Chapter 3
The dowager’s walking stick struck the floor three times in rapid succession, a percussive command the household had long since learned to read as a summons, a dismissal, or a declaration of war, depending on the angle of the old woman’s chin.
“Girls,” Margaret Oxley said, and the single word carried the temperature of a January frost. “You will remove yourselves. I wish to speak with His Grace privately. Josephine, you may go with them.”
The four sisters turned as one, a choreography of obedience so practiced it had become instinct.
Josephine caught the small flex of muscle when Seraphina’s jaw tightened, the protest swallowed whole, but the eldest moved toward the door without argument, her sisters falling into line behind her like ducklings in black bombazine.
They had all learned that resistance in the dowager’s presence was a coin best spent sparingly.
Josephine did not move.
It was a small act of defiance, and her body punished her for it at once, a hot surge of panic starting in her chest and radiating out to her fingertips, which she pressed against her skirt to still their trembling.
She had learned, over a year in this house, that courage was not the absence of fear but the grim, teeth-clenched decision to act in spite of it.
So she stayed by the window, spine straight, hands hidden in the folds of her mourning gown, and willed her voice to come out even.
“With respect, Your Grace, I believe I shall stay.”
The silence that followed was the peculiar kind that comes before a storm.
Heavy, pressurized, tasting faintly of copper.
Margaret Oxley’s pale blue eyes, already cold, hardened to something nearer stone.
The walking stick tilted forward an inch, as though the old woman were weighing whether to use it as a weapon rather than a support.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said I shall stay.” Josephine swallowed, but kept her chin level.
“I am, as you have often reminded me, the Dowager Duchess of Oxley. I have as much right to be present for discussions concerning the estate and the welfare of this family as any other member of this household. Indeed,” she added, and here the certainty in her own voice surprised even her, “as there are two dowager duchesses in residence, it seems rather fitting that both should be included.”
At the now-open door, the girls had frozen.
Seraphina’s hand hovered on the handle, her blue-green eyes wide with feeling she did not quite hide.
Arabella’s porcelain poise cracked just enough to show the startled woman beneath it.
Even the twins, pressed close together in the corridor, peered back into the room with expressions of pure astonishment, as though Josephine had sprouted wings rather than spoken a few sentences.
Margaret’s mouth opened. Josephine braced herself for the volley that would follow, but before the old woman could speak, a deep voice cut across the room.
“The duchess is quite right.”
He had not raised his voice. He had not needed to. The words landed with the flat, absolute authority of a cornerstone being set into place, and Josephine felt something loosen behind her ribs, a knot she had not known she carried, undone by the simple, extraordinary fact of being backed.
He stood near the fireplace, arms folded across his broad chest in a posture that managed to be both easy and immovable. His stormy blue eyes moved from the dowager to Josephine and held there a breath, warmth and approval flickering through them and gone almost before she could name it.
“She has every right to be present,” he continued, turning back to Margaret. “Moreover, as the late duke’s widow, she is likely to have insights that will prove useful to me. Her Grace stays.”
Josephine fixed her features into the serene mask she had spent a year perfecting, though her heart hammered beneath it.
She thought of the secret she carried, the one that pressed against the walls of her dignity every hour of every day, and how quickly it would all unravel if Margaret ever discovered it.
The old woman missed nothing. She cataloged every misstep, hoarded every suspicion.
Josephine could not afford to draw her notice, and yet here she stood, holding her ground in full view of the dragon’s pale blue stare.
Do it anyway. I cannot protect them if I am invisible.
She glanced toward the door and gave the smallest nod. Seraphina hesitated a moment longer, her sharp gaze flicking between the dowager and the new duke with the wariness of a chess player weighing the board, then ushered her sisters into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind them.
The latch clicked, and the three of them were alone.
Margaret wasted no time. She settled her walking stick against the arm of her chair with the deliberateness of a general planting a standard and fixed the duke with a stare that had, over the decades, reduced stronger constitutions than Josephine’s to stammering compliance.
“Very well, then, since we are apparently conducting a committee rather than a private audience, let us address the matter directly.” The old woman’s voice was thin and nasal, pitched to carry reprimand the way a church bell carries doom.
“You are now the Duke of Oxley. I trust you understand what that entails.”
“I have some notion,” the duke replied. Josephine caught the faintest thread of dry humor in his tone, so understated that Margaret, whose appreciation for irony had evidently atrophied decades ago, missed it entirely.
“It entails responsibility,” the dowager continued, as though he had not spoken.
“It entails the stewardship of eight hundred years of history, a seat in the House of Lords, and the upholding of a name that has been carried with dignity through the reigns of eleven monarchs. It does not entail the continued operation of a textile mill.”
Josephine watched his face. She had positioned herself carefully, still by the window but angled so she could observe both the dowager and the new duke without appearing to study either.
It was a skill she had honed to an art, watching everyone while seeming to watch no one, keeping her own face serene and unreadable.
She had learned long ago that being seen too plainly was its own kind of danger.
His expression did not change. That alone was remarkable.
Josephine had watched men twice his age quail under that certain note in Margaret’s voice.
The late duke’s solicitor. The village physician.
Even the archdeacon, who had once gone pale and lost his place in the Christmas sermon after the old woman remarked upon his pronunciation of the Nicene Creed.
But the man by the fireplace only regarded his grandmother with an unimpressed calm, as if he had weathered louder storms than this one and come away thinking it good practice.
“You will divest yourself of that shameful business,” Margaret continued, gathering momentum the way a woman does after seventy-six years of monologue.
“It has been a source of unspeakable embarrassment to this family for decades. Your father’s little enterprise, parading the Oxley name through the gutters of commerce.
That a Duke of Oxley should be associated with industry is beyond mortification.
” She drew a breath that quivered with righteous conviction.
“But I thank a generous and merciful Lord that Providence has seen fit to correct the error at last. You will take your rightful place at Lords, you will restore the family’s reputation amongst the peerage, and you will put an end to this sordid chapter of industrial dalliance. ”
She delivered the whole speech with the unshaken conviction of seventy-six years spent being agreed with, and Josephine felt the old, familiar twist of nausea rise in her, that same tangle of anger and helplessness Margaret’s pronouncements always stirred.
The same sick feeling that had followed every one of the old woman’s edicts this past year.
The girls will not go into society. The girls will not visit town.
The girls will not receive callers. Each decree handed down as though it carried the weight of divine ordinance.
It carried nothing of the kind. It was simply an old woman refusing to loosen her grip on the household.
Josephine waited for him to yield. She was so used to watching men buckle beneath Margaret’s certainty that she had already begun forming the expression of polite disappointment she would wear when he agreed.
He did not yield.
“I should sell off a thriving family business, leave my loyal employees to their fate, and turn my back on the community of Irwyn, all because some pompous popinjays at Lords will judge me ungentlemanly for my business dealings? I think not. Fraser & Oxley Textile Mill will remain exactly as it is, under my direct supervision.”
The dowager flinched at his bluntness, but the duke did not appear to care in the slightest.
Josephine pressed her lips together to hold back the smile that threatened to give her away.
Pompous popinjays at Lords. In all her years navigating the razor-edged proprieties of the gentry, she had never once heard anyone speak with such magnificent disregard for decorum, and the effect on her was not unlike the first breath of fresh air after too long shut up in a stale room.
Margaret’s walking stick trembled against the floorboards.
Whether from fury or age, it was hard to say.
“You are vulgar,” she said, her voice dropping to the register she used when she meant to wound rather than merely reprimand.
“Your father was vulgar, and your mother was the daughter of a miller, and between them they have produced a man who speaks so carelessly of his betters in a duchess’s drawing room. The eighth duke would be appalled.”