Chapter 4 #2
“They never go into Irwyn to shop. They do not attend Sunday services. The vicar comes to them instead, because the dowager will not allow them to travel. Even the youngest two have spent their entire girlhoods shut inside these walls, with no companions their own age, no tutors, none of the advantages young women of their station are owed.”
A muscle moved along his jaw, the outward sign of a temper that ran deep and a self-command that, formidable as it was, still had its limits.
A low sound of displeasure escaped him. “Their grandmother’s doing.”
“It is. Their father’s too, before he died.
Jerome saw no purpose in investing in their futures.
He wanted a son, and until one arrived, the girls were …
an inconvenience. An expense he begrudged.
” She kept her voice level, though every word tasted of ash.
“The dowager shares that view, and has kept up the practice since his death. The girls are fed. Clothed. Housed. But they are not living, Your Grace. They are merely enduring. There is a considerable difference.”
He considered her a long moment, fingers steepled before him in what she suspected was his habitual thinking posture, a businessman’s version of a scholar’s furrowed brow.
“And you,” he said. “You hold the title of dowager Duchess of Oxley. You carry authority in this household. Why have you allowed it to continue?”
There was no cruelty in the question. Still, the exactness of it was like a blade had slipped neatly between the ribs, and heat rushed to Josephine’s face. She could not deny it was a fair question. The very one she had put to herself a hundred times, alone in the small dark hours.
Why have I let it continue?
“I have lived here one year, Your Grace,” she said, and keeping her voice level cost her more than she wanted to admit.
“I arrived a bride and was widowed within the twelvemonth. What authority I hold in this household exists in name only. The dowager entirely governs the staff, composed of the butler, the housekeeper, the coachman, and every footman. All of them are her appointments, loyal to her alone, answerable to no one else. She holds the purse strings and tolerates no argument against her wishes.”
She would not weep. But what came next required two hard swallows before she could force the words past the tightness gathering in her throat.
“I, too, have not once been allowed to leave the estate since I came here.”
Absolute silence followed. His steepled fingers came undone. His hands dropped to rest on the arms of his chair, and his bearing changed.
“You have not left,” he echoed, his voice dropping to a register she had not heard from him before, one that belonged not to a man of business but to a man finding the outer edge of his own patience.
“I tried, once,” she said. “I asked that the carriage be brought round so I might visit the village. The coachman told me he could not oblige without the dowager’s express leave.
When I sought that leave, Her Grace informed me the carriage was reserved for family use, and that my errand did not qualify.
” She paused. “I am family, of course. Only not in her estimation.”
“And walking?”
“I thought of it. But I feared that if I left without leave, she would refuse to let me back inside. And if I were cast out entirely, no one would remain to stand between her and the girls.”
For the first time, she let him see past the guarded mask she had worn since setting foot in this house. She let him see everything that lay beneath it, the exhaustion, the fear, the stubborn resolve to protect four young women who had become the whole of her reason for enduring.
“I am all they have,” she continued quietly.
“I know I have done nothing to change their circumstances. But I am the only soul in this house who cares whether they are happy, or even safe. And I am afraid—” Her voice broke, and she caught herself, jaw clenched until the tremor passed.
“I am afraid that something will happen that I cannot govern, and I will no longer be able to protect them at all.”
What that something might be, she did not say. She could not, not yet. She still guarded her secret fiercely, certain that its discovery would change everything that followed, whether for the better or for ruin she could not begin to guess.
He regarded her a long while. The fire cracked in the grate, and somewhere in the walls beyond, the old house groaned and shifted, as if it too held its breath.
His face had gentled as she spoke, not into pity, which she would not have welcomed, but into the grim understanding that the household’s troubles ran deeper than he had first estimated.
“Well.” He said it at last, and the word held no outrage, no hesitation, only intent. “I expect we shall need new servants.”
Of every reaction Josephine had braced herself to receive, this was not one she had anticipated.
She had readied herself for dismissal, doubt, some condescending promise that he would attend to matters from the safety of Irwyn.
Instead came something so plainly sensible that tears pricked behind her eyes without warning, and she had to turn away, fixing her attention on the faded globe in the corner until the sting eased.
“You … you would dismiss them all?”
“The butler, the coachman, and anyone else who took part in confining you will be reviewed and replaced where it proves necessary. Beckwith may start at once.” He delivered this with the same flat certainty he had used against the dowager the day before.
“A household runs on the same principle as a mill. When a part fails, you do not coax it back to life. You take it out and put in one that runs properly.”
Josephine blinked hard. The tears she had been holding back rose dangerously close to the surface, and she pressed her fingertips together in her lap, using the small sting of it to anchor herself against the overwhelming feeling of being heard. Truly heard, for what felt like the first time.
He reached into the coat draped over the back of his chair, drew out the small notebook, and opened it.
Josephine glimpsed the page containing a dense column of entries in a firm, angular hand, underlined and annotated, growing at a pace that would have unnerved any man less practiced at managing disorder.
He took up his pencil and added a single word at the foot of the list.
Servants.