are sporadic, categories inconsistent, and there are gaps where nothing was recorded at all. Either the steward was grossly negligent, or he was deliberately obscuring the figures. I am inclined toward the latter.”
A pause. Then the duke’s voice, lower and clipped. “Pocketing money?”
“There are discrepancies in the tenancy receipts that are difficult to explain by incompetence alone. Small amounts, but they accumulate. And entries have been amended in a different hand, as though someone adjusted the numbers after the fact.”
“Is there any value in keeping the man around?”
Beckwith’s reply came without hesitation. “None whatsoever. I spoke with tenant farmers yesterday, and their opinion of him is uniformly poor. They would not mourn his departure.”
A fierce surge of relief momentarily weakened her knees.
The steward, Mr. Hatchley, had been a source of quiet dread since her arrival.
His eyes lingered on the twins whenever they passed, a slithering gaze no decent man would direct at girls of seventeen.
She had mentioned it to the dowager once and been told that Hatchley was a loyal servant and that Josephine’s imagination was overactive.
She had ensured, with Clara’s help, that the twins were never left alone in his vicinity.
“Very well,” the duke said. His tone reminded Josephine of the way a surgeon might discuss the removal of a gangrenous limb. Necessary, unpleasant, and best done quickly. “Inform Hatchley that I wish to see him this afternoon. I shall dispatch him myself.”
“Understood, Your Grace.”
A chair scraped. Footsteps crossed the library floor. Josephine pressed deeper into the alcove, her heart drumming against her ribs, and Clara, who had positioned herself at the corridor’s far end like a sentinel, gave a sharp, almost imperceptible shake of her head.
The library door opened, and Beckwith emerged, notebook in hand. He turned in the opposite direction and disappeared around the corner without a glance toward the alcove.
Clara caught Josephine’s eye and gave the faintest nod.
Josephine smoothed her skirts, drew a fortifying breath, and walked toward the library with what she hoped was an unhurried gait. She stopped just outside the doorway.
“Oh,” she said, allowing a note of mild surprise to color her voice. “Your Grace. I did not expect to find you here.”
It was, she acknowledged privately, not her finest performance.
But the duke did not appear to notice. He was seated behind a battered walnut desk that had been reorganized with ruthless efficiency—papers in neat stacks, a ledger open before him, an inkstand and a row of sharpened quills that might have been soldiers awaiting orders.
The library itself was a revelation. Arched windows admitted pale morning light in long bars across faded rugs, and the barrel-vaulted ceiling was carved with oak medallions depicting owls and scrolls.
Bookcases rose to the ceiling, coated in gray velvet dust. But around the desk, the dust had been banished.
Alistair looked up from his ledger. His auburn hair was slightly disordered, his coat discarded over the back of his chair, his shirtsleeves rolled to the forearm in a fashion that would have given the dowager palpitations.
The informality of it sent a small traitorous flutter through Josephine’s midsection that she determinedly ignored.
He rose, setting down his quill.
“Duchess.” His tone was courteous but guarded, the same careful reserve she had noticed the previous afternoon, as though he were holding her at arm’s length, not out of unkindness but out of some private, unexamined caution.
“Please come in.” He indicated one of the worn leather wingback chairs before the desk.
She crossed the threshold and resisted the impulse to glance behind her before closing the door. Clara would be watching the corridor. Clara always watched the corridor.
“I hope I am not intruding,” Josephine said, taking the offered seat. The hearth held a modest fire, and its warmth was welcome against the perpetual chill of the hall. She folded her hands in her lap and arranged her features into the expression of calm resolve she had rehearsed that morning.
“Not at all.”
He waited until she was settled before returning to his own chair.
Once seated, he gave her his full attention, which was a more formidable experience than she had anticipated.
His blue eyes were direct and assessing, absent of the social glaze that most gentlemen employed as a screen.
When Alistair Fraser-Oxley looked at you, he looked at you.
“I wished to speak with you privately,” she said. “About the household. About the girls.”
He leaned back in his chair and waited. He did not prompt, did not hurry, did not fill the silence with meaningless pleasantries. He simply waited, and Josephine understood that this was a man who knew the most powerful tool in any conversation was patience.
She drew a breath and began.
“The girls have been kept here,” she said.
“Cloistered. They have not been permitted to leave the estate in years. Seraphina is four-and-twenty, Your Grace. She is perilously close to being considered on the shelf, and she has never attended a single ball, a single assembly, a single dinner beyond these walls. None of them have.”
She watched his face as she spoke. His expression did not change. It was the same assessing regard, but the muscles around his eyes tightened, a contraction she might have missed had she not spent a year studying the subtle play of expression as a matter of survival.
“They do not go into Irwyn for shopping. They do not attend Sunday services. The vicar comes here instead, because the dowager will not permit them to travel. Even the younger girls have spent the whole of their girlhood within these walls, without companions, without tutors, without any of the experiences that young women of their station ought to have.”