Chapter 7
Josephine was leaving Fortunestone Hall for the first time in more than a year.
The realization struck her as the carriage bucked over the rutted avenue.
Behind them, the stone towers dwindled beyond the line of elms until the mist swallowed them, as though the house were reaching after her even now.
Before her, the road opened wide, and even beneath a sky gray with coming rain, the world felt impossibly large.
The girls sensed it as well. She could read it in the way their shoulders dropped the instant the carriage cleared the gates, as if all four of them had exhaled, together, a breath held for years.
Seated across from Josephine, the twins had given up entirely on restraint.
“A journal.” Genevieve pressed her fingertips together as if she might will one into existence out of thin air.
“With marbled endpapers, the sort a heroine would use for her secret correspondence. And a novel, one with a crumbling abbey and a mystery that stays unsolved until the final page. Or truly anything at all, so long as it is not one of Grandmama’s improving tracts. ”
“New pencils,” Juliet put in, quieter but no less certain. “And a commonplace book, one with properly ruled pages.”
Josephine listened to these bright, buoyant girls with an ache made of equal parts joy and grief, girls the dowager had spent years flattening into obedience.
Girls their late mother had never troubled herself over, having abandoned them for London long before her death rather than endure this dreary estate a moment longer.
Girls their father had neglected while chasing his own selfish pursuits.
A stranger with a notebook and blunt pragmatism had managed in three days what she had failed to accomplish in over a year.
She had shielded them. She had comforted them.
She had never been able to free them. Freedom required authority, and authority was the one thing that had always eluded her.
That very authority now sat beside her.
Alistair occupied the far end of the seat, silent since their departure, his eyes fixed on the passing window.
Neither of them had spoken of the library since, of the kiss, or of the desperate proposal that had left her mouth before she could weigh the cost of it.
She had confessed to a partial deception and he had sent her from the room.
And now here they sat, pressed together while four young women chattered on about pencils and marbled endpapers, the warmth of his thigh against hers through layers of bombazine and wool undoing her resolve in ways no amount of careful breathing could repair.
She had believed herself incapable of feeling any of this.
Marriage had taught her only to endure, never to be cherished.
Jerome had never once bothered learning who she truly was, and when his own coldness met hers in turn, he laid the blame entirely at her feet.
Frigid, he had called her, just the once, with the offhand cruelty he brought to everything else, and it had never once occurred to him that the failing might belong to a husband who could not be troubled to try.
That single word had buried itself in her like a fishhook, lodged so deep that pulling it free now would do more harm than simply leaving it be.
But Alistair had already started to dismantle that verdict, from the very moment he took her by the elbow in the library and drew her close with a gentleness that had unmade her more thoroughly than force ever could have.
The kiss itself had been a revelation, not simply for what he had done, though its thoroughness had stayed with her since, but for what it had stirred awake inside her.
She had felt it plainly. Affection, sharp and undeniable, entirely her own, strong enough to make her forget, for a handful of shattering minutes, that she was a woman carrying a plan, a secret, and a child beneath her stays all at once.
She was not frigid. She had only ever been married to a man who could not be troubled to learn any different.
The carriage struck a rut, and Josephine’s shoulder collided with Alistair’s arm.
His hand came up to catch her, quick and instinctive, then dropped away again, and the place where he had touched her burned like a brand left too long against skin.
She did not look at him. Instead she fixed her attention on Genevieve, who had launched into the plot of some Gothic novel she meant to buy with an enthusiasm bordering on the evangelical, and tried to smother her own rising panic.
I am in a great deal of trouble.
Because scheming for his protection was no longer the whole of it.
She liked him. She wished to feel his hands in her hair again, his mouth against hers, the solid press of him near her, not for his usefulness but simply because he was himself, and the line separating those two reasons grew fainter with every passing hour.
She folded her hands in her lap and forced her gaze forward.
The road dropped into the valley, and Irwyn emerged from the mist like an image surfacing through old varnish.
Bleached stone cottages with slate roofs climbed the hillside in uneven rows, and below, the canal traced a dark ribbon through the green, a horse pulled a barge which eased along under bales stacked high beneath oilcloth.
A stone market square. St. Elinor’s spire.
And rising above every rooftop, the dark column of the mill’s chimney, trailing its banner of smoke that told her hundreds of people were at their work and the engines had not stopped turning.
Even through the closed carriage windows, the air carried a faint tang of lanolin and coal smoke.
The girls pressed themselves to the glass.
Genevieve gripped Juliet’s hand tight. Arabella tilted her head to catch the scenery sliding past over their heads, and Seraphina, aloof through the whole of the drive until now, leaned forward with an eagerness that made her look, for once, like a young woman of four-and-twenty rather than a prisoner handed a brief reprieve.
The carriage turned onto Merchant Row and rolled to a stop.
Alistair climbed down first and handed each girl out in turn, Josephine last of all.
Up close, the shops proved even more inviting than they had looked from the road, their bow windows filled with bolts of cloth, leather-bound books, jars of sweets, all the modest prosperity of a town built on wool and water.
They had gone barely a dozen steps down the pavement before Genevieve caught the warm scent drifting from a bakery. “Spiced gingerbread,” she announced. “Black treacle and clove.”
“I shall not leave this town without a square of it,” Juliet said, and before Josephine could get a word out, all four girls had swept through the bakery door in a tinkle of bell and a flurry of black bombazine and bright eyes, startling the shopkeeper into looking up from his counter.
Josephine and Alistair trailed behind at an easier pace, arriving to find the girls already gathered before the display case, their faces lit with the unguarded longing of young women who had gone without small pleasures for far too long.
Juliet turned first, her pale eyes seeking out Josephine. “Josephine, might you—”
She let the sentence go unfinished, since Josephine was already reaching for her reticule, but before her fingers closed around it, Alistair stepped past her and set coins on the counter with the unhurried air of a gentleman settling a routine account.
“Choose what you like,” he said, the words meant for no one in particular and all of them at once.
Genevieve’s whole face lit with a smile, and Juliet ducked her chin as though fighting back tears. Arabella’s mouth curved upward in an expression rare for her, and even Seraphina, who trusted no kindness until it had proven itself, eased her shoulders just a little.
Alistair’s eyes met Josephine’s for a moment, and he murmured, “They will need pin money of their own. A regular allowance. I shall arrange it.”
He left the girls to their gingerbread and went back out to the street, and Josephine followed a moment later, leaving them free to exclaim over black treacle and clove without a guardian’s watchful eye.
The two of them fell into step together down Merchant Row, the bakery’s faint sweetness trailing after them in the damp air.
“Thank you,” she said. “For all of it. Not only the gingerbread.”
He answered with a nod, though his eyes stayed elsewhere.
They walked on a little further, past the draper’s window where a bolt of deep blue wool caught what light the gray sky offered, and then he spoke again, the question arriving with no preamble at all, in the direct manner she had come to expect from a man who considered wasted words a genuine sin.
“How did you come to marry a man well past his fiftieth year?”
She might have deflected. She might have given him the polished account, the one she had rehearsed early in her marriage for acquaintances who asked with barely disguised curiosity.
But Alistair had promised her he would set things right, and answering his honesty with evasion felt like a betrayal of its own.