Chapter 2
The butler emerged from the dim hollow of the entrance hall without a sound, as though he had spent decades perfecting the art of appearing from nowhere.
He was tall and gaunt, his face so drained of warmth it might have been carved from the same gray stone as the manor itself.
His pale eyes swept over Alistair once, and Alistair had the distinct sense he was being weighed, not for the measure of a duke, but for the measure of a threat.
“Your Grace.” He spoke the words correctly enough, though the tone beneath them was another matter entirely, carrying the barest edge of what sounded less like deference and more like an indictment. “Hobbs, Your Grace. The family awaits you in the drawing room. If you will follow me.”
Alistair did not care for the man on sight, which was not a judgment he often made so swiftly.
He prided himself on giving people time to reveal their characters before he formed conclusions.
But there was something in the butler’s bearing, with his rigid spine and the faintly contemptuous set of his mouth, that put Alistair in mind of a gatekeeper standing his post, one who had decided, long before his arrival, that the new master was not welcome.
“Beckwith,” Alistair said, turning to his estate manager, who stood a pace behind, hat in hand, taking in the crumbling grandeur of the entrance hall with the expression of a surgeon surveying a patient.
“Get yourself settled and find the estate office. We will meet this evening to discuss your initial observations.”
Beckwith inclined his head and departed without ceremony, which left Alistair to follow the cadaverous butler through a succession of corridors that smelled of damp plaster, beeswax, and the stale hush that settles into a house after centuries of accumulated dust, grief, and poor ventilation.
The floorboards groaned beneath his boots.
Tapestries hung in faded silence along one wall, their hunting scenes so darkened by age that the stags appeared to be fleeing into shadow.
Portraits of dead Oxleys peered down from the walls with expressions of collective disapproval, as though the whole lineage had foreseen this moment and found it wanting.
Alistair noted the cracks in the plaster, the slight bow in a ceiling beam, the places where the paneling had warped from damp. His fingers itched for his notebook. He had been in the building mere minutes, and already the repair list threatened to outgrow its binding.
Charming.
He was already composing the letter to Franklin in his head.
The estate is worse than anticipated. The butler appears to be an automaton. The portraits are hostile. Expect my return within the week.
Hobbs paused before a set of double doors at the end of a paneled gallery.
The wood was dark oak, carved with the Oxley crest that Alistair recognized from the solicitor’s correspondence, a griffin rampant above a motto he did not trouble himself to translate.
Hobbs rapped twice with a bony knuckle and pushed the doors open without waiting for a reply.
“His Grace, the Duke of Oxley,” he announced, and stepped aside.
Alistair crossed the threshold into the family drawing room and stopped.
The room was smaller than he had expected, given the scale of the rest of the hall.
Tudor ceiling beams ran overhead, dark with age, and a stone fireplace held a modest fire fighting a losing battle against the drafts.
The mantelpiece was crowded with porcelain shepherdesses, their painted smiles absurdly cheerful amid the general air of decline.
Threadbare settees flanked the hearth. A Turkish carpet had surrendered most of its color to time.
The leaded-glass windows let in a gray, watery light that turned the whole scene into a painting left too long out in the rain.
But it was not the room that arrested him. It was its occupants.
Four young women sat upon the long settee nearest the fire, arranged in a row with their hands folded and their spines held so rigidly straight that Alistair was struck, sharply and against his will, by the memory of new hands at the mill on their first morning.
Desperate to please. Terrified of putting a foot wrong.
Uncertain whether the man now in charge would prove kind or cruel.
They looked so like his younger sister that it caught him somewhere under the ribs, that same thick silver-blonde hair, the same fine, matched features, lashes so pale they all but vanished around eyes of a blue-green he would have known anywhere.
The pull of familiarity came first, unwanted and sharp, and hard on its heels came something fiercer.
Protectiveness. The same instinct that had gripped him and his mother when Charlotte was small and their father had just died and somebody needed to stand between her and the world.
All four Oxley daughters, from schoolroom age to mid-twenties, wore the black of mourning, and the sight of the bombazine dragged him straight back to his own father’s death, fifteen years gone and yet somehow near as yesterday.
Cold recognition, not pity, settled behind his sternum. Alistair did not deal in pity. It was simply plain to see the neglect in the careful quiet of four young bodies trained to take up as little space as possible.
Before he could address them, a voice cut across the room like the crack of a whip.
“You are a ginger.” The old woman’s lined lips curled in disdain as she struck her walking cane against the floorboards to underline the harshness of her verdict.
Alistair’s jaw firmed. So this was his grandmother. The woman who had lent her support to disinheriting her own son for the crime of loving where tradition forbade it.
He felt no tug of family loyalty at all, nothing to wrestle down. She was simply a charmless old aristocrat, the embodiment of everything wrong with a society so disconnected from the everyday affairs of ordinary people.
“Indeed. It must be my inferior Scottish blood,” he agreed, with a cold smile.
She pursed her mouth in displeasure, the fine lines of her age sharpened by the expression. Apparently Her Grace did not care for having her own insult taken from her hands before she could deliver it.
On the settee, the eldest cousin’s mouth had fallen open.
The second was watching him with an expression of barely concealed wonder, as though she had just witnessed a conjuring trick she could not explain.
The youngest two, the twins, traded a glance of such naked astonishment that Alistair might have laughed under any other circumstances.
He did not laugh. He held the old woman’s gaze with the firmness that came of thirty-five years spent among men who respected plain speaking and had no patience for pretension.
Margaret Oxley was not the first person to look down her nose at him.
She would not be the last. And she would find, as all the rest had, that Alistair Fraser-Oxley did not flinch.
“You will find that I shall be a recurring disappointment, Your Grace. I have no intention of altering it.”
The dowager’s iron-gray hair was pinned beneath a widow’s cap of starched white, and her pale blue eyes were sharp as cut glass.
She sat in a high-backed chair positioned to command the room, a chair she had plainly occupied so long that no one else would have dared lay claim to it.
Her walking stick, a lacquered affair with a silver handle, rested against the arm of the chair like a scepter set down between edicts.
“You are impertinent,” she declared.
“I am direct.” Alistair clasped his hands behind his back.
“A trait I gather may be unfamiliar in this household, but one I intend to exercise freely during my visit. I am not here to trade pleasantries, Your Grace. I am here to assess the condition of the estate and set its management in order, after which I shall return to my business in Irwyn.”
The dowager’s nostrils flared, a dilation so slight it should not have carried the weight of contempt it did. “Your business,” she repeated, loading the word with all the horror the aristocracy reserved for trade. “You speak of commerce as though it were a virtue.”
“It is.”
A faint stir passed through the room. Nothing so loud as a sound, more a collective exhalation, a small release of held breath from the direction of the settee.
Alistair did not glance at his cousins. He did not need to.
He could feel the weight of their attention like sunlight against the back of his neck, and he understood, with a grim certainty that settled clean into his bones, that no one had spoken to Margaret Oxley in that fashion for a very long time.
The old woman turned her glacial gaze upon the girls. “Sit up straight, all of you. You look like scullery maids gawking at a circus. Have I taught you nothing of deportment?”
Four spines, already rigid, somehow found further vertebrae to straighten. The eldest pressed her lips together until they went white, and the smaller of the twins dropped her gaze to her lap with a swiftness that spoke of long habit.
Alistair ground his teeth. He had seen this before, though never in a drawing room, only on the mill floors of competitors, the way a worker’s shoulders hunched when an overseer passed.
The body learning faster than the mind that being seen brought trouble.
He had spent years making certain that breed of fear never took root in his own operation.
He did not care for finding it here, dressed in bombazine and seated on a threadbare settee.
He swallowed the sharp answer that wanted out and turned deliberately from the dowager. There would be time enough to deal with the old dragon. For the moment, there was someone else in the room he had yet to acknowledge.