Chapter 12 #3
“Your Grace,” Josephine said, and set her own cup down with a calm she did not entirely feel.
The dowager did not acknowledge the greeting. She crossed to her customary chair, the high-backed one nearest the fire, the seat she had occupied in this room for decades, and lowered herself into it with the bearing of someone who had never once sat anywhere she did not mean to govern from.
“Two cups,” the dowager said.
“I have been enjoying some company this morning.”
“Keeping company which makes unnecessary work for the servants.” The pale eyes moved to the window. “Seraphina, I presume. The child has taken to slinking about this house of late as though she believes herself entitled to be in it.”
Josephine said nothing. She had learned, across a year of such exchanges, that engaging was a trap of its own making. Every answer became a concession, and every concession set a precedent.
The dowager appeared to take the silence as invitation. She settled further into her chair. “You will,” she began, with the deliberate preamble of a judge about to deliver a finding, “have given some thought to the matter of mourning.”
Josephine held her hands motionless in her lap.
“Jerome has been dead two months.” The dowager spoke his name the way she spoke most things, with ownership rather than grief, as though he had been a possession that had inconveniently stopped functioning.
“Two months. And we are given to understand you intend to remarry before his body is properly cold.”
“The duke has secured a common license,” Josephine said. “The vicar—”
“Licenses are a matter of law. I speak of propriety.” The walking stick struck the floor once, a deliberate sound, the way one might bring down a gavel.
“A Duchess of Oxley is expected to keep full mourning for twelve months. Six months in first mourning. Full black, no ornament, no entertainments, no society. Six months in second mourning before half-colors are so much as considered. This is not a matter of personal taste. It is the standard this family has held to for generations.”
“I am aware of the convention.”
“Aware.” The dowager’s tone made clear that awareness, absent the matching conduct, amounted to its own species of moral failure. “Jerome deserved better than a wife who consigns him to history before the season has properly turned.”
Josephine considered the old woman across the table and felt the deep weariness of being asked to keep up appearances indefinitely for an audience no amount of effort would ever satisfy.
She thought of Alistair. He simply declined to be impressed by the dowager, comfortable in his own skin because he was someone who had never spent thirteen months trained to be afraid.
She was not Alistair. She knew exactly what she carried and could not spend courage she might urgently need elsewhere.
“I have every respect for convention,” she said carefully. “But the circumstances of this household are such that certain arrangements cannot wait.”
“The circumstances.” The dowager repeated the word. “You mean his commercial obligations.”
“I mean the welfare of the family.”
“The welfare of—” Pale eyes sharpened. The dowager had recognized the implication Josephine had left unspoken.
Whatever else she was, the old woman was shrewd, and had been reading rooms and people long before Josephine was born.
“You are remarkably anxious to be married, for a woman whose husband is two months dead.”
The room felt as though it had closed in a fraction. Josephine held her breath, hoping it went unnoticed.
“It is a matter of good sense,” she said. “The duke shares that view.”
“The duke.” The dowager said it the way she said everything touching Alistair, as though the title were a coat cut for another man entirely and she saw no reason to pretend otherwise out of courtesy.
“The duke is a man who measures sentiment by the yard. You will forgive me if I set a modest value on his opinion where matters of family honor are concerned.”
Josephine stood.
It was not a dramatic gesture but a resolved one. The dowager’s eyes tracked the movement.
“I thank you for your counsel,” Josephine said, which was as near to honest as she could manage without consequence. “The arrangements will proceed as planned.”
She quit the room before that walking stick could strike the floor once more.
The wedding was near. Alistair would come back. The vicar would speak the words over them. Facts, she told herself firmly, not mere wishes.
And yet …
The arithmetic assembled itself without her leave.
Two months since Jerome. Six months of expected full mourning, at the very least. A secret presently invisible that would be revealed to everyone within a matter of weeks.
Alistair in Irwyn with a flooded mill and a delayed contract and a dozen competing claims on his attention, every last one of them more urgent than a Sunday wedding that could, technically speaking, still be moved.
She came to a stop at the window, staring out while her thoughts spun circles inside her head.
The rain would not let up.