Chapter 2 #2
The widow, his uncle’s dowager duchess, stood at the window with the pale window light catching her honey-colored hair like a halo, her expression as serene as if she were sitting for a portrait and the painter had asked her to hold still one moment longer.
Her eyes were gray, the soft gray of summer rain breaking a hot afternoon.
She did not heat his blood the way he might have expected.
She cooled it, an odd, unhurried calm settling over a man who rarely stopped moving long enough to notice his own thoughts.
Her gown was plain mourning black, a crepe fichu at her throat that spoke of restraint rather than vanity.
Her bearing was calm and contained, her hands clasped before her, quiet in a way he suspected had been hard-won rather than natural to her.
She was young, younger than he had expected.
No more than five-and-twenty, if he judged rightly, and the thought that his uncle had married a woman scarcely older than his own eldest daughter turned Alistair’s stomach.
Sunlight caught the pins in her hair, and for one entirely unwelcome moment he pictured drawing them free, one by one, just to watch the silk of it fall.
Confound it.
He pulled his gaze from the widow Oxley with rather more effort than the task should have cost him, and turned to his cousins with what he hoped passed for calm authority.
“Now, then.” He gentled his voice, because the souls behind those four pairs of blue-green eyes, watching him with varying degrees of dread, deserved that much. “I have been remiss. I know your faces but not your names, and that will not do. Will you introduce yourselves?”
A silence fell, so thick with hesitation Alistair could almost hear it creak.
The girls glanced toward their grandmother, whose expression had arranged itself into a mask of frigid disapproval, and then toward the window, where the widow stood.
It was a small movement, four heads turning in near unison, but it spoke volumes.
The widow offered the faintest inclination of her head, barely more than a dip of the chin, and the effect was immediate.
The eldest straightened her shoulders and lifted her gaze to meet his.
Interesting.
So the girls looked to the young widow for leave to speak, not to their grandmother. That told him a great deal about the invisible architecture of this household. Who protected, and who menaced.
The young women rose as one.
“I am Seraphina.” The eldest curtsied. Her voice was low and clear, with a controlled tension he recognized as the sound of someone choosing every word with care.
She was four-and-twenty, if his memory served, and her face carried the fine-boned Oxley structure sharpened by something fiercer.
Intelligence, perhaps, or anger held on a very short leash.
Her blue-green eyes met his without wavering, which told him she had more steel in her than even that rigid posture suggested.
She was afraid, yes. But she was also, he sensed, furious.
“The eldest. Welcome to Fortunestone Hall, Your Grace.”
“Thank you, Seraphina.” He inclined his head. “Tell me, what occupies your time here?”
A fractional pause. Another glance toward the widow. “We read. We sew. We … practice the pianoforte.” The words came out like items recited from a list, dutiful and colorless.
Alistair waited, but nothing further came.
He turned to the second sister, who had been watching the exchange with the carefully neutral expression of a seasoned diplomat observing negotiations not her own.
Two-and-twenty, her fair hair arranged with a neatness bordering on the architectural, a single pearl pin holding it all in place.
Where Seraphina radiated a kind of banked fire, this one was porcelain.
Cool, collected, and, he suspected, harder to read.
She gave nothing away until she chose to, and she chose to rarely.
“Arabella,” she offered before he could ask, dropping into a perfect curtsy.
“I play the pianoforte rather better than Seraphina does, though she will not admit it.” A ghost of a smile touched the corners of her mouth, there and gone so quickly he might have imagined it.
“And I paint. Watercolors, mostly. Landscapes and botanicals.”
“And do you paint what you see from these windows, or from memory?”
The question was deliberate, and he watched its effect with the same close attention he gave the testing of a new loom mechanism.
Arabella’s mask of propriety held, but her eyes dimmed a little all the same, accompanied by a flinch so faint he nearly missed it.
“From the windows, Your Grace. We do not … venture far.”
No. I rather thought not.
He turned to the twins, who stood side by side at the far end of the settee, their shoulders nearly touching.
Not yet eighteen, he judged, still caught in that uncertain country between girlhood and womanhood, and the way they leaned into each other had the look of a fortification.
Two against the world, or at least against this household.
The one on the left was smaller, finer-boned, with large pale eyes that watched him from beneath a fringe of silvery lashes, wary as a creature grown used to being overlooked.
The one on the right was softer, rounder of feature, wearing the dreamy look of someone whose thoughts lived mostly elsewhere, a trait Alistair recognized from his best machinists, the ones who solved a problem by staring into the middle distance until the answer simply arrived.
“Juliet,” whispered the quiet one. Her gaze dropped to the floor almost at once, as though saying her own name aloud had spent the whole of her courage.