Chapter 7 #2
“My father is an aging landowner in Hertfordshire,” she said.
“The estate is entailed. Both my brothers fell at Waterloo, so upon my father’s death it passes to some distant cousin, and my mother and younger sister will be left with nowhere at all to go.
” She kept her tone light, though the old recitation always tightened her throat regardless.
“I brought little dowry to any match. I was nearing the age where a woman without fortune or connections simply vanishes from the notice of eligible men, and when the Duke of Oxley took an interest, I understood exactly what was being offered. My family’s security.
A title. Some hope that my mother and sister might have shelter once my father is gone.
” A pause. “I did not love Jerome. But the alternative was watching my family sink into ruin, and that I could not allow.”
She braced for pity. She knew its shape well by now. She had witnessed many times the soft, sympathetic murmur that followed any confession of her circumstances, the tilted head, the gentle “how dreadful” that accomplished absolutely nothing and altered even less.
Alistair came to a stop.
Josephine turned back to find him studying her with those storm-blue eyes, and what she found there was not pity but something closer to real sympathy, as if he were seeing her for the first time and did not find the sight beneath him.
He let out a slow breath, taking in what he had just heard rather than passing judgment on it, and the weight of his attention made her chest ache.
She could not bear it.
“I am not a victim,” she said, far too quickly and with far too much heat behind it.
She sounded defensive even to her own ears.
She sounded foolish, a woman who had entered a disastrous marriage with both eyes open and now stood on a public street practically begging for his protection not even a day before.
Sweet heavens, the whole of it mortified her.
That she needed rescuing in the first place.
That she could not simply gather the girls and march out of Fortunestone Hall under her own power.
Or banish the old woman to her own wing and be done with her.
That her whole future, and her unborn child’s besides, now rested on the goodwill of a man she had schemed to trap.
“That is not what I believe.” His voice had gone low.
Then his hand found her arm just below the elbow, a touch so brief it might have passed for accidental if not for the evident intention behind it, his fingers pressing through her sleeve for one instant before falling away again.
In that single second Josephine understood he was offering not comfort exactly, but acknowledgment.
He had heard every word. He had taken it in.
The urge to weep caught her without any warning at all, a swift, treacherous pressure gathering behind her eyes that she fought back with everything her self-command could muster.
She turned toward the shop window beside them, feigning interest in a display of lace collars, and pressed her fingertips together until the feeling passed.
She would not weep. Not here, on a public street, with a man beside her who had already witnessed far too much of her desperation.
She wished for his strength. She wished she might manage all of this alone.
But the truth she could not say aloud was that if the worst ever came, if the full circumstances of Jerome’s death ever came to light and she was not there to shield them, the girls would need someone immovable, and Alistair was the only immovable person she had found anywhere in this godforsaken stretch of Yorkshire.
Her hand drifted to her belly, a habit worn so smooth by now she barely noticed doing it.
The child growing there, small and secret and entirely dependent on her steering the next weeks clear of disaster, deserved a mother whose every kindness was not built on some foundation of necessity.
But necessity was the hand fate had dealt her, and she meant to play it with whatever grace she could still summon.
* * *
Alistair watched the girls move through the haberdashery with dazed, wide-eyed wonder as though they had spent their lives underground and just stumbled into sunlight, not quite believing it could be real.
They wandered between the displays of ribbon and lace, trailing fingers along bolts of trim, holding buttons up to catch the light, marveling over trifles that any young woman with an allowance of her own would never think twice about.
It was Josephine alone who kept the whole outing from tipping into chaos.
She moved among the girls with but a word here and a gentle nod there, navigating their whims with a competence that made it clear she was accustomed to managing a household of strong opinions.
She praised Arabella’s selection and steered Genevieve away from a display of feathered hair ornaments with a gentle remark that they suited a ballroom rather better than a morning’s errand.
When Seraphina’s hand found a pair of vivid emerald kidskin gloves, Josephine guided her elsewhere with a murmur that such things might wait until after her debut.
Alistair watched all this from beside a rack of gentlemen’s cravat pins he had not the slightest intention of buying, and found himself holding a reluctant admiration for the young widow.
She had come to him in the library and spoken of his cousins before she ever mentioned her own troubles.
Her own difficulties had come as an afterthought, and he could not decide whether that spoke to pure selflessness or to a woman so long accustomed to her own suffering that reporting it no longer occurred to her as worthwhile.
She had married Jerome Oxley purely to save her family.
Not ambition, not the title, not the crumbling grandeur of Fortunestone Hall.
At four-and-twenty, with no dowry, no connections, none of the beauty that could offset poverty in the marriage market of the ton, she had done the only thing remaining to her.
Except that she possessed exactly that kind of beauty. Alistair had noticed it the instant he laid eyes on her, and he noticed it again now. She was beautiful. And she had traded that beauty for nothing grander than her family’s security.
He left the haberdashery and walked with Genevieve down to the bookshop at the far end of Merchant Row, a narrow, warm little establishment smelling of ink and aged leather.
She moved through the shelves with all the reverent quiet of a pilgrim stepping into a cathedral, fingers trailing along the spines, while Alistair stood by the window and let her browse in peace, his mind still grinding at the problem since the previous afternoon.
The girls were not safe. That single fact underpinned everything else, and nothing about it changed regardless of how he felt about Josephine, or the library, or the kiss, or her condition, or any of the other complications that had piled onto him since the moment Franklin first said the words, “You have inherited.”