Chapter 6 #2
His cousin’s head came up.
“When was the last time you visited the town of Irwyn?”
The silence that followed was immense. It filled the dining room from the flagstones to the beamed ceiling, and in it, Alistair could hear the tick of a casement clock somewhere in the corridor and the faint, desperate clink of Genevieve’s spoon against her bowl as the girl’s hand trembled.
“I hardly think that is an appropriate question for the dinner table,” Margaret said. Her voice carried the particular edge of a woman who was accustomed to shutting down conversations with the force of her disapproval alone.
“I did not ask you.” Alistair did not raise his voice. He did not need to. He held Margaret’s gaze for an infinite two seconds, long enough to make clear that the statement was not a request, and then turned back to Seraphina. “My lady. When did you last visit Irwyn?”
Seraphina’s eyes darted sideways. Not to Margaret, not to Alistair, but to Josephine, who sat perfectly still on the opposite side of the table, her hands in her lap, her expression neutral.
Whatever passed between the two women was invisible to anyone who was not looking for it, the faintest inclination of Josephine’s chin, a movement so small it might have been a breath.
But Seraphina saw it, and her shoulders eased.
Alistair noted the exchange. He had seen it before, in the drawing room on his first day.
The pattern was unmistakable now. They did not look to their grandmother for permission.
They looked to Josephine. Whatever authority Margaret believed she held over this household, the girls had long since chosen a different allegiance, and they had done so with the quiet, ungovernable loyalty of people who know the difference between a warden and a protector.
“I have not left the estate in five years,” Seraphina said. “Perhaps six. I cannot recall exactly.”
The words arrived flat and factual, but her color had risen, a flush creeping up from the high neck of her mourning gown to stain her cheeks, and Alistair understood that the embarrassment was not for the admission itself but for having to make it.
She was a woman of four-and-twenty. She had not left her own home in half a decade.
He turned to Arabella. “And you?”
Margaret’s walking stick struck the floor beneath the table, a single percussive crack of displeasure. “I will thank you not to interrogate my grandchildren, Your Grace. This is a dining room, not a courtroom.”
“Then I would suggest,” Alistair said, not looking at her, “that you allow the witness to answer the question, and we shall be done with it all the sooner.”
Arabella answered with the careful diction of a woman who had spent her life navigating the narrow corridor between honesty and self-preservation. “The same as Seraphina. We have not visited the town. The vicar comes to the hall for a private Sunday service.”
“A private service,” Alistair repeated. The words sat in his mouth like something foul.
A private service meant a private existence, a household so thoroughly sealed off from the world that even God was delivered to the door rather than sought in the community where He presumably resided.
“And have any of you ever left the grounds of the estate? On your own?”
Another silence. This one was different. It had a texture to it, the nature of a secret pressing against the walls of its containment, and Alistair could feel the girls exchanging glances along the length of the table, deciding between them who would speak and what could safely be said.
It was Seraphina. Of course it was. She was always the one who spoke first, the eldest, the fiercest, the girl who carried the collective courage of her sisters like a weight she had not asked for but would not set down.
“I once walked to the village.” The flush was darker now, spreading to her ears.
“I wanted to see it. I had no coin to buy anything, so I stopped at the edge and turned back before anyone saw me.” Her jaw set, and she met Alistair’s gaze with a defiance that was not directed at him but at the shame of the admission itself. “I did not encounter anyone.”
Alistair let the full weight of what he had just heard settle into him. What followed was not rage but something colder and more permanent, the structural anger of discovering that the system he needed to dismantle was not a faulty loom but an entire way of life.
“This is done,” he said.
Margaret’s chin rose. “I beg your pardon?”
“This arrangement. The confinement. Whatever you wish to call it. It is finished.” He picked up his wineglass, took a measured sip, and set it down with a meticulousness that was itself a kind of punctuation.
“Tomorrow I shall accompany my cousins to Irwyn for an afternoon. There is shopping to be done. Wardrobes, I am told, are in a lamentable state, and I believe the town has a perfectly serviceable modiste who can begin rectifying that.”
The transformation that passed across his cousins’ faces was worth every minute of the wretched meal.
Seraphina’s defiance softened into a hint of hope.
Arabella’s elegance cracked by the smallest of degrees, a widening of her eyes, a parting of her lips that was more eloquent than any speech.
The twins looked at each other with an excitement so naked and so fiercely restrained that Alistair’s chest ached, because he recognized it.
He had seen the same look on Charlotte’s face when she was nine and their mother had told her she could accompany Alistair to the canal opening, and Charlotte had tried so hard to be dignified about it that she had burst into tears.