Chapter 6
Laughter reached him before anything else did.
Thin and tentative, more breath than sound, it stopped him cold in the corridor outside the family drawing room, as effectively as a hand pressed flat against his chest. Two days he had spent at Fortunestone Hall now, and not once had he heard any of his cousins laugh.
The sound caught him so off guard that he froze with his hand still on the doorframe, listening.
One voice murmured rapidly beneath the others.
Another rose in a bright note that dissolved into fragile laughter.
A third hushed them both, urgent enough to suggest the merriment was forbidden and therefore all the more irresistible.
The room went silent the moment he pushed the door open.
Four pale faces turned toward him from the settees, their startled expressions remarkably alike. Seraphina and Arabella shared one, Juliet and Genevieve the other, all four dressed in formal black dinner gowns that turned their fair coloring nearly ghostly in the candlelight.
Near the window stood Josephine in her own mourning black, hands clasped, her expression sliding from something unguarded and nearly warm into the careful serenity he had come to recognize as her armor.
Their eyes caught for the barest instant before she turned hers away, and in that fraction of a second the entire weight of the afternoon settled back between them like a stone dropped into still water.
He had kissed her. Accused her. Sent her from the room.
And now here they all were, gathered for dinner as if none of it had happened, as if the taste of mint tea were not still caught somewhere behind his teeth like a splinter he could neither dig out nor forget.
Alistair adjusted a cravat that needed no adjusting and strode into the room, determined to survive the next two hours through sheer stubbornness alone.
“Good evening.” He offered the greeting to the room at large, with a formality that struck him as faintly absurd given the circumstances, though it was, he suspected, the only manner likely to carry him safely through the meal ahead.
Seraphina dipped her head. Arabella murmured something in greeting.
The twins traded a glance loaded with the same silent language he had once shared with his own younger brother, whole conversations passing in the space of a blink.
Josephine offered nothing at all, though her laced fingers tightened, and Alistair noticed, because apparently he had become a man who tracked the movements of a woman’s hands now.
Stop it.
He took up his usual place by the fire, hands clasped behind his back, and made an attempt not to look at Josephine.
It worked about as well as trying to ignore a lit lamp in a dark room.
She hovered at the edge of his vision, bright and unmoving, and keeping his eyes off her demanded a great deal more concentration than he cared to admit.
Then, from somewhere down the corridor, the sound began.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
The walking stick came on at an even, unhurried pace, each strike landing with the authority of a gavel.
Its effect on the room was instant and complete.
Genevieve’s face hardened. Juliet’s hands sought each other in her lap.
A muscle jumped at the hinge of Seraphina’s jaw.
Arabella, whose calm was the best-rehearsed of the four, went so motionless she might have been cast in porcelain.
Even Josephine’s chin lifted a fraction, the way a soldier squares up at the first beat of a drum.
It was, Alistair thought grimly, the most efficient deployment of fear he had seen since an inspector had shown up unannounced at the mill in his first year running it, sending every worker on the floor into rigid, white-faced compliance.
The difference was that the inspector had the law behind him.
Margaret had nothing but habit, cruelty, and control of the household purse, and the fact that both produced identical results told him everything he needed to know.
The door opened, and the dowager duchess entered, or more accurately, occupied the threshold for a long moment before condescending to cross it.
She wore black silk heavy with jet and garnets, her iron-gray hair pinned with an exactness that only a maid well-versed in her mistress’s intolerance for flaws could achieve.
Her pale eyes moved across the room with the same deliberate appraisal she might give a room of furniture awaiting inspection, rather than grandchildren awaiting greeting.
“You are all here,” she remarked, in the tone of someone noting both an expected and a faintly unwelcome fact. Her gaze reached Alistair last of all. “Your Grace.”
“Ma’am,” Alistair said, giving her exactly the courtesy she had earned and not one measure more.
The silence that followed did not last long, thankfully.
Hobbs appeared in the doorway with the uncanny timing of a lifetime spent waiting just beyond thresholds.
His gaunt frame folded into a bow aimed, Alistair noted, not at the duke who now paid his wages, but at the dowager who held his true loyalty.
“Dinner is served, Your Grace.”
The words were meant for Margaret alone.
Alistair watched the butler’s eyes slide past him.
His carefully blank expression made his allegiance to the old order clear.
He thought of Josephine’s words in the library, that the staff answered to the dowager and no one else.
He would have Beckwith look into the man. Soon.
They filed into the dining room in the exact order Margaret’s rigid sense of precedence demanded.
Alistair first, as duke, with the old dowager on his arm since she would tolerate no other arrangement, then Josephine alone, then the girls trailing behind by age like ducklings drilled to march instead of waddle.
The chamber itself ran long and cold, its candelabra throwing more shadow than light, and the table, built to seat twenty, had been laid for seven at one end with a formality that felt almost punitive.
Silver gleamed against white linen. Crystal caught and held the candle flame.
Every surface of it was polished, correct, and utterly without warmth.
Alistair seated Margaret before taking his own place at the head of the table. Josephine settled to his left, the girls arranged along the sides, and the first course arrived in a silence thick enough to slice.
He ate, or went through the motions of it, since the soup was lukewarm and over-salted and his attention was fixed on the far more pressing task of watching his cousins.
Genevieve stirred her spoon through the broth without once lifting it.
Juliet sipped in careful mouthfuls, mechanical and joyless, as if eating were something to be endured rather than enjoyed.
Arabella ate with metronomic regularity but no pleasure in it, as if provisioning herself for a siege.
Seraphina alone among her sisters seemed to have any appetite at all, having already finished her soup and moved on to buttering a roll with tidy strokes, as though she knew every eye at the table was on her and had, just this once, decided not to care.
All four of them were too thin. Not the leanness that comes with youth or a slight build, but the marked hollowness of meals eaten under watch, of food doled out as a privilege rather than provided as a simple necessity.
Alistair had seen that look on new children at the mill, before he established the mill kitchen that fed the apprentices, something his competitors had ridiculed and his own workers had wept over.
Hunger carried itself a certain way, shoulders curling in, eyes dropping down, and he recognized it now in a ducal dining room where the silver was sterling and the bread had gone stale.
“Seraphina.” Margaret’s voice sliced across the table like a blade leaving its sheath. “That is your second piece of bread.”
Seraphina’s hand went still. She had been reaching for a roll, the smallest one left in the basket, and now her fingers hung suspended above it in a gesture at once absurd and heartbreaking, the hesitation of a grown woman of two-and-twenty reduced to seeking permission before she could eat.
“A lady does not overindulge.” Margaret did not look up from her own plate, where a modest portion sat untouched, serving no purpose beyond decoration. “Corpulence is the enemy of elegance. No gentleman of quality wishes for a bride who cannot govern herself at table.”
The words settled over the table like frost. Genevieve’s spoon stopped moving.
Juliet’s eyes dropped to her lap. Arabella stared at her plate, while Seraphina’s knuckles went white around her knife, and for one vivid instant, Alistair found himself wondering whether his eldest cousin was calculating the distance between that blade and her grandmother’s hand.
She drew her hand back from the breadbasket and folded it into her lap.
Alistair’s jaw locked. He remembered the same cold fury at the mill, when he discovered a foreman docking men’s pay for lateness caused by his own wretched scheduling.
None of it reached Alistair’s face. Long before he inherited a dukedom, he had learned that anger carried greater force when stripped of heat.
“You speak of suitors,” he said, his voice easy, almost pleasant, the tone he used in negotiations just before dismantling an opponent’s position entirely. “An odd concern, given that my cousins seem to have no chance whatsoever of meeting any.”
Margaret’s eyes came up, milky and sharp all at once. They fixed on him with clear displeasure, as if she were entirely unused to being challenged at her own table. “I am sure I take no meaning at all from that remark, Your Grace.”
“Then allow me to be direct.” He set down his spoon. “Lady Seraphina.”
His cousin lifted her head.
“When did you last set foot in Irwyn?”