Chapter 6 #3
Whatever the meal had cost him in misery, the change that swept across his cousins’ faces made up for every minute of it.
Seraphina’s defiance eased into a soft flicker of hope.
Arabella’s polished calm cracked just slightly, her eyes widening, her lips parting in a way more eloquent than any words could manage.
The twins exchanged a look so openly thrilled and so fiercely restrained at once that it ached in Alistair’s chest to see it, because he knew that look.
He had seen it on Charlotte’s face at nine years old, the day their mother told her she might accompany Alistair to the canal’s opening, and Charlotte had tried so hard to be dignified about the honor that she had promptly burst into tears.
These girls were not nine years old. They were grown women who had been robbed of years they would never get back. That a mere trip to the modiste could provoke such a reaction was itself an indictment so scathing that no court in England could have handed down a harsher verdict.
“Oh,” Genevieve breathed, then caught herself at once, pressing her lips shut as though the sound had slipped out uninvited.
She glanced toward Margaret, away again, and then, with the sudden reckless nerve of a girl who had spent far too long being careful, added, “Might we also see the bookshop? I have heard there is one on Merchant Row, and I should dearly love to visit it.”
The words tumbled out in a rush, one nearly overtaking the next in its hurry to be said before prudence could catch up to it, and she wore the look of a person bracing for the sound of shattering glass after throwing the stone that caused it.
“You may visit every shop on Merchant Row, time permitting,” Alistair said, and was rewarded with a smile so sudden and so quickly reined back in that it looked like a lamp lit and snuffed out again in the same breath.
“What a charming notion,” Margaret said, in a voice cold enough to freeze the River Irwyn in the height of August. “I suppose I must accompany you all, since it is clear no one else in this household gives a thought to propriety.” She said this as though bestowing an enormous favor, sweeping her gaze around the table as if daring a single soul to argue the point.
Alistair drew breath to answer, but Josephine got there before him.
“That will not be necessary, Your Grace.” She spoke clearly, distinctly enough to be heard the length of the table.
“I serve as their chaperone, a perfectly capable one at that. Besides,” she went on, her tone one of courtesy built to hide a blade, “the roads to Irwyn show little mercy to carriages this time of year, and I should hate for your arthritis to suffer through hours of jolting and walking about town. The girls and I shall manage perfectly well on our own.”
Margaret’s fingers closed around the stem of her glass. Josephine met her stare and did not blink. Neither woman spoke, but the challenge had been made.
Margaret gave way. She marked her surrender with a stiff dip of her head, conceding this one skirmish while making it unmistakable that she had no intention of losing the larger war, and turned back to her plate wearing an expression that promised a reckoning later, in private.
The walking stick, propped against the table’s edge, slid a fraction, and the sound it made against the wood carried the click of a pistol being cocked.
Alistair held his tongue. He raised his wineglass and drank, watching over its rim as the young woman outflanked the most formidable person in the house with nothing sharper than courtesy and a mention of aching joints.
The anger from the library had not left him. Neither had the sense of betrayal, nor the bitter certainty that calculation had been braided into her feelings for him. For now, he kept it all beneath the civility expected at a family dinner.
Even so, he admired what she had done. The admission irritated him almost as much as she did.
She had not merely endured this house. She had made herself, quietly and without any fuss, the sole barrier standing between four young women and their grandmother’s tyranny.
She had managed it with no resources of her own, no real authority, not even a carriage or a coin to call hers, armed only with patience and the sort of courage that stays silent because it cannot afford to draw attention to itself.
Not wholly.
Her words in the library returned to him.
She had admitted that her interest in him was not entirely calculated, flushed and close to tears yet determined to make him understand.
He had refused to believe her. For fifteen years, people had sought him out because they needed something.
The possibility that she might want him as well had felt too dangerous to trust.
Now he wondered whether he had judged her too harshly. She had approached him with a purpose. He did not doubt that. But perhaps necessity was not the whole of it. Perhaps a woman could scheme to save the people she loved and still, at the same time, mean the kiss.
Perhaps he had been wrong about more than her feelings.
He could scarcely spare a single day. London was waiting.
The Hollingford contract ticked on like a clock he had no power to slow, but his cousins had not left their own grounds in half a decade.
The youngest of them had just asked, with the trembling hope of a prisoner requesting leave to walk the yard, whether she might see a bookshop.
Tomorrow, then, they would go to Irwyn. The contract would keep one more day. Some matters simply outweighed commerce.