Chapter 14 #2
“Lord Franklin has arrived,” he said, because there was no good way to begin this and beginning was the only way through it. “From London.”
She regarded him calmly. “There is a problem.”
“An important prospective client. He will withdraw by week’s end unless I appear in person.” He watched her take the information in and set it in order. “I must leave this morning. Within the hour.”
Silence fell. She crossed to the chair opposite the desk and sat, her face stunned.
“The wedding.” Her voice caught.
“I will return from London the moment I am able. As soon as the contract is secured, I come back directly, and we will—”
“When will that be?”
It carried less the weight of a question than of a formality, already braced to receive an answer she expected to dislike.
“I cannot say with any certainty.” He kept his voice level. “The roads are heavy. The journey alone runs two days under good conditions. The negotiations themselves will take however long they take, and I cannot predict that from here.”
“You cannot say.”
“No.” There seemed no point softening it; she would not thank him for trying. “I will be as quick as the matter allows. You have my word on that.”
She stared at him across the desk. The silence between them held a weight he could not quite put a name to. Josephine wore an expression that made him wonder if she was fighting down panic. If so, she was mostly winning.
* * *
She had thought herself prepared for this conversation.
She had dressed for a wedding, and then the footman arrived, and she had dressed herself instead for whatever the morning actually required, a different kind of armor entirely, and walked down to the library telling herself that whatever he said, she would receive it with the even temper she had spent months perfecting.
She told herself so in the corridor. Told herself again on the stairs.
She had believed it right up until she sat down across from him and heard that he could not tell her when he would return.
After the first jolt of it, she did not let her dismay show.
She had grown very good at not letting things show.
She had learned the skill upon her arrival at Fortunestone Hall, discovering within a fortnight that the life she had agreed to bore no resemblance to the one she had actually been given.
She had not wept then. She had not wept at any of the discoveries that followed.
She had learned instead the discipline of understanding that her own feelings were not among the variables anyone had ever agreed to consider, and she had practiced that discipline so long and so thoroughly that it had become, in most circumstances, impossible to tell apart from genuine calm.
These were not ordinary circumstances.
Beneath that calm sat something she would not have named aloud in any company, including her own.
Against her better judgment, she had allowed herself to want it. Now panic rose as it slipped out of reach before she could grasp it.
She had wanted this morning. The vicar, the ceremony, the vows that would turn uncertainty into permanence. More than any of it, she had wanted him, a man who commanded admiration without ever demanding it. She had dressed for the occasion. She had allowed herself to believe it would truly happen.
That had been her mistake. Not the wanting, but believing she might be permitted to keep what she wanted.
And then came the other thoughts, the ones logic could not dismiss, because logic had its limits and fear did not observe them.
What if the roads proved worse than expected?
What if London kept him longer than a week, two weeks, a month?
What if he reached London and found occasion, from that distance, to reconsider what had seemed so clear at Fortunestone Hall in the rain, and discovered the clarity did not survive the journey?
A man in London, surrounded by his own world and his own people and his own concerns, might look back on a promise made in Yorkshire to a woman he had known only days and find it rather less binding than it had felt at the time.
She would not blame him for it. She would understand entirely.
That was the worst part. She would understand it, because one marriage had taught her exactly how a man’s intentions and his actions came apart from each other without either side ever quite admitting that they had.
What if something happened to him on the road? Jerome had died on a cliff a hundred yards from his own front door, on an ordinary evening, with no warning at all. The universe gave no notice before it upended everything.
“The vicar is in Irwyn,” she said, keeping her voice polite, as though proposing a minor revision to the household accounts rather than asking for the thing she wanted most. “Two miles distant. If we rode now, we could return before you need to leave.” She held his gaze. “An hour, perhaps two.”
She watched him weigh it. He was a thorough man, and he gave the proposal the full attention it deserved, working through it with methodical care.
She could see him measuring the time against the roads against the hour against every other cost in turn and kept her own composure while he thought it through.
As she forced every emotion down, the room sharpened around her.
The candles had nearly burned out, and the air smelled faintly of ink and cold ash.
Alistair watched her. The change in his expression told her he understood exactly what she was asking and what it had cost her to say it.
“There is no time.” The words came out with an evenness she recognized as costing him something too.
“Franklin and I leave within the hour. Every hour before York is an hour before London, and every hour before London is an hour Goss spends weighing his alternatives.” He met her eyes directly, with the unflinching honesty she had come to know as his own peculiar form of respect.
“I cannot spare that hour, Josephine. I wish sincerely that I could.”
She had known this would likely be his answer. Even so, she had needed to hear it before she could finally relinquish the stubborn hope that he might say yes.
She set that hope aside now, putting it away in the private chamber she had been building and expanding inside her own mind for some time, the place where the things she could not afford to feel were stored away until she could afford to feel them, which was, in practice, never.
She rose, smoothed her gown’s front, and arranged her face into the expression that had already carried her through mornings worse than this one.
“I shall leave you to your preparations,” she said. “Though might I suggest you and Lord Franklin break your fast before you go? The roads will not improve for your leaving hungry.”
She turned and made for the door.
“Josephine.”
His voice caught her before she reached it.
“I am sorry,” he said. “For the timing of it. I would not have chosen this.”
She glanced back at at him wit ha brief nod, not trusting herself to speak.
He meant it. She could also see beneath it that he understood an apology was not nearly enough and offered it anyway, because it was the only thing within his power to give her.
Which was, she thought, more than Jerome would ever have troubled himself to offer.
None of it made things easier.
“I know,” she said.
She went out, and the door closed quietly behind her.