Chapter 3 #3
“Your Grace,” she began, relieved to find her voice level. “I must apologize for my mother-in-law’s remarks. They were unkind and unwarranted.”
He turned from the fire, and for a moment, his blue eyes met hers with an openness that caught her off guard.
A vulnerable flash, as though he had forgotten, for the space of a heartbeat, to keep up the brisk, businesslike manner that seemed to serve as his natural armor.
Then the shutters came down, and the expression turned more careful.
“There is no need for apology,” he said. His voice, without the dowager’s presence to sharpen it, had settled into a register lower, quieter, and rather more reserved than the one he had used through the whole confrontation. “The dowager’s opinions are her own. They want no defending or excusing.”
“Nevertheless, I would not wish you to think her views are shared by the rest of the household.” Josephine folded her hands before her, a posture of serenity that had become a kind of armor in its own right.
“The mill is the largest employer in Irwyn. The people of this parish depend upon it and your family’s stewardship.
I think it rather admirable that you mean to keep it, whatever the peerage may think. ”
His expression eased with a subtle warming, barely perceptible, as though a door had opened a fraction of an inch and let a sliver of light slip through. “You are well informed about the mill’s importance to the community.”
“I have been here a year, Your Grace. One cannot live in a house two miles from a textile mill bearing one’s own family name without coming to understand its importance.
” She paused, choosing her next words with the care of a woman setting stitches in fine silk.
“The vicar speaks very highly of you. He says you take care of your people.”
“The vicar is charitable.” He shifted his weight, his gaze dropping from hers to the fire and back again, and in that brief circuit, Josephine caught something she had not expected.
A flicker of awareness in those stormy blue eyes that had nothing to do with estate management or family politics and everything to do with the fact that they were a man and a woman alone in a room that had, without either of them quite intending it, grown uncomfortably intimate.
His attention rested on her a moment too long. His jaw twitched before he seemed to recollect himself and turned toward the fire.
All it took was that twitch of a jaw, and just like that, an idea took root.
It was small and half-formed, more instinct than strategy, but it lodged in her mind with the quiet tenacity of a seed finding purchase in cracked stone.
If this man’s interest in her could be encouraged, if his reluctance to involve himself could be worn down, if she could make him see that the girls needed rather more than a brief visit and a bank draft, then perhaps, perhaps, the terrible hold Margaret Oxley had kept over this household for decades might finally come loose.
It was not a comfortable thought. It sat uneasily beside everything Josephine believed of herself, every principle she held about honesty and a woman’s dignity.
But Fortunestone Hall had taught her quickly that a little ruthlessness was sometimes the only answer to cruelty. And the girls could not wait.
She held his gaze a moment longer than was strictly proper, and when she spoke again, her voice carried a warmth she had not entirely meant to allow it.
“What you did for Juliet just now, acknowledging her gift for numbers … No one in this house has ever told her that her mind has value. You gave her something today she will remember for a very long time.”
His brow creased, a fractional tightening that suggested her words had landed somewhere deeper than politeness. “A child should not have to be told that her mind has value. That it needed saying at all is a scathing indictment of this household.”
“It is,” Josephine agreed quietly. “Which is why your presence here matters more than you may realize.”
The words hung between them, weighted with more than they said outright.
He studied her a long moment, his gaze searching, and Josephine held it without flinching, though the effort cost her more than she would have liked to admit.
Then he turned away, toward the fire, and whatever had passed between them retreated.
“I will make arrangements before I depart,” he said, and the briskness was back in full. “The girls’ welfare will be seen to.”
Rising, he inclined his head and left the room.
The door clicked shut.
Josephine stood motionless a long moment, listening to his boots recede down the corridor.
Then she let out a breath she felt she had been holding since the moment he first walked into the drawing room, and her calm cracked, just slightly, a hairline fracture in porcelain, invisible to anyone not looking closely.
The idea was still there, insistent, pressing against the walls of her conscience.
She would think on it very carefully. She simply could not dismiss it. Not yet.