Chapter 1 #2
Somewhere behind those old walls waited his uncle’s family.
Four cousins he had never met, a grandmother who had once supported his father’s exile, and a young widow about whom he knew next to nothing.
He had glimpsed Jerome Oxley a handful of times over the years, a tall figure climbing in and out of a carriage in Irwyn, imperious in his bearing, the sort who believed the whole world owed him deference.
They had never once exchanged a word. Then Jerome had walked off a cliff in the dark and left the wreckage for someone else to sort.
Typical Oxley. Leave the trouble for the next man to clean up.
Whatever condition he found his new family in, he would settle matters and be on his way. Alistair Fraser-Oxley was a man built to solve problems with dispatch. This would be no different.
He straightened his coat and strode toward the door.
* * *
Josephine could see clear to the front gates from the Widow’s Watch, a narrow turret room at the highest point of Fortunestone Hall’s east tower, where generations of Oxley wives had kept vigil for husbands returning from war.
The room smelled of damp stone and the faintest ghost of lavender from some long-forgotten pot in the corner.
Beyond the pocked glass, the Yorkshire landscape stretched away in muted greens and grays, beautiful in its bleakness and entirely indifferent to the small dramas unfolding within these walls.
She pressed her fingertips to the cold glass and watched the dark speck of a carriage emerge from the line of elms, crawling along the ruined avenue like a beetle picking its way through a ditch.
Her breath fogged the pane, and she wiped it clear with the heel of her hand, an indelicate gesture that would have earned a sharp word from her mother-in-law had the old woman been present to see it.
But the dowager duchess kept to her apartments most mornings, attended by Hobbs and fortified by her own resentments, and Josephine had seized the rare freedom of climbing the tower stairs to the one place in this vast, airless house where she could breathe freely.
“He is here,” she said.
Behind her, Clara Trent set down the shawl she had been folding and crossed to the window with careful steps.
Her lady’s maid moved through Fortunestone Hall the way a mouse moved through a house full of cats, and though she counted eight-and-twenty years and possessed a quiet beauty that would have made any portraitist weep with gratitude, something in her wide hazel eyes had not been young in a very long while.
“Two months,” Clara murmured, peering past Josephine’s shoulder at the approaching carriage. “Two months to travel two miles.”
“It was never the distance keeping him away.” Josephine’s voice came out resolute, though her pulse was anything but.
She had prepared for this morning. She had rehearsed what she would say, how she would stand, the exact tilt of her chin, as though readying herself for an examination on which every future hope depended.
Because it did.
So much rested on the character of the man in that carriage.
More than Josephine could say aloud, even to Clara.
She thought of the girls, her stepdaughters, whom she had come to love as fiercely as if they were her own, and of the cloistered lives they led inside these walls.
She thought of the promises she had made herself the day she first arrived at Fortunestone Hall, and how few of them she had managed to keep.
If Alistair Fraser-Oxley proved even half the man his reputation in Irwyn suggested, there was a slender chance this household might finally know something other than fear.
If he proved anything like his uncle, there was no hope at all.
Please let him be different.
The carriage vanished behind a copse of ash trees, then reappeared closer, its shape sharpening against the gray March sky. Through the rain-streaked glass, Josephine made out the driver hunched against the drizzle.
“The vicar told me he has an excellent reputation,” Josephine offered, as much to reassure herself as Clara. “That he takes care of his people. That the mill workers speak well of him, which is not a thing one hears often of the men who employ them.”
She glanced back and noticed how Clara’s fingers had found each other and knotted at her waist, a habit worn into her these last weeks, a little sign of how thoroughly this melancholy house had worked upon her nerves.
It was the same gesture Clara made whenever she was frightened, which was more often than either of them cared to admit.
“What if he’s like—” Clara did not finish, unable or unwilling to say more.
She did not need to. The question had haunted Josephine for weeks now..
She knew next to nothing of him beyond the vicar’s good opinion and the scraps of talk she had gathered from the servants.
A man of industry, they said, direct in his manner and unconcerned with the idle pursuits of the class he had just inherited.
Whether that directness carried any warmth beneath it, she could not yet say.
Josephine turned from the window and caught hold of the other woman’s twisting hands, stilling them between her own.
She met Clara’s gaze with the calm, unshakable dependability she had learned to summon whenever she herself felt close to breaking apart inside.
It was the same face she wore whenever the walls of this old prison pressed too close, whenever the weight of the past threatened to buckle her knees.
“He will not be like Jerome,” she said. “No two men are cut from the same cloth, and everything I have heard says this one is cast from something else entirely. But whoever he turns out to be, Clara, you have my word. I will convince him to take the reins of Fortunestone Hall properly. I will make him see what this house needs. You have my word.”
Clara’s eyes glistened, though she blinked the shine away, resigned in the manner of someone who had learned long ago that tears were a luxury this household could not afford. “And if he won’t listen?”
Josephine tightened her grip on Clara’s hands. “Then I shall have to be more persuasive.”
A silence settled between them, broken only by the whisper of rain against old stone and the far cry of a curlew somewhere out over the moor.