Chapter 12 #2
Benedict turned to regard him as a younger brother who had just been handed both a responsibility and a piece of gossip in the same breath. “Return to Fortunestone,” he repeated. “How very domesticated of you.”
“I am to be married on Sunday.”
Benedict’s mug stopped halfway to his mouth. Then continued on its way. “Are you?” His tone fell somewhere short of belief.
“I am.” Alistair handed back the empty mug. “Do try to keep the mill standing while I am away.”
“Always do,” Benedict said. “Give my regards to your bride, whoever she may be.”
“You will meet her in due course.” Despite himself, a smile touched his mouth at the thought of Josephine, and the hours they had spent together the night before by the library fire.
He could not recall the last time a woman’s company alone had left him so thoroughly disinclined to think of anything else.
One of the boys brought his horse round, and he swung back up and turned it toward the still-dark road.
Behind him, Benedict was almost certainly wearing an expression of undisguised curiosity, subtlety never having numbered among his brother’s more developed talents.
The rain, which had received notice of no one’s schedule, went on as though it had nowhere better to be.
* * *
Breakfast came and went without him.
This was not, in itself, remarkable. Alistair kept early hours, and most mornings found him already deep in the library with Beckwith before the household had finished its toast. But his absence carried a different shape this morning.
Josephine’s nerves registered a change in the air before her reason had gathered the facts to account for it.
She found Mr. Beckwith in the passage outside the dining room, a rolled survey map under his arm, clearly with a great deal still to do.
“Mr. Beckwith. The duke … has he breakfasted already?”
Beckwith stopped and turned, and the hesitation before he answered told her most of what she needed to know. “His Grace rode out before five this morning, Your Grace. A clerk came from the mill. There is flooding. The River Irwyn has breached its banks, and the lower sheds were taking water.”
Josephine took a moment to absorb it. “Before five,” she repeated.
“I am told he did not wait for the carriage. The roads, in this weather …” Beckwith glanced toward the window. “He went on horseback.”
She thanked him and sent him on, lingering a moment in the empty passage while the news found its place in her mind.
The mill, of course. It did not surprise her, not entirely.
He had warned her often enough in subtle ways.
The ledgers left open on the worktable, the letters to Franklin, and the sudden sharpening of his attention whenever the mill was mentioned had all made his priorities clear.
Fortunestone was an obligation he managed with good grace.
The mill was the work that truly claimed him.
She had understood that from the beginning, and she did not begrudge him his devotion to it.
She only wished the Irwyn had chosen some other week to lose its temper. She reminded herself of the hundreds of people whose livelihoods depended on that mill, against which her own concerns amounted, by any honest reckoning, to very little, and went to find Seraphina.
Satisfied he was well, or as well as a man riding into a flood could be, her thoughts drifted back to the evening before, warming her cheeks until she scolded herself into setting the thoughts aside entirely. It would not do to be caught blushing like a maiden by her sharp-eyed stepdaughters.
She found Seraphina in the family drawing room, curled at one end of the settee with a volume of verse, looking like she had only recently discovered she was permitted to sit wherever she pleased.
Josephine had been noting the change for days now.
The color returning to her stepdaughter’s cheeks, the increasing vitality of someone kept too long in a confined room and only beginning to grasp the width of the larger one she had just been let into.
Not unlike a caged bird set loose into a rather bigger cage.
Josephine settled at the other end of the settee and accepted the cup Seraphina poured without ceremony, the girl having appointed herself keeper of the tea tray and taken up the post with a gravity Josephine found both touching and faintly amusing.
“He has gone to the mill,” Seraphina said. She was not asking.
“Before five this morning. There is flooding.”
Seraphina fell quiet a moment, turning a page of her book without reading it. “He will come back.”
“Of course he will.”
“I meant …” Seraphina set the book aside and turned to her with the directness that was, Josephine had come to learn, her natural mode once she had been given sufficient cause to trust the person before her. “I meant that he will come back. He is not a man who leaves things unfinished.”
Love and sorrow tightened in Josephine’s chest as she contemplated her stepdaughter. Shut away for years, the girl had nevertheless learned to judge people with remarkable insight.
“No,” she agreed. “He is not.”
Rain pressed against the windows with the same roaring persistence it had kept up for days. They sat together in the companionable quiet that had grown between them over the past week, each beginning to trust that the future might hold more than they had feared.
She found herself at the window without quite deciding to go there.
Beyond the glass the moors were a gray wash, and the river below would be running swollen and brown, its urgency matching her own unease closely enough.
Beckwith had called the roads passable. Beckwith had also said the flood was worsening by the hour, which suggested his idea of passable was rather more flexible than the word usually allowed.
Alistair had ridden out before breakfast. Into that.
It was not truly the mill she worried over.
The looms and coal stores gave her respectable reasons for concern, but neither occupied her thoughts for long.
She wondered instead whether he had stopped to eat, whether his coat would keep out the rain, and whether the road north of the estate remained passable.
None of it was a useful thing to be thinking. She had known the man a matter of days, and he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself.
She pressed her fingers to the cold glass and watched the gray, and did not move again until the sound reached her from the corridor. There it was. The slow, distinct clack of a walking stick against bare stone.
Josephine turned in alarm the same instant Seraphina came up off the settee.
A year in this house had sharpened her ear to that sound the way a hunted creature learns the exact crack of a branch underfoot.
She caught Seraphina’s arm and steered her toward the door at the far end of the room, the one opening onto the music room passage, a finger pressed to her lips.
Seraphina went without a word, silent in her slippers, drawing the door shut with the learned care of years spent moving through her own home unnoticed.
Josephine turned back for the tea tray. She was reaching for the second cup, the evidence wanting removal, when the door opened.
The dowager Duchess of Oxley entered the drawing room with walking stick and ramrod spine and iron-gray hair arranged with a rigidity suggesting her maid had been at the work of it since well before dawn.
She surveyed the room with pale blue eyes that had always struck Josephine as the color of winter ice over shallow water, handsome enough but discouraging of any lingering contact.
Her gaze dropped at once to the tea tray.