Chapter 1 #3
Josephine let go of Clara’s hands and turned back to the window. The carriage was crossing the bridge now, wheels clattering over old stone, close enough that she could make out the gleam of damp on the horses’ flanks and the mud caking their hooves.
“Right,” Josephine said briskly. “Well? Will I do?”
Clara was already in motion, stepping close to examine her mistress with a practiced eye, the sort a maid gains only by learning, out of necessity, to work small wonders with next to nothing.
She smoothed a crease from Josephine’s sleeve, tucked a stray lock of honey-blonde hair back into its pins, and set the fall of the black crepe fichu straight at her throat.
The gown was plain mourning black, as protocol demanded, but well kept, and it sat close to her slender figure with a simple elegance.
A duchess ought to have owned a dozen such gowns.
Josephine had two, and Clara kept both in flawless repair through sheer will and a clever needle.
“You look well,” Clara pronounced, though her tone suggested she wished the word carried more conviction. “Calm and collected. A duchess.”
“A dowager duchess,” Josephine corrected gently. “An important distinction. Especially to the other dowager duchess.”
A flash of dark amusement crossed Clara’s face, there and gone. It was rare and it never lasted, but Josephine treasured every one of those moments, proof that the frightened woman had not swallowed the rest of her whole.
They descended the narrow spiral stair together, slippers whispering against stone worn smooth by centuries of footsteps.
The tower stair opened onto the upper corridor of the east wing, where the air ran cooler and carried the scent of old wood and beeswax.
Fortunestone Hall had a strange gift for feeling vast and airless at once, its corridors stretching away into long shadowed distances while its rooms pressed close with low ceilings and dark paneling.
Josephine had not grown used to it, not in a full year of living beneath its roof. She suspected she never would.
When she had first come here as Jerome Oxley’s bride, she had believed the marriage would be tolerable at least. Her husband had presented himself as a distinguished gentleman of the old school, weathered but dignified, wanting only companionship and an heir.
The truth had turned out to be something else altogether, and she had learned it far too late to matter.
But she had stayed. She had stayed for the girls, because they had no one else in the world to stand between them and this house.
And she had stayed because she had no money of her own, no carriage, and nowhere else to go.
At the landing, Clara paused and drew a breath that was almost a shudder.
“I suppose I had better find Hobbs,” she said. The name fell from her lips like a stone dropped down a well. “So he can carry word to Her Grace that the duke has arrived.”
They both swallowed at once.
Hobbs, the butler, had served the Oxley family since the eighth duke’s day, and had long since hardened into little more than an extension of the dowager’s will.
Dry and disapproving, thin as a rail and twice as rigid, he possessed a gift for appearing in doorways at just the wrong moment, his pale eyes cataloging every misstep for later report.
Josephine had learned within a fortnight of her arrival that nothing happened at Fortunestone Hall without Hobbs knowing of it, and that nothing reached the dowager’s ear that Hobbs did not carry there himself.
He was not cruel in the manner of men who raised their voices.
He was cruel in the manner of men who forgot nothing and forgave less.
“Well,” Josephine said, drawing herself up straight, “it shall soon enough tell us whether Mr. Fraser-Oxley has any talent for standing up to dragons.”
Clara’s eyes went wide. “You’re not going to call her a dragon to his face?”
“Of course not. I mean to be the very picture of grace and propriety.” Josephine smoothed her skirts and lifted her chin. “But between the two of us, Clara, if this man cannot hold his own against Margaret Oxley, he shall be no use to anyone in this household.”
With that she set off down the corridor toward the main staircase, her bearing serene, her heart hammering loud enough that she felt half certain Clara must hear it too.
Below, somewhere in the belly of the great hall, a door thudded shut.
The new duke had arrived.
And from the far reaches of the north wing, faint but unmistakable, came the rhythmic tap of a walking stick against stone.
The dowager was on the move.
Josephine’s stomach turned to ice, but she kept walking, kept breathing, kept her face easy and untroubled.
She had survived a year in this house. She had survived a marriage that bore no likeness to the one she had been promised.
She had survived things she could not yet bring herself to speak of, and the weight of carrying it all for everyone else beneath this roof had not broken her yet.
She would survive this too.
She had to.