Chapter 13
Three struck on the landing clock just as Alistair reached the final flight of stairs.
He found himself counting the strokes without meaning to. Twenty-two hours he had been on his feet by now. His boots were done for, his coat likewise, and a deep, stubborn ache had settled behind his right shoulder, the kind that would want a full week to work loose, a week he could not spare.
The candle he carried threw wavering light across the paneled walls, shadows lurching as his arm wavered with exhaustion.
Fortunestone Hall at this hour showed its most honest self, none of the careful pretense a household puts on for the benefit of its observant new duke.
It was simply an old house, thick-walled and indifferent, breathing out the chill of a building that had stood through enough centuries to remain oblivious to any single one of its inhabitants.
The ride back from Irwyn had taken longer than it should have, the valley road turned treacherous by days of rain and the overflow from the western bank.
The gelding had picked his way with the sullen care of an animal worked well past reasonable request. Alistair had not argued the point.
He had simply sat the saddle, hands loose on the reins, mind running its inventory, the one that never stopped regardless of the hour.
The mill was secured. That was the fixed point the rest of the damage arranged itself around. The machinery intact. The looms intact. The engine house intact. The difference between a setback and a catastrophe.
The insurance assessors would come from Leeds in their own time, whenever that proved to be, and ask a great many questions before eventually naming a figure that would want negotiating upward.
In the meantime, Alistair would cover the costs himself.
Replacement coal and wool sourced from Bentley’s in Bradford at a premium he found offensive.
Emergency repairs to the roof. Wages for the workers through the shutdown, because he had not built a workforce three hundred strong by abandoning them the moment the arithmetic turned inconvenient.
He had spent fifteen years ensuring the mill could withstand a disaster such as this. The repairs would deplete reserves he had guarded carefully, but they would not ruin him. He could absorb the loss, rebuild, and leave the expected Hollingford payment untouched.
He had managed worse.
Dark lay the corridor outside the ducal chambers, sconces unlit, and he made his way by candlelight and memory alone.
No word had gone ahead of him. There had been no decent hour to send any, and in any case, announcing a man’s arrival at three in the morning smacked of exactly the sort of drama he had no patience for.
He had returned without fuss, wanting nothing more than his own bed.
He pushed open the door to his room and stopped.
The fire was burning. Low, but burning.
Someone had banked it within the last hour, and the grate threw a pleasant amber glow that pushed the chill back from the room. He paused, grateful for the unexpected warmth.
Then he saw the rest of it.
A single lamp burned low on the night table. Josephine slept in the wingback chair drawn close to the hearth and bed, curled beneath a shawl with her hair loose about her shoulders.
He stood in the doorway longer than was strictly necessary. She had waited for him. Built up the fire, lit the lamp, and waited, and at some point the waiting had folded itself into sleep, and still she had not left.
He set the candle down and undressed with as little noise as he could manage. Boots, coat, waistcoat. He had gotten down to his shirt when the sound of him moving reached her.
“Alistair.” Her voice came thick with sleep, rougher than its daytime register.
“Go back to sleep,” he said. “It is scarcely past three.”
She pushed herself upright regardless, pressing the heel of one hand against her eye.
Her hair slid across one shoulder. In the lamplight she looked warm and entirely unguarded, nothing like the dignified widow who navigated the halls by day.
He paused to look at her, his shirt half-unlaced, his shoulder aching, and the mill’s losses still adding themselves up in his mind.
“How bad?” she asked.
“Manageable.”
She took this and nodded. Then she reached up and set her hand against his jaw.
He kissed her, which had not been entirely the plan but was the only reasonable response available to him.
She answered him slowly, still warm with sleep, and leaned into him without hesitation.
He wrapped one arm around her and kissed her with all the pent-up relief of twenty-two hours spent cold, wet, and worried.
Only then did he understand that he had begun to think of her as safety.
“The insurance assessors,” he murmured against her hair, because even now his mind would not sit still. “They will want someone sent from Leeds. Weeks before any payout, possibly months. I will need to cover the emergency costs directly. Materials. Wages through the repairs.”
“You have the reserves for it,” she said. Not a question. She already knew.
“I have the reserves.” He drew back to frown at her.
The corner of her mouth lifted. “You are not nearly so difficult to predict where your responsibilities are concerned.”
He was not entirely certain that was true, though he lacked the energy just then to argue it. He was also, he registered distantly, sitting on the edge of his own bed at three in the morning conducting a financial conference with his affianced duchess.
“I have a foot in two different worlds,” he said, and heard the exhaustion plain in his own voice. “The estate. The mill. Neither one will wait its turn while I attend to the other.”
“Then stop, for five minutes,” she said, “and sleep.”
He lay down at last. She drew the coverlet over him and returned to her chair rather than leave him. The mill’s arithmetic ran one final circuit through his mind before, at last, falling silent. He was asleep before the clock on the landing could mark the quarter hour.
* * *
The fire in the hearth had burned down to cold ash before Josephine finally accepted that sleep would not return to her that night.
She sat motionless in the dark of her chair, listening.
A few feet away, in the bed, Alistair’s breathing ran slow and even, a deep, unguarded rhythm indicative of genuine rest. That, more than anything, was what frightened her.
Not the sound of him sleeping. The sheer relief in it.
He had not been himself this night. Not the man she had come to know in the days since his arrival at Fortunestone Hall, the one who moved through her dispirited household with the brisk intelligence of someone who had never once entertained the luxury of doubt.
That man did not surrender to weariness. He did not wince when he turned his head.
She shut her eyes and tried to reason herself calm, the way she had learned to do across a year of disastrous marriage. A private practice, like folding a frayed cloth before anyone could glimpse its threadbare edge.
He is tired. Men tire. It does not mean anything.
But it did mean something, and some stubborn, sleepless part of her would not pretend otherwise.
The wedding was soon.
Soon she would have the legal safety of Alistair’s name, his protection, the transformation of her circumstances from desperate precariousness into something resembling permanence. Alistair would stand between her unborn child and the dowager’s glacial, relentless reach.
In the privacy of her own mind, the one place she permitted herself an honesty affordable nowhere else, she had told herself she did not need Alistair to love her.
She needed him alive. Standing. Vigorous.
The sort of man capable of bending a room to his will merely by walking into it.
She needed, specifically, the version of him that made her feel, for the first time in years, that the relentless catastrophe of her own life was not hers to manage entirely alone.
She needed him well.
I need the wedding to take place.
The thought arrived with the persistence of water finding stone, and she could not keep it from seeping through.
She rose.
The room was cold. She had not truly registered it until this moment, curled as she had been in the chair with the last of the fire’s warmth, and now the chill found her all at once.
The candle on the mantel had nearly burned itself out.
Beyond the heavy curtains she could make out nothing, but the darkness itself had changed character while her attention lay elsewhere.
Not fully night any longer. That uncertain gray hour before the servants began to stir.
She had to go. She could not be found here.
Whatever understanding she and Alistair had reached, however unprecedented their situation, their intimacy born of crisis and deepening now into something for which she had no adequate word, the proprieties of this house still held, and the people who enforced them would be rising soon.
Hobbs moved through Fortunestone before six, that creeping, starch-scented figure with his unspoken indictments and his dull-coin eyes.
He reported to the dowager the way other men breathed, automatically, without conscience, simply as an extension of his essential nature.
Let anyone see her leaving Alistair’s rooms at dawn, and whatever fragile diplomatic ground she had gained would collapse in an instant. The dowager’s shape tongue, unyielding as ever, would tear her apart for it.
Josephine eased herself from the chair so carefully, it was as though she were crossing ice. She gathered her shawl more securely about herself, then stood one unplanned moment, staring at him.