Chapter 7 #2
“My father is an aging landowner in Hertfordshire,” she said.
“His estate is entailed. Both my brothers were killed at Waterloo, so the property will pass to a distant cousin upon my father’s death, and my mother and younger sister will have nowhere to go.
” She kept her voice light, though the familiar recitation never failed to tighten her throat.
“I had no dowry. I was approaching the age where a woman without fortune or connection becomes invisible to eligible men, and when the Duke of Oxley showed an interest, I understood what was being offered. Security for my family. A title. The possibility that my mother and sister might be sheltered after my father dies.” She paused.
“I did not love Jerome. But I married him because the alternative was to watch my family fall into destitution, and I could not do that.”
She waited for pity. She had grown accustomed to it, the soft, sympathetic murmur that followed any disclosure of her circumstances, the tilted head and the gentle “how dreadful” that accomplished nothing and changed less.
Alistair stopped walking.
Josephine turned to find him considering her with those storm-blue eyes, and what she found there was not pity, but sympathy.
Genuine, as though he were seeing her clearly for the first time and did not find what he saw contemptible.
He sighed, the slow, careful exhale belonging to one processing information rather than forming a judgment, and the quiet weight of his regard made her chest ache.
She could not bear it.
“I am not a victim,” she said, too quickly and with too much heat.
She sounded defensive. She sounded like a fool, a woman who had walked open-eyed into a disastrous marriage and now stood on a high street begging for the protection of a man to whom she had tried to propose matrimony not one day prior.
Sweet heavens, it was mortifying. That she needed rescuing at all.
That she could not simply gather the girls and walk out of Fortunestone Hall under her own power.
Or boot the old woman into her own wing.
That her entire future, and that of her unborn child, depended upon the goodwill of a man she had thought to trap.
“That is not what I think.” His voice was quiet.
And then he reached out and touched her arm, just below the elbow, a contact so brief it might have been accidental if not for the evident care of it, his fingers pressing through her sleeve for an instant before withdrawing.
In that single second, Josephine understood that he was not offering comfort so much as acknowledgment. He had heard her. He had understood.
The urge to weep arrived without warning, a swift, treacherous pressure behind her eyes that she fought with every fiber of her self-possession.
She turned her face toward the shop window beside them, pretending to examine a display of lace collars, and pressed her fingertips together until the sensation ebbed.
She would not cry. Not here, on a public street, before a man who had already seen too much of her desperation.
She wished she had his strength. She wished she could do this alone.
But the truth she could not speak aloud was that, if the worst came to pass, if the circumstances of Jerome’s death were ever fully known and Josephine was not there to protect them, the girls would need someone who could not be moved, and Alistair was the only immovable thing she had found in this godforsaken corner of Yorkshire.
Her hand drifted to her belly, a gesture so habitual now that she barely registered it.
The child growing there, small and secret and utterly dependent on her ability to navigate the next few weeks without disaster, deserved better than a mother whose every kindness had an architecture of necessity behind it.
But necessity was the hand she had been dealt, and she would play it with whatever grace she could muster.
* * *
Alistair watched the girls move through the haberdashery with the dazed, bright-eyed wonder of coal miners who had stumbled into sunlight and could not quite believe it was real.
They drifted between displays of ribbons and lace, running their fingers along bolts of trim, holding buttons up to the light, exclaiming over things that any young woman with pin money would have taken for granted.
It was Josephine who kept the expedition from dissolving into chaos.
She moved among them with quiet competence, accustomed to managing a household of volatile personalities.
She admired Arabella’s choice, redirected Genevieve from a display of feathered hair ornaments with a gentle observation that they were perhaps better-suited to a ballroom than a morning in town, and when Seraphina reached for a pair of vivid emerald kidskin gloves, gently steered her away, murmuring that perhaps they ought to wait until after her debut.
Alistair observed this from beside a display of gentlemen’s cravat pins he had no intention of purchasing and found himself considering the young widow with something approaching reluctant admiration.
She had come to him in the library and spoken first of his cousins before ever mentioning her own predicament.
Her own plight had been an afterthought, and he was not certain whether that spoke to selflessness or to a woman so accustomed to her own suffering that she no longer thought it worth reporting.
She had married Jerome Oxley to save her family.
Not for ambition, not for the title, not for the crumbling grandeur of Fortunestone Hall.
At four-and-twenty, without a dowry, without connections, without the kind of beauty that compensated for poverty in the marriage market of the ton, she had done the only thing left to her.
Except that she did have that kind of beauty. Alistair had noticed it the moment he saw her in the drawing room, and he noticed it again now. She was beautiful. And she had sold that beauty for the price of her family’s security.
He left the haberdashery and walked with Genevieve to the bookshop at the far end of Merchant Row, a narrow, warm establishment that smelled of ink and old leather.
Genevieve moved through the shelves with the reverent hush of a pilgrim entering a cathedral, her fingers trailing along the spines, and Alistair stood near the window and let her explore while his mind worked through the problem that had been turning like a millstone since the previous afternoon.