Chapter 13
The clock on the landing struck three as Alistair climbed the last flight of stairs.
He counted the strokes without meaning to, the way a man counts without will when every other faculty has been stripped to its bones.
He had been on his feet for twenty-two hours.
His boots were ruined, his coat was ruined, and there was a deep, specific ache behind his right shoulder that he suspected would require a week to unknot, which was a week he did not have.
The candle he carried threw unsteady light across the paneled walls, the shadows lurching as his arm wavered with exhaustion.
Fortunestone Hall at this hour was its most honest self, none of the careful performance of a household maintaining appearances under the eye of its new duke.
It was simply an old house, thick-walled and indifferent, exhaling the chill of a building that had stood through enough centuries to be unimpressed by any single one of its inhabitants.
The ride back from Irwyn had taken longer than it should have, the road through the valley made treacherous by several days of rain and the overflow from the western bank.
The gelding had picked his way with the sullen care of an animal worked past reasonable request. Alistair had not argued.
He had sat in the saddle with his hands loose on the reins and his mind running its inventory, the one that did not stop regardless of the hour.
The mill was secured. That was the fixed point around which the rest of the damage arranged itself. The machinery was intact. The looms were intact. The engine house was intact. The difference between a setback and a catastrophe.
The insurance assessors would come from Leeds when they came, which would be in their own time, and they would ask a great many questions and eventually offer a figure that would require negotiation.
In the meantime, Alistair would cover the costs.
Replacement coal and wool sourced from Bentley’s in Bradford at a premium he found offensive.
Emergency repairs to the roof. Wages for the workers during the shutdown, because he had not built a workforce of three hundred people by abandoning them when the arithmetic turned inconvenient.
He had the capital. He had always been careful to have the capital.
He had run the mill for fifteen years on the principle that a man without a reserve was a man at the mercy of events.
He would not need to call on the Hollingford payment early.
He would absorb the loss and rebuild, which was uncomfortable and expensive and entirely manageable.
He had managed worse.
The corridor outside the ducal chambers was dark, the sconces unlit, and he navigated it by the candle and by memory.
He had not sent word ahead. There had been no reasonable hour at which to send it, and besides, the kind of message that announced a man’s return at three in the morning was the sort of drama he found distasteful.
He had simply come back, as he always came back from the mill, quietly and without ceremony, expecting nothing except bed.
He pushed open the door to his room and stopped.
The fire was burning. Low, but burning.
Someone had banked it within the last hour, and the grate emitted a pleasant amber glow that pushed the chill back from the air. He took in this detail with the slow deliberateness of an exhausted man processing an unexpected kindness.
Then he perceived the rest of it.
The bed curtains on the near side had been drawn back. A single lamp burned on the night table, turned low. And within that circle of light, tucked against the pillows with her hair loose and one hand open against the linen, Josephine lay asleep.
He stood in the doorway longer than was strictly necessary. She had waited for him, had built up the fire and lit the lamp and waited, and at some point, the waiting had become sleep, and she had not left.
He set the candle down and undressed quietly. Boots, coat, waistcoat. He was down to his shirt when the sound of him moving reached her.
“Alistair.” Her voice was thick with sleep, rougher than its daytime register.
“Go back to sleep,” he said. “It is nothing past three.”
She pushed herself upright anyway, pressing the heel of her hand against her eye.
Her hair fell across one shoulder. In the lamplight, she looked warm and unguarded, so far removed from the gracious widow who navigated the corridors of Fortunestone Hall that he stopped and looked at her, his shirt half-unlaced and his shoulder aching and the mill’s troubles still running its tally in the back of his mind.
“How bad?” she asked.
“Manageable.”
She absorbed this with the direct attention she brought to everything, even at three in the morning. She nodded. Then she reached up and put her hand against his jaw.
He kissed her, which was not entirely what he had planned but was the only reasonable response.
Her mouth was slow and warm with sleep, and she leaned into him without hesitation, all her weight trusting forward, and he held her with one arm around her back and kissed her with thoroughness derived from having been cold and wet and worried for twenty-two hours and finally arriving somewhere he had not known, until this moment, that he considered safe.
“The insurance assessors,” he murmured against her hair, because his mind would not stay quiet even now. “They will want someone from Leeds. Weeks before a payout, possibly months. I will need to cover the emergency costs directly. Materials, wages during the repairs.”
“You have the reserves for it,” she stated. It was not a question. She knew.
“I have the reserves.” He pulled back to look at her.
Something moved through her expression that was not quite amusement. “You are not as difficult to predict when it comes to your responsibilities.”
He was not certain that was true, but he lacked the energy to contest it. He was also sitting on the edge of his bed at three in the morning conducting a financial conference with his affianced duchess.
“I have a foot in two different worlds,” he said and heard the tiredness in his own voice plainly. “The estate. The mill. Neither of them will wait while I attend to the other.”
“Then stop for five minutes,” she said, “and sleep.”
He lay down. She settled the coverlet over him, and the mill’s arithmetic ran one final circuit through his mind and then, at last, fell quiet.
He was asleep before the clock on the landing could mark the quarter hour.
* * *
The fire in the hearth had burned to cold ash before Josephine finally accepted that sleep would not return.
She lay motionless in the dark, listening.
Beside her, Alistair’s breathing was slow and even, the deep, unguarded rhythm of a man in genuine rest …
and that was what frightened her most. Not the sound of him sleeping, but the profound relief in it.
He had not been himself this evening. Not the man she had come to know in the days since his arrival at Fortunestone Hall.
That man who filled a doorway like a question no one had thought to ask, who moved through her dispirited household with the brisk, restructuring intelligence of someone who had never once entertained the luxury of doubt.
That man did not surrender to weariness. He did not wince when he turned his head.
She pressed her eyes shut and tried to reason herself calm, as she had learned to do in her year of marriage. It was a quiet, interior practice, like folding a frayed cloth before anyone could see its threadbare edge.
He is tired. Men tire. It does not mean anything.
But it did mean something, and some stubborn, sleepless part of her refused to pretend otherwise.
The wedding was soon.
Soon she would enjoy the legal safety of Alistair’s name, his protection, the transformation of her situation from one of desperate precariousness to something resembling permanence. Alistair would stand between her unborn child and the dowager’s glacial, relentless reach.
She had told herself, in the privacy of her own mind where she permitted herself honesty she could not afford elsewhere, that she did not need Alistair to love her.
She needed him to live. She needed him to remain standing, remain vigorous, remain the sort of man who bent a room to his will.
She needed the version of him that made her feel, for the first time in years, that she was not entirely alone in managing the slow catastrophe of her life.
She needed him well.
I need the wedding to take place.
The thought arrived with the soft, devastating persistence of water finding stone, and she could not stop it seeping through.
She sat up.
The room was cold. She had not truly noticed until this moment, when the warmth of his body was no longer behind her and the air came at her all at once.
The candle on the mantel was nearly spent.
Through the heavy curtains, she could see nothing, but the sensation of the darkness had shifted while she was not attending to it.
Not fully night anymore. Something between, that uncertain gray hour before the servants began to stir.
She had to go. She could not be found here.
For all the understanding she and Alistair had come to, for all that their situation was unprecedented, their intimacy born of crisis and deepening into something she had no adequate vocabulary for.
The proprieties of the house still existed, and the people who enforced them were rising soon.
Hobbs moved through Fortunestone before six, that creeping, starch-scented figure with his unspoken indictments and his dull-coin eyes.
He reported to the dowager the way other men breathed …
automatically, without conscience, as an extension of his essential nature.
If she were seen leaving Alistair’s rooms at dawn, whatever fragile diplomatic position she currently held would combust entirely. The dowager would eviscerate her with that unyielding judgment.