Chapter 17
Speed was not among the cob’s virtues. Alistair had worked that out within the first quarter mile and had been contending with it ever since, an exercise in pure frustration, since he knew perfectly well that urgency and actual pace were two entirely different animals, and knowing it offered him no comfort whatsoever.
On the road from the inn he had told himself he could not know what awaited him back at the hall. It was a lie.
Josephine was alone in a house with Margaret Oxley, on the very morning meant to be their wedding day, with no one left in it holding either the authority or the inclination to stand between her and whatever the old woman had decided to make of the void his departure had opened.
It would be fine, he had told himself. He repeated the reassurance some four times between the inn yard and the first mile marker, at which point he gave up telling himself anything whatsoever and simply turned his whole attention toward getting back.
The Fortunestone gates swung into sight at the end of the elm avenue, and he had closed to perhaps two hundred yards when a carriage appeared, moving out along the drive at a brisk clip, Fortunestone livery on the coachman’s coat, trunks lashed to the roof.
Alistair pulled the horse up short in the middle of the road.
He sat there a moment considering those trunks.
The cold anger that rose up in him now caught him somewhat by surprise, anger aimed not at any one person but at an entire situation, at that specific strain of human cruelty that works through institutions and propriety and the accumulated weight of social standing. He had known this feeling before.
It sharpened into icy resolve.
The carriage drew up the instant the coachman spotted the obstruction ahead. Alistair swung down, tied the cob to the nearest elm, and commanded the man on the box. “Stay where you are.”
He crossed to the carriage door and knocked once.
A pause followed, then he opened it himself.
Josephine had been crying. The evidence of it clung to her face still, despite whatever effort she had spent scrubbing it away.
Her eyes showed red. What calm remained came at a cost he had learned by now to recognize, the toll a well-maintained wall always exacts once the ground beneath it starts shifting.
He watched her take in the fact of presence, the mud on his coat, the horse tied to the elm behind him, a man who had turned straight around and ridden back without a thought for how he looked on arrival. He watched her work out what it meant.
“Why are you here?” Her voice wobbled.
“To marry you,” he said. “Obviously.”
Something crossed her face he had no name for, and needed none.
It moved over her the way weather moves across a landscape, swift and total, and left her poise broken clean apart in its wake.
She pressed her fingers to her mouth and turned toward the window.
Her shoulders worked hard at containing her emotions, which were not, he suspected, purely composed of grief.
He waited. He was capable of waiting without needing to fill a silence, a skill developed across years of meetings with vendors and clients alike and found useful in a great many contexts since.
When she turned back, her face had been put back together.
Quickly, and well, which told him a great deal about how often the skill had been called upon.
He had watched her gather herself before, in front of the dowager, in front of the girls, and each time that gathering had arrived with the smooth authority of a thing long practiced.
This was different. This was the dignity of a woman reassembling herself after her defenses had been cut through entirely, the seams still stubborn against going back together.
“I am going home,” she said. “To my father’s house in Hertfordshire.”
“I can see that.” He kept his voice level. “Why?”
She examined her hands. “Circumstances have changed.”
“Josephine.” He inhaled through his nose, then continued with all the gentle patience he could muster. “What happened since I left this morning?”
She said nothing. He had learned a great many things about her across eight days, more than he would have credited possible and considerably less than he now intended to know.
Whatever had put her into this carriage with her trunks strapped to the roof had happened in the hours since he rode away, and it had not been of her choosing.
He felt as certain of that as he had ever felt of anything.
“What did she say to you?”
The silence changed its character, a question landing squarely on the answer it was hiding.
“It does not signify,” she said.
He studied her thoughtfully. “It signifies entirely.”
“I am going back to that house,” he said quietly, “regardless of what you tell me. The only question is whether I go in understanding what awaits me.”
Her chin lifted. A tiny movement, controlled almost the instant it happened, but he caught it all the same. “You cannot simply walk back in there and—”
“I can, and I will.” He said it flatly. “I am the Duke of Oxley. That house belongs to me, and everyone inside it is my responsibility, a fact the dowager appears to have temporarily mislaid. What I would prefer,” he said, “is to know what she said to you before I say a single word to her.”
She stared at him across the carriage step. The morning light showed no mercy, and she looked tired and stripped of her usual careful management. Without her usual defenses, she was achingly herself, and standing so near her tested his composure for reasons having nothing to do with dislike.
She opened her mouth. Closed it again. Pressed her hands flat against her lap in the gesture she made when arriving at a decision.
“Not here,” she said finally.
He stepped back from the door and addressed the coachman. “Step down.”
“Alistair.” Her voice reached him through the door with the note of alarm. “What are you doing?”
He closed the carriage door.
Then he sent the coachman back to Fortunestone Hall astride the cob and climbed up to the driver’s box himself, taking up the reins.
He offered no explanation. She would understand once they reached the vicarage, and he meant to see them there before she had time to build a sufficient case against it.
They needed to arrive while services still ran.
He drove without hurrying. His emotions had finished sharpening and turned into something more useful now, intention that comes of identifying a problem, weighing every variable, and arriving at the single acceptable course of action.
Margaret Oxley had used her morning to considerable effect.
She had timed it well and carried it out with the ruthlessness of someone whose ill intent never once wavered.
What the old woman had failed to account for, however, was a horse at the White Hare and a road that ran in both directions equally.
Irwyn’s spire showed pale through the morning cloud ahead. He fixed his eyes on it and did not glance back at the gates of Fortunestone Hall receding behind him.
One step at a time. Irwyn first. Then the vicar. Then everything else that follows.
* * *
What she had expected, she could not have said.
Most of that morning had gone toward refusing herself permission to expect anything whatsoever, on the reasonable grounds that the morning had already taken all she had to offer and given nothing back.
Then the carriage stopped. The door opened.
There stood Alistair Fraser-Oxley on the other side of it.
The sight of him broke through the last of her restraint.
She had never wept so openly in front of him before. She had not wept in front of anyone in a very long time, but oh, how she had wanted to the moment she saw his face.
Watching Irwyn draw nearer through the window, she felt the conflict of his return settle over her like two different weathers sharing one sky.
He was here. Relief arrived so immediate, so physical, that it frightened her a little.
She knew, even as the feeling washed through her, that she held no real claim to it.
Hundreds of souls in Irwyn had a stronger claim on him than she ever would.
The mill was real. The livelihood of every worker drawing wages from Fraser & Oxley was real, and she had never been the sort of woman who set her own trouble above the trouble of people with no one else to speak for them.
That reckoning she had already made, on the estate road, and accepted, and it had been the right one.
Yet here he was regardless, and she found herself entirely at a loss over what to do with her own quiet delight.
Not delight on account of everyone it touched.
Not the girls. Not Clara. Not even the babe carried beneath her heart. Only delight, true and unadorned.
She was not going to examine that too closely. A conversation was coming that she had never had with another living soul, not aloud, not in any form that gave it a shape beyond her own memory, and she needed whatever courage remained to her to get through it.
The carriage slowed, and she recognized the church at once.
The tall stone building was behind a garden wall at the edge of the high street, the same one she had passed with the girls on that shopping trip which now felt like a memory belonging to some entirely different woman’s life.
She heard Alistair’s footsteps on the stone path, and then silence.
A quarter of an hour later Alistair returned and opened the carriage door, his expression telling her everything before he said a single word.
“The vicar will marry us,” he said. “Now. In the church.”