Chapter 13 #2
Josephine eased herself from the bed with the careful deliberateness of someone crossing ice. She found her dressing gown, pulled it around herself, and reached for the wool shawl she had worn over it. Then she stood for one unplanned moment, looking at him.
He slept on his side, one hand open against the pillow. His auburn hair had been disarranged; with a warmth she could not currently afford, she noted how it lay in the careless disorder that daylight and propriety would correct before anyone else saw him. His breathing was still even, still deep.
Get well, she thought, with a fierceness that surprised her. You are not permitted to be unwell. Not now. Not when I have just found reason to believe that things can be different.
She left.
The corridor outside Alistair’s rooms was dark.
Not the comfortable dark of a room with embers and familiar furniture, but the operative dark of an old house that had been designed for grandeur, not navigation.
All long stretches of flagstone and portrait-hung walls that absorbed the shadows and gave nothing back.
Josephine pressed herself along the wall and moved east.
She had counted the doors. Fourteen paces from his to the junction where the ducal wing met the older gallery, then a right turn past the tapestry of the fourth duke’s boar hunt, then down the servants’ back stair, not the formal staircase, which was visible from the entrance hall, and along the lower passage, through the morning room passage, and up again to the private corridor where her own rooms sat.
Seven minutes, perhaps ten, if she was cautious.
She had reached the gallery junction and turned when she heard it …
the acoustic signature of someone approaching from the servants’ corridor below.
Not the tentative shuffle of early morning drowsiness, but the purposeful, heavy-heeled rhythm of a person already committed to a destination.
A man, she thought. One of the footmen, most likely, beginning the grate-laying that preceded the household’s waking hour.
Josephine did not freeze. Freezing was for women who had not spent a year living at the mercy of another person’s moods.
She moved, stepping sideways into the deep doorway recess of the old music room, pressing herself into the carved frame and drawing the shawl close around her as though she might persuade the shadow to absorb her entirely.
The footsteps grew louder. A flicker of lamplight preceded the figure around the corner and then, mercifully, turned away from her and continued east, down toward the long wing that housed the formal dining room. She waited. Counted thirty heartbeats. Listened to the silence refill itself.
Then she moved again.
By the time she reached her own door, she was cold through, her slippered feet aching from the chilly flagstones, her heart still conducting itself at slightly too rapid a tempo. She pressed the latch and slipped inside.
Clara was sitting in the chair beside the cold fireplace.
She had not been sleeping. The evidence was clear, the candle lit, her hair braided for the night, but her back straight with the alertness of maintaining a vigil, not dozing.
She rose the moment Josephine entered, relief and anxiety running together across her face which she did not attempt to conceal.
“Your Grace.” Her voice was barely above a breath.
“Clara.” Josephine shut the door with careful silence and turned to face her. “You should have slept.”
“I could not.” Clara moved to her side, reaching for the shawl with practiced hands. The instinctive choreography of the lady’s maid, always oriented toward tending. “I kept thinking—” She stopped.
“I know what you kept thinking.” Josephine allowed her to take the shawl and settled herself on the edge of the bed with the exhaustion of pretending impassiveness for too long.
“And I kept thinking it too. But there is nothing to be done about it at four in the morning, and fretting has never once changed the outcome of anything in the history of the world.”
Clara’s hands stilled. In the candlelight, her wide eyes were very bright, and Josephine recognized the look. She had seen it in those first terrible days after Jerome’s death, that expression of a woman holding herself together by an act of will she was not sure she could sustain.
“The wedding,” Clara said. The words came out with a careful restraint that made them heavier. “Do you think … will it still—”
“Yes.” Josephine said it with more certainty than she currently possessed, which was itself a kind of gift she knew how to give. “Yes, Clara. Nothing has changed. His Grace is tired. The roads from Irwyn were brutal, but he will be himself by morning, and the wedding will proceed as arranged.”
Clara exhaled. Not quite a sob, but adjacent to it, quickly suppressed.
“Come here,” Josephine said, and when Clara sat beside her on the edge of the bed, she took the girl’s cold hands between her own.
She felt, not for the first time, the absurdity of the position.
A duchess of twenty-five comforting a woman of twenty-eight in the small hours, two people whose respective vulnerabilities had fused them into an unlikely alliance.
“Listen to me,” Josephine said. “Whatever happens. Whatever is said, or discovered, or—” She chose her words with care, each one weighed before it was allowed out.
“Whatever may arise regarding events that preceded my husband’s death.
I need you to hear me, Clara, and believe me.
You will not be named. Not by me. Not in any document, any statement, any version of events that I am in any position to influence.
You were never there. You saw nothing. You know nothing.
Whatever burden there is to carry from that night, I carry it alone, and I am the one with the rank and the connections to weather it. ”
Clara’s hands tightened around hers, her voice urgent but low, mindful that the walls had ears. “Your Grace, I would never … I don’t blame you, I’ve never once—”
“I know you do not.” Josephine’s voice was placating.
“And I know you would not. But that is not what I am trying to say. I am telling you that if anyone were ever to suggest otherwise … if the dowager, or Hobbs, or anyone else were to imply that the circumstances of that evening involved anyone in this household other than my late husband and his own considerable devotion to the bottle, you are to say nothing. You are to look blank and confused and refer them to me. That is all. Do you understand me?”
The silence between them was the kind that means yes without requiring the word.
Jerome had drunk himself to the edge of that cliff.
That was the truth she returned to when the nights became too long and her imagination too active.
He had been drinking since noon, which was not unusual.
He had quarreled with one of the stable-men and dismissed him on the spot, which was not unusual.
He had made remarks at supper that were not fit for repetition and had then taken the bottle with him when he left the table.
None of this had been unusual. Jerome’s singular path of destruction had been so well-trodden that it had its own geography, its own seasons, its own predictable progression from charm to cruelty to the oblivion he chased with such reliable, exhausting dedication.
He had walked too close to the cliff edge in the dark. He had been well-documented in his habits. His own boots had testified to where he had gone.
It was the truth. It was enough.
“The wedding will happen,” Josephine said again, releasing Clara’s hands and rising.
“And when it does, your position here is secure. Not merely tolerated at the dowager’s whim, not subject to whatever Hobbs chooses to think, but genuinely, legally secure.
Alistair has already indicated that the household arrangements are to be revised.
You will be properly employed, properly compensated, and the only person in this house with the authority to dismiss you will be me. ”
Clara looked at her with an expression that Josephine could not name. Something between gratitude and grief and something more complicated still—the look of a woman who has been conditioned to expect so little that the offer of basic security feels like an impossible extravagance.
“Get some sleep,” Josephine said gently. “Both of us need it.”
After Clara had gone, Josephine sat alone in the gray pre-dawn stillness of her room, looking at nothing specific.
She thought about Alistair. She thought about his hand open on the pillow.
She thought about Jerome’s absences, the days of hollow silence after he had ridden out, returning smelling of things she had learned not to identify too specifically, offering no explanation and expecting none to be required, because she was his wife, which meant she was his property, and property did not interrogate its owner.
She thought about what it meant that she was frightened now.
Not of cruelty or absence or humiliation, but of loss.
Genuine loss. The possibility that something she had barely allowed herself to want might be taken before she had finished understanding that she wanted it.
She could tell herself that Alistair represented security, but the truth was more complicated than that, and her heart was far more engaged than she wished to admit.
It was, she supposed, an improvement of sorts. To be afraid of losing something good was at least an acknowledgment that something good existed.
She pulled the coverlet around herself and watched the window as the darkness continued to lighten.
Soon. She would be wed soon and then she would have the foothold she needed to take care of everyone in this household and her own. Because Alistair was a good man who took care of his people.