Chapter 6 #2
The silence that followed swallowed the whole room, floor to beamed ceiling, and inside it Alistair could make out the tick of a casement clock somewhere down the corridor and the faint, frantic clink of Genevieve’s spoon against her bowl as her hand shook.
“I hardly think that a suitable question for the dinner table,” Margaret said, her voice carrying the edge of someone accustomed to ending conversations on disapproval alone.
“I did not ask you.” He kept his voice level, having no need to raise it. He held Margaret’s stare a long two seconds, long enough that there could be no mistaking his words for a request, then turned back to Seraphina. “My lady, when did you last visit Irwyn?”
Seraphina’s gaze flicked sideways, not toward Margaret, not toward Alistair, but toward Josephine, seated perfectly still on the far side of the table, hands folded, expression unreadable.
Whatever silent exchange passed between the two women would have escaped any onlooker not already watching for it.
Josephine gave the barest tilt of her chin, a motion no larger than a breath.
Seraphina’s shoulders loosened when she caught it.
Alistair marked the exchange. He had seen its like before, that first day in the drawing room.
The pattern was plain to him now. They did not turn to their grandmother for leave to speak.
They turned to Josephine. Whatever power Margaret believed she still commanded in this household, the girls had already pledged their loyalty elsewhere, quietly and unshakably.
Instinct had already taught them the difference between a jailer and a shield.
“I have not left this estate in five years,” Seraphina said. “Perhaps six. I could not tell you exactly.”
She delivered the words flat and matter-of-fact, though color had already risen from the high neck of her mourning gown to stain her cheeks, and Alistair understood the shame was not in the fact itself but in having to say it aloud.
Here was a woman of four-and-twenty who had not set foot beyond her own home in half a decade.
He turned to Arabella. “And you?”
Margaret’s walking stick cracked once against the floor beneath the table, a single sharp report of displeasure. “I will thank you to stop interrogating my grandchildren, Your Grace. This is a dining room, not a court of law.”
“Then might I suggest,” Alistair said, without troubling to look at her, “that you let the witness answer, and we shall reach the end of it all the faster.”
Arabella’s answer came with a careful cadence that spoke of a lifetime picking her way along the narrow ledge between honesty and self-preservation. “The same as Seraphina. We have not been to town. The vicar comes here instead, for a private Sunday service.”
“A private service.” The phrase tasted sour on his tongue as he repeated it.
A private service meant a private existence entirely, a household so thoroughly walled off from the world that even Sunday worship came to them, lest they be permitted to join the ordinary life of the parish.
“And has any one of you left the grounds unaccompanied? Ever?”
Another silence followed, though this one felt different, textured somehow, a secret straining hard against whatever held it in place. Alistair could sense the girls trading glances down the length of the table, working out among themselves who would speak first.
Seraphina, naturally. It was always Seraphina, the eldest, the fiercest, the one who carried her sisters’ collective courage like a burden she had never asked to bear and would not now set down.
“I walked to the village once.” The color in her cheeks had deepened, spreading now to the tips of her ears.
“I only wished to see it. I had no coin for buying anything, so I stopped at the edge and turned back before I was noticed.” Her jaw firmed, and she met Alistair’s eyes with a defiance aimed not at him but at the humiliation of admitting it at all. “No one saw me there.”
Alistair understood then that this was no isolated wrong. The anger that followed was quiet and enduring, sharpened by the knowledge that everyone around it had learned to call it ordinary.
“This ends now,” he said.
Margaret’s chin rose. “I beg your pardon?”
“This arrangement. The confinement. Call it whatever you like. It ends.” He lifted his wineglass, drank an unhurried sip, and set it back down.
“Tomorrow I shall take my cousins into Irwyn for the afternoon. There is shopping to attend to. I am told the wardrobes here are in a sorry state, and the town, I believe, boasts a perfectly capable modiste who can begin correcting that.”