Chapter 10
The rain showed no sign of easing, but Alistair could bear the walls no longer.
The morning had gone to reviewing Beckwith’s drainage estimates, the afternoon to letters for his solicitor in Leeds, and the hours between to pacing the west library like a man taking the measure of his own cage.
The fire had burned low, the gray light through the windows thickened to the color of pewter, and still the rain came on, drumming its ceaseless rhythm against the glass until the sound blurred into something indistinguishable from the silence it had replaced.
By half past three he had reached the end of his patience entirely.
He shrugged into his overcoat in the entrance hall, paying no mind to the startled footman who must have thought His Grace had taken leave of his senses.
Alistair had built his whole career on decisive action.
Four days shut up in a medieval ruin while the sky emptied itself over Yorkshire had left him restless to the point of agitation, his thoughts wearing the same grooves over and over.
The mill, the contract, the estate, Josephine, until one worry could no longer be told apart from the next.
He needed movement. Needed to see with his own two eyes the land now his, rather than through the go-between of Beckwith’s careful maps.
The rain hit him the instant he stepped through the side door, cold and insistent, soaking clean through his hat brim within seconds.
He turned his collar up and set off down the gravel path skirting the south gardens, boots crunching in the sodden stone until the gravel gave way to mud, and the mud in turn to a narrow track vanishing into the trees.
The woods swallowed him with a suddenness that caught him off guard.
One moment he was crossing open ground with Fortunestone Hall bulking dark behind him, its medieval towers black against the low sky, and the next he stood beneath a canopy of bare oak and ash, branches interlacing overhead like the vaulted ribs of some ruined cathedral.
Rain still found him through the leafless boughs, but the wind fell away entirely, and the air turned still and cold, thick with the smell of wet bark and old leaves returning to earth.
He followed the track with no clear purpose in mind, letting his legs carry him along while his thoughts worked elsewhere.
The path lay overgrown but still visible, winding downward through the wood toward the sound of water.
Not the rain. The river. He could make it out now, a low, persistent rush beneath the patter of the downpour, growing louder the further he went.
The trees thinned out. Soft loam gave way beneath his feet to bare stone, slick with rain and furred over with moss, and the path bent sharply around a massive outcropping of limestone before opening onto—
He stopped short.
The ground simply ended. Not by degrees, not with the gentle slope of a riverbank, but with the sudden finality of a blade’s edge. He stood at the lip of a cliff, and the world fell away beneath him.
Below, perhaps two hundred feet down, the River Irwyn cut through a narrow gorge, its waters swollen brown with the week’s rain, churning against banks of gray stone flanking the current on either side.
Fortune’s Fall.
The sheer drop stole the breath clean out of his chest. No fence stood here, no wall, no marker of any kind to warn a man that his path led straight to oblivion. Only earth and stone, and then nothing at all, a void filled with rain and the roar of water and gravity’s gray indifference.
His uncle had gone over from this exact place. This very spot, in all likelihood.
Alistair’s jaw set as he stared down at the rocks below, trying to picture it.
Jerome Oxley, drunk and careless in the gathering dark, stumbling along this very path.
Had he even known where he stood? Had drink so dulled his senses that he simply walked off the edge without noticing?
Or had there come a terrible flash of clarity, the ground gone from beneath him, understanding arriving a moment too late to matter?
The official version called it an accident.
A duke deep in drink, a slick path, an unlucky fall.
The coroner had found it satisfactory. But Alistair had caught the whispers running through Irwyn, that Jerome Oxley’s death might not have been an accident at all.
That a man who had driven his estate to ruin and his family to despair might have found, at the cliff’s edge, an answer to troubles he had lacked the courage to face any other way.
Which possibility disturbed him more, Alistair could not have said.
Only then did he register how treacherous the rock beneath his own boots had become.
The limestone lay glazed with rain, its surface worn smooth by centuries of weather until it was nearly as slick as glass, and the moss clinging to its edges gave no purchase whatsoever.
A man might lose his footing here without warning.
He stepped back. Then back again, until solid ground stood beneath him once more and the cliff’s edge became a gray absence somewhere ahead of him, rather than a void directly under his feet.
His heart hammered harder than it had any business doing.
What a way to die.
He stood there a long moment in the rain, breathing with deliberate care, hands clenched inside his coat pockets, while the great house waited somewhere at his back in the mist.
This, then, was the inheritance he had come into. Not only the crumbling walls, the neglected tenants, the bitter old woman with her walking stick. This as well. A cliff that had swallowed one duke whole and lent truth to the estate’s grim nickname.
He turned his back on Fortune’s Fall and retraced his own steps through the wood, moving faster than good sense allowed on so muddy a path.
By the time the trees gave way, the hall’s towers had come into view through the rain, dark and solid against a colorless sky, and the sight of them settled him in a way he had not anticipated.
There was work waiting for him.
* * *
Rain still fell come dinner, an endless sound that seemed to cling to the sky.
Josephine had grown used to it across the last two days, the way it had woven itself into the fabric of the household until it became the very texture of silence, though the girls had not managed the same.
Genevieve pressed her nose to the drawing room glass while they waited for Hobbs to announce the meal, breath fogging the pane as she stared mournfully out at the sodden gardens.
“It has been raining for a hundred years,” she announced, theatrical despair thick in her voice, the sort that comes of working through every old novel the estate’s moldering library holds. “We shall all grow fins and swim to Irwyn.”
“It has been raining for two days,” Juliet corrected from her seat by the fire, not lifting her eyes from the leather-bound book open in her lap. “It only feels like a hundred years to you because you have gone through every novel in the house already.”
“I have not gone through all of them. I have merely ... returned to the best passages.”
“Three times over.”
Josephine traded a glance with Arabella, seated at the writing desk composing a letter with placid focus, having long since perfected the art of tuning out her younger sisters entirely.
The faintest curve touched her mouth before she bent back to her correspondence with one of her many cousins scattered across England.
Seraphina stood apart from the rest, near the doorway, arms crossed over her bodice in the posture she always took on when bracing herself for the dowager’s arrival.
Alistair entered the drawing room looking very much like a man who had recently been caught out in a downpour and made only a partial recovery from it.
His auburn hair still clung damp at the temples, darkened to the shade of old copper, and though he had changed into dry evening clothes, a restlessness hung about him that the rain seemed to have sharpened rather than washed away.
His eyes found Josephine’s across the room, and the warmth in them, the private acknowledgment passing between them, swarmed her heart beneath the stiff bombazine of her mourning gown.
Do not blush. Not here. Not in front of the girls.
She schooled her expression and inclined her head in greeting, and he answered with the ghost of a smile before turning to address the room at large.
“I trust you are all well this evening.”
“We are prisoners,” Seraphina said flatly, though no real venom rode beneath it. “The rain has managed that much on its own.”
“Indeed. I ventured out myself this afternoon, and can confirm the grounds appear determined to rejoin the sea.” He crossed to the fire and held his hands out toward the flames, and Josephine caught the faint tremor running through his fingers before he curled them into fists and let them drop to his sides.
Something about that walk of his had left him unsettled.
The sound reached them before the presence did.
The rhythmic clack of a walking stick against bare stone, growing louder with all the inexorable patience of bad weather rolling in.
Josephine felt the familiar tightening take hold in her chest, her hands clenching involuntarily in her lap, and watched the same tension move through the whole room.
Genevieve stepped back from the window. Juliet shut her book.
Arabella set her pen aside. Seraphina’s jaw went hard.
The dowager duchess Margaret Oxley entered the drawing room the way she entered any room, as though her mere willingness to appear constituted a favor bestowed on everyone present.
Her iron-gray hair sat dressed with severity beneath a cap of black lace, and her mourning gown hung heavy with heirloom jet that caught the light like the eyes of carrion birds against the dark fabric.
Her thin mouth held its usual expression of permanent dissatisfaction.