Chapter 10 #3
“Your father was a disgrace. Your mother is a Scottish nobody with mill grease still beneath her fingernails. And you—” She gripped her napkin in one hand, her walking stick in the other, her frail frame trembling with an anger too large for the body holding it.
“You are an insult to every single Duke of Oxley who has ever come before you.”
Alistair’s expression never changed. “Every Duke of Oxley before me drove this estate straight into the ground. I intend to manage rather better than that.”
The dowager held his gaze a long, brittle moment. Then she laid her napkin on the table with the care of someone setting down arms, pushed her chair back, and left the room entirely.
The walking stick led the way, its sharp report against bare corridor stone marking her retreat like the ticking of some malevolent clock.
Clack. Clack. Clack. The sound faded down the hall, growing fainter without ever quite vanishing, and Josephine sat with both hands pressed flat to the table and her heart beating high in her throat.
That sound, she suspected, would never fully release her.
It haunted the corridors of this house like a ghost, heralding the old woman’s approach, marking her exit, echoing on in the silence left behind.
It was the very sound that had come before the worst evening of Josephine’s life, that same rhythm tapping through the hall, and it returned to haunt her dreams with all the faithfulness of a curse.
Do not think of it. Not here. Not now.
She clenched her hands and found her palms had gone damp.
The girls sat in that stunned quiet that always followed the dowager’s storms, each working through the aftermath in her own way.
Seraphina’s color ran high, her eyes bright with fury held just barely in check.
Arabella had already reassembled her serene calm with a speed that spoke of years of practice.
Juliet watched Alistair with an expression of careful assessment, as though tallying figures in some private ledger of her own.
And Genevieve looked as though she might either weep or cheer, and had not yet settled on which.
“Well.” Alistair said it with a mildness that broke the tension at once. “Shall we return to our dinner?”
A sound broke from Seraphina that might have passed for a laugh. She pressed her knuckles to her lips, and the brightness in her eyes turned from anger into something warmer. “Yes. I believe we shall.”
The rest of the meal unfolded in a mood bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the oppressive silences that usually governed the Oxley table.
Genevieve peppered Alistair with questions about the wedding.
Would there be flowers? Might she wear her blue ribbon?
He answered each one with a patience that made Josephine’s chest ache to watch.
Juliet asked a question about the legal implications of a common license, and he regarded her with surprise and something close to respect before walking her through the process.
Arabella inquired after the vicar’s wife, whom she remembered fondly from a service once held at the hall, and Seraphina ate her dinner with an appetite that suggested the dowager’s absence had improved rather more than merely the conversation.
Josephine listened and let the evening’s contentment settle around her like a garment she was not yet entirely certain she had permission to wear.
Once dinner concluded, Alistair bid each of his cousins good evening with a warmth that would have gone entirely unremarked in any other household, and was nothing short of extraordinary in this one.
The girls filed out, slippers whispering against stone, and then only the two of them remained in the cavernous dining room, portraits watching on, candles guttering low in their silver holders.
He crossed to her chair and leaned down, near enough now that she caught the wood smoke clinging to his coat.
“I wonder if I might claim a few minutes of your evening,” he said, voice pitched low, meant for no ear but hers. “There are matters still to settle before Sunday, and I find I would far rather settle them across a fire with you than alone with a stack of correspondence.”
Her pulse leapt regardless of how plain the words themselves had been. She glanced up at him, startled by her own response, then let her gaze drop back to the table, certain that a second longer spent looking at him would betray every thought currently in her head.
“Of course,” she managed.
He straightened, offered his hand to help her rise, and walked her to the foot of the stairs before letting her go with a brief, warm press of his fingers against hers.
“The library, whenever you are ready. There is no hurry.”
She climbed the stairs by herself, one hand trailing along the banister, thinking of the walking stick’s fading percussion, of the cliff that haunted her dreams, of the man now waiting somewhere below for her, and she could not quite decide whether the flutter in her chest was nerves, anticipation, or some reckless, hopeful tangle of both.