Chapter 17 #2
Warmth flooded through her at the words, immediate and beyond her control.
Cold arrived on its heels, just as quickly.
She had wanted this so badly, and now it was being handed back to her, and she could not take it.
The distance between wanting it and being unable to accept it struck her as among the more bitterly cruel forms of suffering she had yet encountered.
“I cannot,” she said.
His gaze did not waver. “Tell me what she said.”
Tell him. All of it.
Fear had taken hold of her. She saw it clear as day now, in a way she had refused herself before this moment.
Not fear of his judgment, though that fear sat there too, a low hum underneath the louder one.
What frightened her was what would happen once the last private room inside her stood open to examination.
“The dowager has my shawl,” she said. “A pale blue one. I had not thought of it since January. I did not even know it was missing.” She twisted her fingers together, a rare signal of her anxiety.
“It was found beneath Jerome’s body at the base of the cliff.
By one of the groundsmen, a man in her employ, who brought it to her rather than to the magistrate.
” She paused and glanced up. “She has been holding onto it since, deciding what to do with it.”
His jaw went tight. “And this morning she decided.”
“She has.” She kept her voice even. “She told me to leave the estate, or she would present the shawl to the magistrate and ask him what he made of it. She said she wished to know what happens to a woman who kills a duke.”
A long quiet settled over him, the kind that carries real weight. “And did she offer her own conclusions on the matter?”
“She had a carriage waiting in the yard.”
“The devil take her.” He said it low and sharp, then fell silent.
Beyond the window, a cart rolled along the high street, wheels loud against the cobblestones, and two women talking outside the baker’s shop fell silent as it passed, then took the conversation back up again.
“What happened that night?” he said. His voice carried no judgment whatsoever. “Not what the shawl suggests. What actually happened.”
He pushed the door wider still and climbed inside, drawing it shut behind him, then sat beside her. The stark fact of his nearness, close enough that the chill still clinging to his coat reached her, rearranged the careful order she had built around herself.
The cry from the path returned to her in memory, sharp as that January air had been. How she had come up onto her feet before understanding what was happening. How her heart had known the truth of it before her thoughts ever caught up.
You have carried this since January. Tell him the truth.
“It was Clara, my lady’s maid,” she said.
Her voice did not shake, though holding it even cost her something physical, a held breath dressed up as calm.
“Jerome had been drinking since noon. He did that, toward the end, whenever his mother grew especially insistent about something. He had been pestering Clara for some weeks by then. Following her through the house. Making remarks. I had taken to ensuring she was never left alone in rooms where he might find her.”
She stopped. In the pause sat everything she had never said aloud before, the memory examined only in the dark and never once spoken of aloud.
“Clara had gone back to the house for tea,” she said.
“I was alone on the bench when I heard her cry out from the path above the gorge. I ran.” She scrutinized her tangled fingers.
“He had found her on the path. He had his hands on her, and she could not get free. She was fighting him, but he was larger, and very drunk, and past caring.” The words came faster now, not from any loss of control but because they had waited too long already, and once the door stood open, nothing would stop them.
She was unable to explain the strange, pure relief that Alistair was the one she was finally telling her darkest truth to.
“I pulled at him. I called his name. He did not stop. So I pulled harder, and he stumbled back from her and Clara ran free. He lost his footing at the edge of the path and reached out, and he must have caught hold of my shawl, and I could not—” She stopped again and drew a ragged breath.
“I could not hold him. He fell. The shawl went with him.”
The silence in the carriage was total.
The telling of it moved through her like cold water, that distinct chill of a long-held secret finally set loose, relief and exposure landing together in the very same instant.
Only once the words were out of her did she realize how badly she had needed to say them, and she was still upright, and he was still there.
“We killed him. I killed him,” she said, defeated.
“Oh, Josephine.” Alistair pulled her into a firm embrace, resting his chin atop her head as he ran a soothing hand along her back. “You did nothing of the sort. Jerome killed himself with his own poor choices.”
She did not speak. She was aware of the solidity of him, the sureness of his hands, the smell of damp wool and mud, the complete absence of any reaction she had feared.
No judgment anywhere in him. What she found instead was simply a person, present and unflinching, and it undid her more thoroughly than anything else could have.
“He had been making poor choices for a very long time,” Alistair said above her head.
“He chose to prey upon a woman with no power to refuse him, to walk near a cliff while drunk, and to keep reaching for a bottle he ought to have set down years before. None of that is yours to carry.” He drew back slightly, enough to see her face.
“What you did for Clara is exactly what anyone with a conscience would have done. You protected her when she had no one else standing between her and harm. That is nothing to carry with shame. That is something to carry with your head held high.”
“The magistrate will not see it that way.”
“The magistrate will not see it at all.” His voice was firm.
“A duchess with a duke standing beside her is a rather different proposition than a dismissed widow with no one to stand beside her. The dowager understood that this morning. That is exactly why she moved when she did, before the wedding rather than after. The shawl was never about justice, Josephine. It was about timing, nothing more.”
She looked at him and felt the last of her dignity give way entirely, the tears she had held too long and too tightly finally allowed to flow.
She wept, though it was not the weeping of confession, nor the raw and ragged thing that had come with the telling.
She did not wipe them away. She did not turn from him.
She simply let them finish in their own time, because for the first time in longer than she could accurately reckon, there was no one in the carriage she needed to hide them from.
Outside, the high street went on entirely indifferent to whatever had just passed inside the carriage outside the vicar’s house, and that struck her as exactly right.
Certain things needed no audience at all.
Certain things were simply true, shared only between two people, inside a cold carriage in March, and that alone sufficed.