Chapter 15 #2
Josephine rose. She held her hands at her sides, her spine very straight, and studied the old woman a long moment before she spoke.
“Whatever you believe about that night,” she said, “the girls asked for none of what was done to them in this house. Seraphina and Arabella and the twins. Whatever use you intend to make of this, I ask that you remember them.”
The dowager said nothing at all.
Josephine crossed to the door and let herself out, pulling it gently shut behind her. She would not grant anyone in this house the satisfaction of hearing it slam.
The shawl.
She had not thought to account for it amid the chaos of that night, nor the days after, nor the weeks spent managing the story and the household and the girls and the mix of grief and relief she had not been permitted to feel. She had simply never thought of the shawl at all.
She pushed off from the wall and went to find Clara.
As she walked back through the corridors, Josephine refused to think of Alistair.
She could not bear to imagine how different everything might have been if they had married that morning and his name already stood between her and danger.
Still less could she afford to examine what she felt for the man himself.
She would not think of it. She was already thinking of it.
She had needed only one hour. One hour, and a vicar two miles down the road, and a man willing to ride that distance before breakfast. One hour, and the thing now dismantling her would have found no purchase at all.
She pushed the thought aside and kept walking.
* * *
The Great North Road proved a considerable improvement on the valley road, and counted as the sole thing about that morning going as it should.
The horses held a reasonable pace, the carriage springs took the worst of the ruts with no more than moderate complaint, and Franklin was asleep before the first quarter hour had passed.
Alistair rather envied him the skill, that capacity for sleeping anywhere, in any condition, as a natural response to tiredness with no restless mind standing between the two.
Alistair was watching the countryside.
The moors had surrendered to lower ground as the road descended from the hills, flattening into the broad, pale green of early spring fields, interrupted here and there by stone walls and bare hedgerows and the odd farmhouse set back at the end of a muddy track.
Nothing beautiful in it, not by any conventional measure.
A working landscape, and he had always preferred those anyway.
In truth, the landscape held none of his attention.
An hour had passed since he left Fortunestone Hall, and from the moment the carriage cleared the gates, he had been arguing with himself about Josephine.
Whatever he felt for her was inconvenient, ill-timed, and impossible to dismiss.
None of that altered the fact that it had taken hold of him completely.
When he proposed, he had told himself the whole business was prudent, nothing more, and had laid it out for himself with methodical logic.
People in that house needed his protection.
Marriage offered the simplest legal means of providing it.
Josephine stood as the sensible, willing party, and that he happened to find her interesting and capable and unusually attractive he had counted an advantage rather than any sort of complication.
At the time, he had believed himself entirely clear-eyed on the whole arrangement.
He knew better now. He had been entirely wrong.
He had not been clear-eyed since his arrival at Fortunestone Hall, when she had held her ground in the drawing room with the dowager’s walking stick striking the floor and her face arranged into that unreadable expression, and he had understood that the woman before him was not managing her situation but surviving it.
She had been surviving it a full year, and meant to go on surviving it through sheer force of will, absent any better alternative, and he recognized this was not passivity but courage of an unglamorous kind.
He recognized it because he had exercised that courage himself, in the years the mill’s future stood uncertain and his father was newly dead and the only barrier between livelihoods and ruin had been his own flat refusal to concede that ruin was possible.
She had captivated him. That was where the trouble had started.
Matters had only worsened since. Holding her that night, close against him before the library fire, had deepened what he felt rather than settled it, the sensation of her still a constant pressure somewhere beneath his ribs, a memory that stirred joy within him. Delight.
She had sat across his desk in the library that morning and asked whether they might ride to Irwyn before he left, and he had watched her hold herself entirely still while he weighed the question, and had seen in that stillness exactly what the asking had cost her.
Not the indignity of asking, since she was not a woman who spent much effort guarding her dignity for its own sake, but the hope underneath it, the tentative hope that he might say yes, and the readiness to set that hope aside if he did not.
He had watched her set it aside. Watched her rise and offer him breakfast with solemn courtesy, and he had stood alone in the empty library afterward, thoroughly lost, for some four full minutes.
He had gathered his coat afterward and gone looking for Franklin, since the contract demanded London, and London demanded his leaving. The alternative meant risking the mill, and with it the livelihoods of three hundred people in Irwyn.
He did not regret the choice. He would make it again, given the same circumstances. But he was discovering, somewhere on the road south of Irwyn, that knowing a decision was correct and feeling at peace with it were not the same experience at all.
Leaving her had gone against something in him, and he had not fully understood how much until the carriage actually pulled away and he felt the physical pull of it working against him.
He had always left places easily, without a second glance.
Yet he had looked back at Fortunestone Hall’s gates all the same.
There had been nothing much to see, only the gates and the avenue of elms and the gray towers receding against a pale sky. Still he had looked.
Franklin stirred in his sleep, shifting his shoulder against the carriage wall, and Alistair’s gaze went back to the window, staring at the passing fields without truly seeing them.
He was in love with her. He might as well own it, since it evidently intended to give him no peace until he did. In love with a woman he had known less than a week, which was not a circumstance he had ever imagined finding himself in.
He wanted to give her things. Not the things he was already bound to provide, the name, the legal protection, the household security.
Other things. The things no agreement covered and no solicitor could arrange.
He wanted to give her a morning in which she had nothing at all to manage.
He wanted the conversation they had avoided in the library and again before dawn, the one in which he told her that duty was no longer the whole of it.
He wanted her for herself, and he needed to know whether she could ever want him for more than the protection he offered.
He wanted to be worthy of the trust she extended him at real personal cost, and to make that worth visible to her rather than merely inferred.
He was also, at present, on the road to London with a contract to rescue and a flooded mill to account for and a brother asleep against the carriage wall, and none of what he wanted could be acted upon just then.
He thought of Fortunestone Hall without him inside it.
The dowager in her rooms, marshaling whatever resources she had left.
The disappointed girls attempting to read and failing at it.
And Josephine, who would stand against whatever Margaret contrived to make difficult, who would manage all of it with the competence and grace that had, from the very first morning, left him thoroughly and helplessly enamored.
This business wanted settling quickly. Not that the contract could wait, it could not, but every day spent in London was a day lost to Yorkshire, and Yorkshire, he had come to discover, now held someone he found he did not care to live without.
Turning from the window at last, he drew the leather satchel onto his knee and opened it. The preliminary Hollingford figures lay on top. He found his graphite pencil and got down to work.
Franklin slept on. The road unrolled ahead of them, pale and straight and leading south. Outside, England went about its ordinary Sunday business in the rain.
Alistair wrote and thought and calculated, and felt beneath all of it the persistent, inconvenient certainty that the most important thing waiting for his return was not to be found anywhere among the figures spread before him.