Chapter 3 #2
“The eighth duke disinherited his own son for falling in love,” the duke replied, and there was no humor in his voice now, only the flat, tempered hardness of a man stating facts he had no intention of debating. “His capacity for being appalled is not something I aspire to emulate.”
Margaret’s mouth worked, but nothing emerged.
Josephine realized, with something close to physical shock, that the old woman had been rendered speechless.
She had believed the thing theoretically impossible, the conversational equivalent of a river running uphill, and yet here it was, unfolding in a drafty Yorkshire drawing room.
For a woman who had governed this household through the sheer force of her tongue for five decades, the silence was an event of historic proportions.
Josephine found herself studying the duke with an attention that went beyond simple admiration.
Here was a man unintimidated by titles, airs, societal expectation, or the rules of the upper classes, so direct and so unlike anyone she had ever encountered.
His speech was refined enough, but he did not plead, did not negotiate, did not soften his position to spare the old woman’s feelings.
He simply stated what was true and let it stand.
Josephine wondered, with a quiet fierceness that startled her, whether she might learn to do the same.
Whether his manner could be studied and absorbed and made her own, so that the next time she faced Margaret Oxley alone, she might hold her ground without her hands trembling in the folds of her skirt.
The dowager tried a different approach. “You will find that the House of Lords does not look kindly upon men who sully their titles with trade. You will be ostracized. The family will suffer.”
“The family is already suffering,” he rebuked.
“The estate is in ruin. The tenants are fleeing. I would wager your granddaughters have not been properly introduced to society and I would venture to suggest, Your Grace, that the mill and its profits represent the only hope this dukedom has of surviving into the next generation. I will not apologize for the earned fortune it will take to drag this estate into the present century.”
Margaret drew herself up, her spine so rigidly straight she might have been a column of iron. She opened her mouth to deliver what would surely have been a devastating rejoinder, but the duke was already speaking again, his tone shifted from combative to something quieter but no less decisive.
“I thank you for your concern, but the decision is made. The mill will remain open under Fraser-Oxley stewardship.” It was his last word on the matter, and he settled into a seat before she could land another cut.
The old woman stared at him a long, crackling moment. His Grace met it with the same immovable strength he had met every one of her salvos.
Margaret’s knuckles whitened around the handle of her walking stick. She pushed herself upright, her temper moving faster than her stiff joints could follow. A slight wince escaped before she mastered it. Margaret would never admit that arthritis troubled her.
“You are your father’s son,” Margaret said, and loaded the words with such venom they might as well have been a curse. “Common in manner, common in speech, and common in ambition. This family deserved better.”
She clacked across the room without another word, the rhythm of her walking stick marking each step like a metronome set to the tempo of cold fury, and pulled the door shut behind her with a force that rattled the leaded windows in their frames.
The porcelain shepherdesses on the mantelpiece shivered in sympathy.
Josephine released the breath she had been holding. The departure of Margaret Oxley from any room produced a change in the air so profound it was almost a change in weather, as though a storm front had passed and left behind the dazed, trembling calm of a landscape that had survived its worst.
She became aware, in the silence that followed, that she was alone with the Duke of Oxley. The fire crackled. Rain murmured against the windows. The fading percussion of Margaret’s walking stick retreated down the corridor and was gone.
His Grace sat on the settee, one hand resting on his knee, his gaze fixed on the modest flames in the hearth with an abstracted intensity, as though he were sorting through a great many competing thoughts at once.
The Oxley men in the portraits she had studied in the long gallery ran lean and angular, pale, fine-boned, with the elegant fragility of men who had never in their lives lifted anything heavier than a quill.
The new duke was none of those things. He was tall and broad-shouldered and solid in a way that spoke of labor rather than leisure, muscle earned in the service of industry rather than sport.
His auburn hair caught the firelight and burned like banked copper, and there was a sturdiness in the way he held himself that put Josephine in mind of the great oak beams of the hall itself.
Strong, and unlikely to yield to anything short of catastrophe.
Stop it.
She was not here to catalog the man’s physical attributes. She was here to secure his support, to make him understand what was at stake, to convince him that the girls, and she herself, needed rather more than a swift assessment and a list of instructions for his steward.