Chapter 16 #2
There had been something missing from his life all these years.
The mill had been a source of great challenges, and it had made him a better man to climb that mountain, but as each year brought greater and greater success, he had lost himself in the work.
He no longer knew who he was outside of the mill.
Josephine had made him want things outside of work.
Had made him yearn for peace and perhaps a new challenge of making the estate reach its full potential, something no Duke of Oxley had achieved in more than a century.
She had cooled the fires that drove him, and he wanted to be at her side.
To share the joy of bringing a baby into the world.
He stood in the inn yard for a moment longer, the March wind finding the gap between his collar and his hat, and let the thought settle into the shape it had been trying to take all morning.
Then he went inside to see about a horse.
* * *
Seraphina did not weep. She stood on the steps of Fortunestone Hall in the cold morning air with her spine straight and her chin level and her eyes very bright, and she took Josephine’s hands in both of hers and held them tightly.
“You will come back,” she said. It was not entirely a question.
“I will come back,” Josephine said. She meant it.
She was not certain how it would be possible, and she had not permitted herself to think too carefully about the mechanics of it, because the mechanics were contingent on a great many things that were not currently within her control.
But she meant it with complete sincerity, understanding that some promises had to be made before their execution could be guaranteed, because the people receiving them needed the promise more than they needed dissemblance.
Seraphina looked at her for a long moment with those sharp, assessing eyes that missed very little. Then she released her hands and stepped back with the calm of a decision to believe in something not entirely certain, because the alternative was worse.
Arabella stood behind her sister, as was her habit, her hands clasped lightly before her and her face arranged with the careful serenity she maintained in all circumstances.
She also did not weep. She would not weep here, on the steps, where anyone might see it.
But when Josephine took her hands, she felt the slight, deliberate pressure of her grip, conveying in that small contact everything she would not permit her face to show.
“You have been very good to us,” Arabella said quietly.
It was simply stated, without decoration, which made it land harder than any more elaborate expression of feeling would have.
She held Josephine’s gaze for a moment, and in it was the look of a young woman who saw considerably more than she acknowledged and had made her own private accounting of everything that was being lost this morning.
Then she released her hands and stepped back, poised and unreachable as ever, and Josephine understood that the poise was not indifference but the most Arabella knew how to give.
Genevieve and Juliet stood together, as they always stood, the small distance between them negligible in any actual sense.
Genevieve’s face was working hard at aplomb and not quite achieving it.
Juliet, who processed the world more quietly than her twin, had gone very still in the way she did when she was frightened and did not wish to show it.
They both looked younger than they were, standing on those steps in the gray morning, which was perhaps because on their faces were the expressions of disappointed children and not the carefully managed faces they had learned to present to the world inside this house.
“Will you write?” Genevieve asked.
“Every week,” Josephine said. “And you will write back and tell me everything, and I will read every word.”
Juliet reached out and touched her sleeve very briefly, the lightest possible contact, the gesture of a child who had learned not to reach for things and was reaching anyway. Josephine caught her hand before she could withdraw it and held it for a moment.
“Be brave,” she said. She knew it was insufficient. It was also all she had.
She looked at them, these four girls who had not asked for any of the circumstances of their lives and had endured them with a resilience that she found, even now, astonishing.
She thought about what the hall had been when she arrived a year ago, the silence of it, the way the girls moved through its rooms like people trying not to be noticed in their own home, the absence of anything that might have been called warmth or ease or simple ordinary comfort.
She thought about what six days of Alistair Fraser-Oxley had done to that atmosphere.
The way he had sat at the dinner table and asked them questions and listened to the answers.
The way he had stood in the drawing room and told the dowager, in a voice that needed no elevation to carry authority, how things were going to be.
The way Genevieve had laughed at something he said two days ago with the unstudied spontaneity of a girl who had temporarily forgotten to be careful.
Eight days. She had not thought it possible to grieve something that had lasted only eight days, and yet here she was, grieving it on the front steps in the cold.
She released Juliet’s hand, straightened her gloves, and turned to find Clara waiting at the foot of the steps beside the carriage.