Chapter 13 #2
He slept on his side, one hand open against the pillow.
His auburn hair had come disarranged, and with a warmth she could not currently afford, she noted how it lay in the sort of careless disorder that daylight and propriety would correct before anyone else laid eyes on him. His breathing continued even and deep.
Get well, she thought, with a fierceness that surprised her. You are not permitted to be unwell. Not now. Not when I have only just found reason to believe things can be different.
She left.
Dark lay the corridor outside Alistair’s rooms, though not the comfortable dark of embers and familiar furniture. This was the resulting darkness of a house built for grandeur rather than convenience, its long flagstone corridors and portrait-lined walls devouring every scrap of light.
She pressed herself flat to the wall and moved east.
She knew the route by count of doors. Fourteen paces from his room to where the ducal wing met the older gallery.
A right turn past the fourth duke’s boar-hunt tapestry.
Down the servants’ back stair, never the formal one, visible as that was from the entrance hall.
Along the lower passage, through the morning room, up again to the private corridor holding her own rooms. Seven minutes this way. Perhaps ten, taken carefully.
She had just turned the gallery junction when she heard it, the distinct sound of someone approaching from the servants’ corridor below.
Not the tentative shuffle of a body barely awake, but the purposeful, heavy-heeled rhythm of someone already bound for a destination.
A man, most likely one of the footmen, come to begin the grate-laying that always preceded the household stirring.
She did not freeze. Freezing belonged to women who had never spent a year at the mercy of somebody else’s temper.
Instead she moved, stepping sideways into the deep doorway recess of the old music room, pressing herself against the carved frame and drawing her shawl tight, as if the shadows might be persuaded to swallow her.
The footsteps grew louder still. Lamplight flickered round the corner, then, mercifully, veered east with its bearer, toward the long wing that held the formal dining room. She waited. Counted out thirty heartbeats. Listened for the silence.
Then she moved again.
Cold through by the time she reached her own door, slippered feet aching against the chill of the flagstones, heart still running a faster tempo, she pressed the latch and slipped inside.
Clara sat in the chair beside the cold fireplace.
Sleep had clearly not touched her. The candle still burned, her hair sat braided for the night, but her spine held the straight alertness of someone keeping vigil rather than dozing. She was on her feet the moment Josephine entered, relief and anxiety tangled openly across her face.
“Your Grace.” Her voice barely rose above a breath.
“Clara.” Josephine eased the door shut without a sound and turned to face her. “You ought to have been asleep.”
“I couldn’t.” Clara came to her side at once, reaching for the shawl with hands that knew the motion by heart, the instinctive reaction of a maid always turned toward tending someone else’s needs before her own. “I kept thinking—” She caught herself.
“I know exactly what you kept thinking.” Josephine surrendered the shawl and lowered herself onto the edge of the bed.
“I thought the very same thing. But nothing can be mended over it at four in the morning, and fretting has never once altered the outcome of a single thing in the whole history of the world.”
Clara’s hands went still. In the candlelight her wide eyes shone very bright, and Josephine recognized the glint at once.
She had seen it in those first terrible days after Jerome’s death.
They had all been holding themselves together through sheer will they were not entirely certain they could sustain.
“The wedding.” Clara spoke the word with a restraint that only made it land heavier. “Do you believe—Will it still—”
“Yes.” She said it with far more conviction than she actually felt, a gift she had learned how to give regardless.
“Yes, Clara. Nothing has changed in the slightest. His Grace is merely tired. Those roads from Irwyn were brutal, but morning will find him himself again, and this wedding shall proceed exactly as arranged.”
A sob caught in Clara’s throat, escaping only as a ragged breath.
“Come here,” Josephine said, and when Clara sat beside her on the edge of the bed, she took the girl’s cold hands between her own.
It struck her, not for the first time, how absurd the whole arrangement was.
A duchess comforting a maid, two women whose separate vulnerabilities had somehow welded them into an unlikely partnership.
“Listen to me,” Josephine said. “Whatever happens. Whatever is said, or discovered, or—” She chose each word with care before letting it out.
“Whatever should arise touching on the events that preceded my husband’s death.
I need you to hear this, Clara, and believe it.
You will not be named. Not by me. Not in any document, any statement, any account of things that I am in any position to influence.
You were never there. You saw nothing. You know nothing.
Whatever weight there is to carry from that night, I carry it alone, because I am the one with the rank and the connections to bear it. ”
Clara’s hands tightened around hers, her voice urgent but pitched low, mindful of listening walls. “Your Grace, I would never … I don’t blame you, I’ve never once—”
“I know you do not.” Josephine’s voice gentled.
“And I know you would not. But that is not what I am telling you. I am telling you that if anyone should ever suggest otherwise, if the dowager, or Hobbs, or anyone at all should imply that the circumstances of that evening involved anyone in this household beyond my late husband and his own considerable devotion to the bottle, you are to say nothing. You are to appear confused and send them to me. That is all. Do you understand?”
The silence between them carried the weight of yes without needing the word itself.
Jerome had drunk himself to the edge of that cliff.
That was the truth she returned to whenever the nights grew too long and her imagination too willing.
He had been drinking since noon, which was nothing unusual.
He had quarreled with one of the stablemen and dismissed him on the spot, which was nothing unusual either.
He had made remarks at supper unfit for repetition and carried the bottle off with him when he left the table.
None of it out of the ordinary. Jerome’s own road to ruin had been so well-worn by then it had acquired its own geography, its own seasons, its own predictable slide from charm to cruelty to the oblivion he chased with such reliable, exhausting dedication.
He had walked too near the cliff’s edge in the dark. His habits were a matter of public record. His own boots had told the story of where he had gone.
It was the truth. It would have to be enough.
“The wedding will happen,” Josephine said again, releasing Clara’s hands and rising.
“And once it does, your place here is secure. Not merely tolerated at the dowager’s whim, not subject to whatever Hobbs chooses to think, but genuinely, legally secure.
Alistair has already made clear the household arrangements are to be revised.
You will be properly employed, properly paid, and the only person in this house with any authority to dismiss you will be me. ”
Clara looked at her with grateful disbelief, though grief still lingered beneath it. She had been raised to expect so little that the offer of simple security felt almost too generous to trust.
“Get some sleep,” Josephine said gently. “Both of us need it.”
After Clara had gone, Josephine sat alone in the pre-dawn stillness of her room, her gaze fixed on nothing at all.
Her thoughts circled to Alistair. To his hand lying open on the pillow.
Then to Jerome’s absences, those days of hollow silence after he rode out and returned smelling of things she had long since learned not to examine too closely, offering no account of himself and expecting none to be demanded, because she was his wife, and a wife was property, and property does not interrogate what it belongs to.
What did it mean, she wondered, that fear had found her again now, of all things.
Not the old fear of cruelty or absence or humiliation.
Fear of loss. Genuine loss. The chance that Alistair might be taken from her before she had finished learning how deeply she wanted him.
She might tell herself that marriage to Alistair amounted to nothing more than safety, but the truth of it ran far more tangled than that, and her heart, she suspected, had committed itself well beyond what she cared to admit.
It counted, she supposed, as a kind of progress. Fearing the loss of something good meant, at minimum, admitting something good had been found.
Drawing the coverlet close about herself, she watched the window as the darkness began, by degrees, to lift.
Soon. She would be wed soon, and then she would have the foothold she needed to look after everyone in this household, and herself besides. Because Alistair was a good man who took care of his people.