Chapter 16 #2
Something had been missing from his life all these years, he understood now.
The mill had given him great challenges, and climbing that mountain had made him a better man for it, but with each year’s greater success he had lost a little more of himself inside the work, until he no longer quite knew who he was apart from it.
Josephine had made him want a life beyond the mill.
She had awakened in him a longing for peace, for family, and even for the challenge of restoring an estate no Duke of Oxley had properly managed in a century or more.
She had cooled the fire that drove him without ever putting it out, and he wanted, badly, to be at her side.
To share in the joy of bringing a child into the world alongside her.
He stood a moment longer in the inn yard, the March wind finding the gap between his collar and his hat, and let the thought finally settle into the shape it had been working toward all morning.
Then he went inside to see about a horse.
* * *
Seraphina did not shed a single tear. She stood on Fortunestone Hall’s steps in the cold morning air, spine straight, chin level, eyes bright, and caught up both of Josephine’s hands in hers, holding fast.
“You will come back,” she said. Not entirely a question.
“I will come back,” Josephine said. She meant it entirely, though she could not say with any certainty how it would come to pass, and had deliberately avoided examining the mechanics of it too closely, for they depended on more things than currently lay within her control.
But she meant it with complete sincerity all the same, understanding that some promises must be made before their fulfillment can be guaranteed, because the people receiving them need the promise more than they need honesty about the odds.
Seraphina studied her a long moment with thoughtful eyes. Then she let go of Josephine’s hands and stepped back, settling into the calm of someone who had made a deliberate choice to believe something uncertain, the alternative being so much worse.
Arabella stood behind her sister with her hands clasped lightly before her, her expression arranged into the careful serenity that carried her through every circumstance without exception.
She did not weep either. She would not weep here, on the steps, where anyone might witness it.
But when Josephine took her hands, she felt the slight, trembling pressure of Arabella’s grip, carrying in that brief contact everything her face would not be permitted to show.
“You have been very good to us,” Arabella said quietly. Simply stated, without ornament, which made it land harder than any more elaborate sentiment could have managed. She held Josephine’s gaze a moment, her own private tally of everything being lost this morning.
Then she released Josephine’s hands and stepped back, gracious and unreachable as ever, and Josephine understood that containment was not indifference. It was simply the most Arabella knew how to give.
Genevieve and Juliet stood together, their shoulders slightly slumped.
Genevieve’s face worked hard at bravery and did not quite achieve it.
Juliet, who processed the world more cautiously than her twin, had gone motionless in the way she always did when frightened and unwilling to show it.
Both appeared younger than their years, standing there on the steps, perhaps because they had the broken expressions of disappointed children rather than the carefully managed faces they had learned to wear inside this house.
“Will you write?” Genevieve asked.
“Every week,” Josephine said. “And you will write back and tell me everything, and I shall read every single word.”
Juliet reached out and touched her sleeve, briefly, the lightest possible contact, the gesture of someone who had learned not to reach for things but reached anyway. Josephine caught the hand before it could withdraw and held it a moment.
“Be brave,” she said. She knew it fell short. It was also all she had to give.
She gazed at them now, these four girls who had asked for none of the circumstances handed to them, and had borne every one of those circumstances with a resilience that struck her, even now, as remarkable.
She thought back to what the hall had been the year she first arrived, its silence, the way the girls moved through its rooms like people determined not to be noticed inside their own home, the utter absence of anything resembling warmth, or ease, or ordinary comfort.
She thought of how a mere few days of Alistair Fraser-Oxley had undone all that.
The way he sat at the dinner table and asked them questions and actually listened to the answers.
The way he stood in the drawing room and told the dowager, in a voice that needed no raising to carry authority, exactly how matters were going to stand from now on.
The way Genevieve had laughed at something he said, unstrained and spontaneous, briefly forgetting she was meant to be careful at all times.
She would not have thought it possible to grieve something that had lasted only a matter of days, and yet here she stood, grieving it on the front steps in the cold all the same.
She released Juliet’s hand, straightened her gloves, and turned to find Clara waiting at the foot of the steps beside the carriage.
Proper preparation had never been possible.
The morning had simply moved too fast for it.
The dowager’s summons, the drawing room, the shawl laid across Margaret’s lap like a sentence already handed down, the carriage waiting in the yard as though arranged the very moment Alistair had left.
Josephine had gone straight to Clara afterward with little time to spare before she needed to be downstairs, and that had been time enough to say the essential things and nowhere near enough time for anything else.
She had watched Clara take the news in, with the white-faced stillness of a woman absorbing a blow she had not seen coming, and then straighten herself and begin, without a word, to pack.
Once more, quietly, for the last time, Josephine repeated the most essential thing. “Not a word about that night. Whatever is asked. Whatever is implied. You know nothing.”
“Your Grace.” Clara’s voice came out remarkably level, which told Josephine exactly what that levelness was costing her.
“I know what you have asked of me, and I shall do it. But I need you to tell me you are going to be all right. You and the—” She stopped herself.
Glanced toward the girls on the steps, still well within earshot. “You and … yours.”
“We are going to be perfectly well,” Josephine said. “I am going to my father’s house, which is a warm and comfortable house, and I am going to write to His Grace explaining that circumstances have changed and that he needs to return from London rather sooner than planned.”
Clara was choosing, for both their sakes, to leave the rest unspoken. “And if he cannot return quickly enough?”
“Then I shall manage until he can.” She kept her voice level. “I have been managing for a long time now, Clara. I do not intend to stop today.”
It was not enough. Clara wanted something more solid than words, some guarantee the ground beneath them both would hold. But no guarantees were on offer.
“Take care of them,” she told Clara. “And take care of yourself. Do not let her make you small.” She held Clara’s gaze a moment, putting into it everything that could not be said aloud with four girls listening. “You are not small, Clara. You never have been.”
For a brief moment Clara’s expression broke entirely, then pulled itself back together with the speed of long practice. She nodded, pressed her trembling lips shut, and stepped back.
Josephine turned toward the carriage. Two trunks sat lashed to its roof, the whole of what she had arrived with a year before. The coachman held the door open. She set her foot on the step.
She did not want to look back at the house. She had learned, long ago, that looking back was a luxury costing more than it ever returned, and she could not afford the expense today.
But she looked back regardless.
There on the steps the girls stood in a row.
Seraphina straight-backed and clear-eyed still, Arabella dignified and watchful beside her, the twins pressed close together, their faces open and unhappy and terribly young.
Clara stood slightly apart, hands folded, wearing the expression she wore when holding herself together by the narrowest possible margin.
Josephine raised her hand. A small gesture, meant only as reassurance.
She stepped into the carriage, and the door closed behind her.
The coachman lifted the reins, the horses moved off, and Fortunestone Hall began to recede through the window, its towers shrinking against a gray sky, the avenue of elms sliding past in their bare rows.
Through the gates they rolled, and all of it fell away behind, until only the estate road remained, the pale morning, and the sound of wheels turning through damp earth.
She let herself sit with it only as long as it took the carriage to reach the bottom of the hill, where the road from the hall joined the Irwyn road and the church spire showed briefly through the trees.
Then she sat up straight, opened the traveling case on the bench beside her, and drew out quill and ink.
She had a letter to write.