Chapter 12 #2
Benedict turned to look at him with the expression of a younger brother who has just been handed both responsibility and a piece of information. “‘Return to Fortunestone,’” he repeated. “How very domesticated of you.”
“I am getting married on Sunday.”
Benedict’s mug stopped halfway to his mouth. Then it continued. “Are you?” he asked in an incredulous tone.
“I am.” Alistair handed back the empty mug. “Do try to keep the mill upright while I am away.”
“Always do,” Benedict said. “Give my regards to your … bride. Whomever she may be.”
“You will meet her in due course.” Despite himself, a smile played on his lips at the thought of Josephine, and their night together. It had been a long time for him, but bedding someone as exceptional as her had been an enjoyment he had not previously experienced.
One of the boys brought out his horse, and he swung back up and turned it toward the unlit road.
Behind him, Benedict was almost certainly wearing an expression of undisguised curiosity, because subtlety was not among his brother’s more developed qualities.
The rain, which had not received notice of any schedule, continued as though it had nowhere else to be.
* * *
He was not at breakfast.
This was not, in itself, remarkable. Alistair kept early hours and had every morning already been buried deep in the library with Beckwith before the household had finished its toast. But there was a shape to his absence this morning that was different, some atmospheric change that Josephine’s nerves registered before her reason had the information to account for it.
She found Mr. Beckwith in the passage outside the dining room, carrying a rolled survey map and the expression of a man with a great deal to do.
“Mr. Beckwith. The duke … has he breakfasted already?”
Beckwith stopped and turned, and the slight hesitation before he spoke was enough. “His Grace rode out before five this morning, Your Grace. A clerk came from the mill. There is flooding. The River Irwyn has breached, and the lower sheds are taking water.”
Josephine absorbed this. “Before five,” she said.
“I am told he did not wait for the carriage. The roads, in this rain …” Beckwith glanced toward the window, where March was making its position on the matter quite clear. “He went on horseback.”
She thanked him and let him go, and stood for a moment in the empty passage while the news completed its arrangements inside her head.
Of course, the mill. She was not surprised, not entirely.
He had warned her often enough in the various forms of a sensible man offering his warnings …
the ledgers on the worktable, the letters to Franklin, the way his attention sharpened whenever the mill arose, as though Fortune’s Fall were an obligation he was managing with good grace until the real work resumed.
The mill was the real work. She had understood that from the first, and she did not begrudge him the understanding.
She only wished the Irwyn had chosen a different week to lose its temper. She reminded herself of the hundreds of people whose livelihoods depended on that mill, against which her own concerns were, in strict arithmetic, very small, and went to find Seraphina.
Assuring herself he was well, her thoughts returned to the night before, warming her cheeks and making her heart thump a little faster until she chastised herself to set such lasciviousness aside. It would not do to be caught blushing by her sharp-eyed stepdaughters.
She found Seraphina in the family drawing room, curled at one end of the settee with a volume of verse and the expression of a young woman who has recently discovered she is permitted to sit where she likes.
Josephine had been noticing the change for days now.
The color in her stepdaughter’s cheeks, the quiet vitality of a person who had been kept too long in a small room and was only beginning to understand the width of the one she had just been let into.
Not unlike a caged bird being set loose … in a bigger cage.
Josephine settled at the other end of the settee and accepted the cup that Seraphina poured without ceremony, having appointed herself keeper of the tea tray and taking the responsibility with a gravity that Josephine found both touching and slightly hilarious.
“He has gone to the mill,” Seraphina said. She was not asking.
“Before five this morning. There is flooding.”
Seraphina was quiet for a moment, moving the page of her book without reading it. “He will come back.”
“Of course he will.”
“I meant …” Seraphina set the book down and looked at her with the directness that was, Josephine had learned, her natural mode once she had been given sufficient reason to trust the person she was addressing. “I meant that he will come back. He is not the kind of man who leaves things unfinished.”
Josephine looked at her stepdaughter for a moment and felt the familiar, complicated warmth, love, and sorrow, and something adjacent to pride, for a young woman who had spent years learning to read character from behind a locked gate and had still managed to form accurate conclusions.
“No,” she agreed. “He is not.”
The rain pressed against the windows with the roaring insistence it had maintained for days, and they sat together in the quiet that had become, over the last week, a comfortable rather than a tense one, the silence of two people who had newfound faith in the future.
She found herself at the window without quite deciding to go there.
The moors had dissolved into a gray wash beyond the glass; the river below would be swollen and brown and moving with an urgency that mirrored her uneasiness.
Beckwith had said the roads were passable.
Beckwith had also said the flood was worsening, which suggested his definition of passable was fluid with every passing moment.
He rode out before breakfast. In this.
She was not worried about the mill. She was not …
she was aware this was an irrational distinction, especially worried about the looms, or the coal stores, all of which were undeniably more important than the thing she was actually worried about, which was whether he had stopped somewhere to eat, and whether his coat was waterproof, and whether the road north of the estate had turned to mud in heavy rain.
These were not thoughts that were useful to have. She had known the man a few days, and he was certainly able to take care of himself.
She pressed her fingers to the cold glass and watched the gray, and did not move until the sound reached her from the corridor … the slow, distinct clack of a walking stick against uncarpeted stone.
Josephine turned in alarm in the same instant as Seraphina sprung to her feet.
A year in this house had sharpened her hearing to that sound the way a hunted animal learned the specific crack of a branch.
She caught Seraphina’s arm and propelled her quietly toward the door at the far end of the room, the one that gave onto the music room passage, pressing a finger to her lips.
Seraphina went without a word, silent in her slippers, closing the door with the practiced care learned over years spent moving through her own home without being noticed.
Josephine turned back for the tea tray. She was reaching for the second cup, the evidence that required removing, when the door opened.
The dowager Duchess of Oxley entered the drawing room with the walking stick and the ramrod spine and the iron-gray hair arranged with a rigidity that suggested her maid had been at work on it since dawn.
She surveyed the room with the pale blue eyes that had always struck Josephine as the color of winter ice over shallow water, beautiful but discouraging of contact.
Her gaze dropped immediately to the tea tray.
“Your Grace,” Josephine said and set her own cup down with a steadiness she did not entirely feel.