Chapter 9 #3
“Jerome scarcely spoke a word to me beyond what duty strictly demanded. He kept me in that house the way a man keeps something he has acquired rather than married, and he could not bear the thought of his wife being seen by other men, so I was not permitted to leave the grounds at all.”
She heard the dullness in her own voice, the careful distance she kept from the memories, as though narrating something that had happened to some other woman in some other life, and felt a faint astonishment at how thoroughly the day’s events had loosened her tongue.
She had perfected the trick during her marriage, retreating inside herself until her suffering seemed to belong to someone else.
It was how she had survived. But her capacity to feel anything at all, it seemed, was slowly returning to her now.
“Thirteen months,” she went on quietly. “Thirteen months forbidden to leave this estate. Eleven months of silence from a husband who stated outright that my purpose was to produce an heir and otherwise stay out of sight. He told me I was cold. That a warmer woman would have given him a son already.” Her mouth twisted at the irony of it now.
“And here I am carrying his child, conceived in the last months of his life, and the only man who has ever made me feel anything at all is the very nephew he refused to acknowledge.”
Clara’s tears had quieted by now. She sat motionless, reddened eyes fixed on Josephine with an expression of fierce, protective tenderness. “His Grace is nothing at all like him.”
“No,” Josephine agreed, squeezing her hand.
“He is not. He listens when I speak, weighs what I have said, and adjusts his course accordingly. He argued with me only this afternoon, and afterward asked for my consent rather than simply demanding my compliance.” She shook her head, still marveling at the fact of it. “I have never met a man like him.”
“Then we might truly come through this, after everything,” Clara whispered.
“More than come through it.” Josephine rose from her knees, one hand pressed to the small of her back where the familiar ache of being with child had settled in for good.
“The girls will have their coming-out. Seraphina and Arabella will have their chance at proper matches. The dowager will lose her grip on this household entirely. My mother and sister will have somewhere to go when Papa’s health finally fails.
” She drew a breath, feeling all those obligations settle back across her shoulders, lighter now for no longer bearing them alone. “And we …”
That familiar shadow gathered again at the edge of her thoughts, the dark shape that lived somewhere between what had already happened and what she still hoped to become.
“… we might be able to come through this unscathed.”
The word unscathed hung there in the air between them. Clara’s gaze sharpened at once, and in the look that passed between the two women lay everything neither dared put into words.
“When is the wedding to be?” Clara asked at last, keeping her voice carefully even.
“Sunday. He is securing a license.”
Clara’s eyebrows lifted. “So soon a date?”
“His Grace must leave for London soon after. The sooner we are wed, the sooner the dowager’s power over us ends.
” Josephine smoothed her skirts, a habitual gesture she knew told Clara she was gathering herself.
“It shall be quiet. No fanfare of any kind, but it will be legal, and that is all that truly matters.”
Clara looked up at her from the chair, the handkerchief folded now into a neat square in her lap. She had always found comfort in little, controllable tasks. Her expression wavered between hope and the old, ingrained caution neither of them had yet managed to set fully aside.
“Then we had best alter one of your old gowns, Your Grace,” she said, a ghost of her old spirit flickering behind her reddened eyes. “You cannot very well marry a duke dressed head-to-toe in mourning black.”
A laugh broke free of Josephine, startled and warm and dangerously near the tears she had been holding off since Alistair’s mouth first found hers in the gray light of the library.
A gown. Something other than the black bombazine she had worn like armor since Jerome’s death, day after relentless day, until the color had seeped into her very mood and she had all but forgotten the feeling of wearing anything else.
“I suppose not,” she said. “Though I have no doubt the dowager will find a great deal to say about that too.”
“The dowager,” Clara said, and the conviction that crept into her voice now was not put on but genuinely earned, built from that first tentative foundation of safety, “may say whatever pleases her. She is not the only duchess under this roof.”
The rain went on falling, tireless and gray, streaming down the bedchamber windows in rivulets that caught the weak afternoon light and broke it into fragments. Beyond the glass the gorge lay hidden under mist and cloud, that terrible precipice where Jerome had met his end.