Chapter 4
Dinner the evening before had been a study in unbearable awkwardness.
Josephine had endured it wearing the calm she had earned surviving a full year of such meals, though last night had felt nothing like the others.
Margaret still sat at the head of the table with her walking stick propped beside her like a scepter, as always.
Everything was the same, except for the new duke.
The duke had sat across from the dowager and answered every one of her barbs with one of his own.
Margaret remarked that the soup was too rich for a lady watching her figure.
The duke countered that it was too thin for anyone watching their health.
Margaret praised the girls’ silence as evidence of good breeding.
He said silence at a dinner table more often spoke of fear than manners.
Watching the exchange, Josephine could not help but think of a fighter discovering that his opponent’s reach exceeded his own.
None of the girls had dared join in, though. Fear kept them silent, fear worn smooth by years of the dowager’s swift retribution, and an uncertainty over whether his defiance would hold or simply flare bright and leave them worse off in the dark that followed.
Josephine understood that caution intimately. She felt it herself, but indulging it was a luxury she could no longer afford.
Within the week, he leaves.
The thought had circled through her mind for every sleepless hour of the night.
He leaves, and everything returns to what it was. Another year passes for the girls inside this prison. Seraphina’s prospects for a good match shrink further. And the dowager stays exactly where she is.
By the time dawn broke, she had made up her mind, still lying in that vast canopied bed built for two and made lonelier for holding only one.
She would find the duke alone, well away from Margaret’s watchful presence and the butler’s pale, prying eyes, and lay out her case plainly.
Not through charm or persuasion, but through the unvarnished truth of what this house had become.
The trouble, naturally, lay in reaching him without anyone noticing.
Every wall at Fortunestone Hall seemed to have eyes.
Margaret’s command of the staff was total, decades of loyalty hardened into something close to omniscience.
Worst among them was Hobbs, a tall shadow with an unsettling habit of materializing in doorways.
But the housekeeper carried her reports to the dowager each morning, and the footmen tracked Josephine’s movements through the corridors with an attention that had nothing to do with duty and everything to do with keeping watch.
No one read the map of this household’s dangers better than Clara.
“Hobbs is in the kitchens.” Clara flattened herself against the corridor wall, easing one eye around the corner with all the caution of a scout probing hostile ground.
Her hazel eyes flicked left, then right, before she waved Josephine forward with a quick gesture. “Quickly now. The back stair is clear.”
Clara led and Josephine followed, the two of them slipping through the house like mice threading a room full of cats.
Down the upper corridor of the Duchess’s Wing, along the narrow back stair to the first floor, past a sitting room whose door stayed mercifully closed, and through the long gallery, where generations of Oxley portraits regarded their passage with matching disdain.
The gallery emptied into the western corridor at last, and there was the library door.
Clara froze there, one hand lifted in warning. Faint voices carried through the library’s heavy oak door, distinct enough to make out.
Josephine slipped into a stone alcove deep enough to hide her from any casual glance, and there she listened.
The first speaker had to be Mr. Beckwith, the new steward. Josephine had only glimpsed him in passing and did not know his voice, but this one carried a mild Yorkshire lilt and an unhurried, level calm.
“The accounting books are in a deplorable state, Your Grace,” Beckwith was saying.
“Entries come and go without pattern, the categories make no sense from one page to the next, and whole stretches show nothing recorded at all. Either the steward was grossly careless, or he meant to hide the true figures. My money is on the latter.”
A beat of silence followed, then the duke cleared his throat. His voice, low and clipped, “Skimming funds?”
“The tenancy receipts show discrepancies too great to blame on mere carelessness. Small sums, but they add up over time. And several entries were altered as if he went back and adjusted the figures after the fact.”
“Any reason to keep him on?”
Beckwith answered at once. “None at all. I spoke with several tenant farmers yesterday, and not one had a kind word for him. His departure would trouble no one.”
Relief rushed through her so fiercely her knees briefly buckled.
Mr. Hatchley, the steward, had unsettled her since the day she arrived.
His gaze lingered too long on the twins whenever they crossed his path, an attention no decent man would turn on girls of seventeen.
She had raised it with the dowager once, only to be told that Hatchley was a faithful servant and that Josephine’s nerves were running away with her.
Since then, she had made certain, with Clara’s muted help, that the twins were never left alone anywhere near him.
“Very well.” The duke’s tone carried the same brisk detachment a surgeon might bring to discussing an amputation, as though the matter were necessary, unpleasant, and best handled without delay. “Tell Hatchley I wish to see him this afternoon. I shall dismiss him myself.”
“Understood, Your Grace.”
A chair scraped back. Footsteps crossed the floor. Josephine flattened herself further into the alcove, heart hammering against her ribs, while Clara, stationed like a sentry at the far end of the corridor, gave the barest, sharpest shake of her head.
The library door swung open. Beckwith stepped out with his notebook in hand, turned the other way down the corridor, and vanished around the bend without so much as a glance toward the alcove.
Clara’s eyes found hers, and she gave the smallest of nods.
Josephine smoothed her skirts, gathered her courage in a single breath, and made her way to the library at what she hoped looked like an unhurried pace. Just outside the door, she stopped.
“Oh,” she said, letting her voice carry a note of mild surprise. “Your Grace. I had not thought to find you here.”
It was not, she admitted to herself, her most convincing piece of theater, but the duke seemed not to notice.
He sat behind a battered walnut desk that had been brought to order with ruthless discipline.
Papers were stacked in neat rows, a ledger lay open, an inkstand was flanked by sharpened quills arranged like soldiers awaiting their orders.
The room itself came as something of a surprise.
Long bars of pale morning light fell through arched windows onto faded rugs, and the barrel-vaulted ceiling bore carved oak medallions of owls and scrolls.
Bookcases climbed to the ceiling, every shelf wearing a coat of gray velvet dust. Only the space around the desk had been swept clean of it.
The duke glanced up from the ledger. His auburn hair was somewhat disheveled, his coat hung forgotten over the chair back, and his shirtsleeves were rolled above his elbows. The unexpected informality sent a small flutter through Josephine’s pulse.
He set down his quill and rose.
“Duchess.” His tone stayed courteous but wary, the same guarded reserve she had noticed the afternoon before, as if he meant to hold her at a careful distance, not out of any unkindness but from some private caution “Do come in.” He gestured toward one of the worn leather wingback chairs facing the desk.
She stepped inside, resisting the urge to look back before shutting the door. Clara would already be watching the corridor. Clara was always watching the corridor.
“I hope I do not intrude,” Josephine said, settling into the offered chair. A modest fire burned in the hearth, its warmth a small relief against the hall’s constant chill. She folded her hands in her lap and arranged her face into the serene expression she had practiced that very morning.
“Not at all.”
He waited for her to settle before taking his own seat again.
Once there, he turned his full attention on her, and she found it a far more formidable thing than she had expected.
His blue eyes were direct, assessing, stripped of the social varnish most gentlemen wore like armor.
When he fixed his attention on a person, there was no mistaking it, and nowhere to hide from it.
“I wished to speak with you alone,” she said. “About this household. About the girls.”
He settled back into his chair and said nothing. No prompting, no impatience, no meaningless chatter to fill the quiet. He simply waited, and Josephine understood at once that here was a man who knew patience could accomplish what words could not.
She gathered a breath and began.
“The girls have been kept here,” she said.
“Shut away, really. They have not left the estate in years. Seraphina is four-and-twenty, Your Grace, dangerously near the age where a woman is considered past hope of marrying well, and she has never once attended a ball, an assembly, or a dinner beyond these walls. None of her sisters have either.”
She studied his face while she spoke. Nothing in his expression changed outwardly. It held the same watchful calm, though the muscles around his eyes drew tight, so slight a movement she might have missed it entirely had she not spent a year learning to read faces as a matter of survival.