Chapter 2 #3
“And I am Genevieve,” said the dreamy one, with rather more volume and a great deal more eagerness.
“We are twins, though no one would mistake us for one another. I read novels. All manner of them. Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Radcliffe, though Gothic novels are my particular favorites. Anything with castles and ghosts and—” She caught her grandmother’s expression and fell silent at once, the bright spark of her extinguished as neatly as a snuffed candle.
Alistair’s hands curled into fists behind his back. The girl’s reaction had come so fast, so instinctive, called up by a single glance from the old woman. It told him everything he needed to know about the daily texture of life in this house, and none of it sat well.
“You need not check yourself on my account, Genevieve,” he said, keeping his voice level and warm.
“I find people who read widely tend to think more clearly. It is not an interest that wants discouraging.” He turned to Juliet.
“And you? What occupies you, beyond the considerable talent of being the quieter half of a pair of twins?”
The faintest color rose in Juliet’s pale cheeks. She opened her mouth, closed it again. With the air of someone taking a running leap from a very high wall, she then said, “Numbers.”
“Numbers,” Alistair repeated.
“Mathematics. Puzzles. I … I like accounts and ledgers.” She said the last so quietly it might have been a confession of murder, her eyes darting to her grandmother in visible dread.
The dowager’s walking stick struck the floor. “Ledgers are no fit occupation for a young lady of breeding. I have told her so, more than once.”
Alistair looked at Juliet. Her eyes lowered to the floor.
Her small hands were knotted together so tightly the knuckles had gone white, and for a moment she put him in mind of Charlotte at twelve, hunched over their father’s books in the mill office, whispering the figures to herself while the adults argued business over her head.
“On the contrary,” Alistair said, addressing the dowager without troubling to look at her.
“A head for numbers is an asset in any situation. I employ several women at my mill whose facility with accounts outstrips most gentlemen I have met in commerce.” He let the full weight of the word settle on the old woman’s sensibilities.
“You ought to be proud of her, Your Grace.”
He could not see Margaret Oxley’s face, but the rigid silence pouring out of her corner of the room spoke plainly enough.
Over by the settee, Juliet’s grip on her own fingers eased by a fraction, and when she lifted her eyes, they held the ghost of something that might, given sufficient nourishment, grow into pride.
Alistair drew the small notebook from his coat pocket and added a fresh line beneath roof, gatehouse, and fencing.
The girls.
He underlined it twice.
The list was growing at an alarming rate, and every new entry felt like another anchor chaining him to this place when he was needed in London, at the negotiating table with Hollingford & Goss, and at the mill besides.
But Charlotte, his own sister, was motion and opinion given human shape, all loud laughter and louder arguments, striding through the mill floor as though she owned half of it.
She had been raised to take up space. These four girls, lashes lowered and voices dropped to whispers, had been trained to disappear instead.
The contrast turned something sour in his stomach.
The estate’s decay could be cataloged and handed off. The roof could be mended by tradesmen, the fences by laborers, the accounts by Beckwith. But four young women who flinched at the sound of their own grandmother’s walking stick could not be set right with a ledger entry and a bank draft.
He looked across the room to where his uncle’s widow still stood by the window, her gray eyes on him with an expression he could not quite read.
Assessment, certainly, but laced with something else.
Hope, perhaps. Or the careful, guarded cousin of hope that belongs to anyone who has learned the hard way not to trust it.
Their gazes held a beat longer than propriety allowed, and Alistair felt that same curious cooling sensation again, as though the forge of his thoughts had been met with a soft, patient rain. It unsettled him. He was not a man easily gentled.
He looked away first, because staring at the widow Oxley was proving an inconvenience of the highest order, and turned his attention back to the notebook in his hand.
He was going to have to stay longer than a week.
The thought landed with the dull weight of certainty.
Franklin would manage the early talks with Hollingford & Goss.
Benedict and Gregory could see to the mill floors.
The contract would hold. It had to hold.
Because if it did not, three hundred livelihoods in Irwyn hung in the balance, and Alistair did not have the luxury of tending his conscience in Yorkshire while his own people paid for his absence.
And yet.
He had looked into the faces of four girls who carried his family’s blood and his sister’s features, and he could not, in any conscience his mother would recognize, simply walk away.
Confound it all to blazes.