Chapter 7 #3
The girls were not safe. That was the foundation upon which everything else rested, and it did not shift regardless of his feelings about Josephine or the library or the kiss or that she was expecting or any of the other complications that had descended upon him since Franklin uttered the words, “You have inherited.”
Margaret controlled the household. The servants answered to Margaret.
The solicitors, for all Alistair knew, answered to Margaret.
And if he left for London, as he must, as the Hollingford contract demanded, the old woman would have weeks, perhaps months, to reassert her authority over every gain he had made in three days.
He needed a structure. A framework that would hold even in his absence.
Beckwith could manage the estate, but Beckwith had no authority over Margaret’s personal household.
The servants needed replacing, but replacing them took time, and in the interim, the old guard would report every movement, every conversation, every small rebellion to the woman with the walking stick and the milky eyes and the absolute conviction that control was her birthright.
There was a solution. It had the obvious, unwelcome clarity of a conclusion he had been avoiding because accepting it meant accepting everything it carried with it. The proximity, the complication, the devastating possibility that—
“Your Grace?”
Genevieve stood before him, clutching a slim volume to her chest with both hands. Her eyes were enormous. “Might I have this one? It is only two shillings.”
He looked at the book. The Old English Baron. Clara Reeve, of course.
“You may have three,” he said, and the smile she gave him was so bright and so unguarded that it cracked the armor he had spent the morning reinforcing.
He left the women at the modiste’s, where Seraphina and Arabella were being measured with an enthusiasm that suggested Mrs. Pruett, the proprietress, had not seen ducal custom in some years and intended to make the most of it.
Josephine remained to supervise, and Alistair caught her eye as he moved toward the door.
“I have an errand,” he said. “I shall return within the hour.”
She did not ask where he was going. She simply nodded, and the trust in that gesture, the willingness to let him go without interrogation, settled into him with a weight that was both gratifying and undeserved.
St. Elinor’s stood at the top of the high street, its square Norman tower dark against the pewter sky.
Alistair climbed the steps and pushed open the heavy oak door, and the interior received him with the accustomed hush of a place that had been absorbing human trouble for eight hundred years without comment.
The vicar was in the vestry, a mild, spectacled man whom Alistair had known these many years and was well-acquainted with his family.
Their conversation lasted twenty minutes. When Alistair emerged, the first drops of rain were falling on the cobblestones of Merchant Row, fat and deliberate, the advance guard of something heavier.
He collected the women from the modiste’s with the briskness born of a life spent managing matters and understanding that the difference between a damp ride home and a soaking one was measured in minutes.
The parcels were loaded, the girls bundled into the carriage with their gingerbread crumbs and their new gloves and their books, and the coachman urged the horses forward just as the sky opened in earnest, rain hammering the carriage roof like applause.
Genevieve was already reading. Juliet leaned against her twin, watching the rain streak across the glass.
Seraphina sat with her new gloves in her lap, smoothing the leather with her thumb in a gesture so tender that it might have been a caress.
And Arabella held her card of embroidery silks on her knees, her thumb tracing the edge of the wrapping with a quiet contentment she likely thought no one noticed.
Josephine sat beside Alistair, her shoulder not quite touching his, her hands folded in her lap, her face turned toward the window.
She had said very little since Merchant Row.
He wondered if she was thinking about Hertfordshire, about the father who was aging and the mother and sister who would one day have nowhere to go.
He wondered if she was thinking about the library or the bakery.
He was thinking about all of it. And about the fact that the woman beside him deserved considerably more than she had. She had married a stranger to save her family, endured a year of cruelty to protect his cousins, and offered herself to a man she barely knew because it was all she had to barter.
The rain drummed on. The carriage climbed the hill toward Fortunestone Hall, and the towers emerged from the mist like sentinels who had been watching for their return.
Alistair looked at the house he had inherited and did not want, thought about the conversation he had just had with the vicar, and knew, with the calm certainty from spending his life making decisions and living with their consequences, that the next one he made would change everything.