Chapter 15
Clara occupied the same chair as before, her hands folded in her lap and her face schooled into a careful blankness, having worked out her own conclusions from the morning’s sounds already and now waiting only for someone to confirm them aloud.
Josephine closed the door and sat across from her.
“He has gone,” Clara said. Not a question.
“He has gone,” Josephine said.
What followed bore almost no resemblance to the silences they had shared in this room before, which had belonged to two people who understood one another well enough to need no words at all.
This silence carried its own weight, a distinct gravity pressing against the walls until the very air felt thick with it.
“How long?” Clara asked.
“He could not say with any certainty. A week. Perhaps ten days.”
Clara’s eyes dropped to her own hands. She did not trouble to hide what she felt. Concealment, past a certain point, became its own confession. “And in ten days,” she said quietly, “anything at all could happen.”
“Yes.” No sense softening it. “But he gave his word, and I believe he means to keep it. That is what we have to work with, and we shall manage on it.”
Josephine delivered this with the dignity she had gathered up, piece by piece, on the walk back from the library, but she was aware it was not her most convincing show of calm.
She was also aware that Clara, who had dressed her and mended for her and watched her endure a marriage built entirely on daily acts of forbearance, was not fooled in the slightest.
Clara said nothing. Her eyes shone bright with unshed tears, and she held them back through sheer effort, understanding well enough that falling apart was a luxury neither of them could presently afford.
“Clara.” Josephine waited until the maid lifted her eyes.
“We have survived a great deal in this house. We shall survive a delayed wedding too.” She reached across and took Clara’s hands, stilling their restless knotting.
“He is coming back. And when he does, we shall have everything we need. All of us.”
A knock sounded at the door, causing Clara to flinch in surprise.
It was one of the hall’s older maids, a woman of few words with a face that gave nothing away, exactly the qualities the dowager searched for in her personal staff.
She delivered her message without a flicker of expression.
Her Grace, the dowager duchess, requested the presence of the duchess in the formal drawing room at her earliest convenience.
The phrasing, Josephine noted, was her earliest convenience. In Margaret Oxley’s vocabulary, that meant now, and nothing else.
She looked at Clara, whose stillness had gone brittle. “Stay here,” Josephine said. “I shall not be long.”
She did not believe it herself, not for a moment, and could see clearly enough, in the fear written across Clara’s face, that Clara believed it no more than she did.
The formal drawing room had long been Margaret’s territory since long before Josephine’s arrival at Fortunestone Hall.
It smelled of old roses and the peculiar cold that gathers in rooms heated as a matter of form rather than comfort.
Margaret sat in her chair by the fire, walking stick propped against its arm, pale blue eyes tracking Josephine’s approach with the patience of someone who had already been waiting a while and did not mind having waited, so confident was she in what was coming.
“Sit down,” the dowager said.
Josephine sat.
“I understand,” Margaret said, “that my grandson has departed for London.”
“On a matter of urgent business, yes.”
“Urgent business.” The old woman repeated the phrase in the tone she reserved for things beneath her contempt. “His mill, I presume.”
“An important client. It is a significant—”
“I am not interested in his clients.” Margaret’s tone was cutting, a rapier slicing a finger right off. “What interests me is that today was meant to be your wedding day, and the man who was to marry you has instead left for London before breakfast.” She paused. “I find that illuminating.”
“He will return.”
“Perhaps.” The old woman’s gaze did not so much as flicker.
“Or perhaps you will discover that men who belong to the world of trade belong to it entirely. The mill will always require his attention. The contracts will always be urgent. The negotiations will always want just a few days more.” She settled her hands over the head of her walking stick with the assurance of a woman making her point without needing to state it outright.
“My grandson is no duke, my dear. He is a mill owner who has been handed a title he neither earned nor wanted, and it will become plain, sooner or later, to everyone including himself, that the two cannot coexist.”
“You are mistaken,” Josephine said carefully.
“Am I?” The words landed with flat certainty, needing no confirmation.
“He proposed marriage to a woman he had known less than a week, and then abandoned her on the very morning of the wedding for his London merchants.” The thin mouth curved, just slightly.
“I am many things, but I am not mistaken about men. I have been studying them for sixty years.”
Josephine kept her face carefully arranged. Choosing her ground with care, she understood this conversation had a destination in mind, and that Margaret meant to steer them both toward it with total confidence. She could tell where it led, and felt no wish to hurry toward it.
“I did not come here to discuss His Grace’s business affairs,” Josephine said. “If that is all you wish to say—”
“It is not all I wish to say.”
Josephine’s heart lurched in alarm.
“I have been considering,” the dowager said, “a matter that has occupied my thoughts for some months now. Since the night of my son’s death, in fact.
” She reached beside her chair and lifted something from the table there, settling it into her lap with an unhurried air, as though she had rehearsed the gesture.
“I have been uncertain how best to proceed. The implications for this family, for the title, for the girls, are not inconsiderable. A scandal of this nature would follow them for years to come.”
Josephine clenched her jaw, staring at what lay in the old woman’s lap.
A shawl of pale blue wool, finely woven, the sort of thing a woman throws over her shoulders stepping out into a cold evening. She had not seen it since January. She had assumed it lost.
I am caught.
She willed her hands to remain motionless in her lap. Practice had made such stillness possible, had trained her body never to betray what stirred behind her face, and she was grateful for it now, because what stirred was cold-handed terror.
“It was found,” the dowager said, “beneath my son’s body at the base of the cliff by one of the groundsmen, the following morning.
A man in my employ, and one whose discretion I have long been able to rely upon.
” She smoothed the fabric across her knees with one hand, a gesture gentle in its calculated cruelty.
“He brought it to me rather than to the magistrate, understanding, as servants of long standing generally do, that certain matters are better handled within the household itself.”
The silence went on stretching. Josephine let it.
She had learned that silence was, on occasion, the only defense left available to a woman, and that the urge to speak, to explain, to offer the truth up before anyone had even demanded it, was a trap laid for women who mistook honesty for protection.
It offered no such thing. It was exposure, plain and simple.
“I want you gone from this house,” the dowager said.
Whatever pleasantries had existed were finished now.
Her voice had shed its conversational register entirely, replaced by the one she used for instructions she expected obeyed without question.
“There is a carriage waiting in the yard. You will pack what is necessary, and you will go to your father’s house in Hertfordshire. This morning.”
“And if I do not?”
“Then I shall send for the magistrate and place this before him.” She lifted the shawl slightly, then let it fall back into her lap.
“And I shall ask him what it means for a woman to have been present at the edge of a cliff on the very night her husband died there. I shall let him draw his own conclusions, which in my experience magistrates are exceedingly capable of drawing, especially when the woman in question is soon to marry the man who stands to gain the most from that death.” The pale eyes held hers fast. “Do you know what price a woman pays for killing a duke?”
Josephine said nothing. She stared instead at the shawl, and then at the woman holding it.
She thought of Clara, waiting upstairs in the dressing room for her return.
She thought of Seraphina and Arabella and the twins, who had weathered everything this house had done to them on the strength of knowing someone stood between them and further harm.
She thought of the child she carried. She thought of Alistair, somewhere on the York road by now, and felt an ache in her chest she had no time to indulge and could not quite silence either.
There were more pressing matters demanding her attention.
The truth of that night had never been simple, but laid before a magistrate by a woman of Margaret Oxley’s standing, backed by physical evidence and a witness ready to testify, it would not be received as the complicated, terrible thing it actually was.
It would be received as the simplest possible version of itself, and nothing more.
She could not shield Clara from that. She could not shield the girls from that. She could not shield the child she carried from that either.
“I shall need an hour,” she said. “To pack, and to make arrangements.”
The dowager’s expression shifted, satisfaction giving way to an older weariness Josephine could not read. “You will have until noon,” she said.