Chapter 18
Alistair drew back only far enough to reach into his coat pocket, then brought the handkerchief to her face himself, folding it once and dabbing carefully beneath her eyes.
The gesture arrived so matter-of-fact and so wonderfully tender, that she found herself with no defense against it at all.
No man had ever offered her such a gesture before, and its sheer unexpectedness undid what little equilibrium she had left, more thoroughly than any of the words that had come before it.
When he had finished, he kept the handkerchief in hand and looked at her gravely.
He has every reason to reconsider, she thought, and he has not.
The heaviness in Josephine’s chest gave way entirely.
She had told him everything, the whole of it, and here he remained, still beside her, still planted exactly where he had chosen to stand.
Not until this exact moment had she understood how much of herself she had held back, guarding against the chance he would not stay.
This relief bore no resemblance to the relief of a danger simply avoided.
It was something she had not felt since leaving Hertfordshire with the late duke behind her. Safe. That was all. Simply safe.
“The vicar is waiting,” Alistair said.
She nodded, then hesitated. “She still has the shawl and the groundsman. Even after today.”
“She does.” He did not soften it, which she had come to understand was not coldness but its exact opposite.
“And she will have, for the first time, cause to think carefully before she acts. The magistrate in Irwyn is a man named Carlisle. I have known him for years, and he is not a man who would willingly serve as an instrument against a duke who has been both his neighbor and his ally.” He held her gaze.
“The dowager knows Carlisle by reputation. She does not know him as I know him. Once she considers that difference, she will arrive at the correct conclusion.”
Josephine thought of the pale blue eyes.
Of the walking stick. Of the shawl smoothed across Margaret’s lap.
The dowager had sixty years’ worth of accumulated skill in wielding social pressure like a blade.
All that skill had taken shape inside a world of men who played by rules Margaret understood down to the letter.
Alistair Fraser-Oxley would not be governed by the rules Margaret had spent sixty years learning to exploit.
She suspected the dowager was about to discover that distinction for herself.
“Very well,” she said. She straightened her bonnet and smoothed her gloves.
St. Elinor’s welcomed them with a reverent hush that did much to restore her battered spirits.
Weak, filtered light fell inside, the faintly mineral air carrying candle wax and old wood and the smell of stone that had soaked up centuries of weather and prayer and the ordinary human business of marking moments worth marking.
The Norman pillars stood in their silent rows, offering no opinion either way.
The vicar stood waiting at the chancel steps.
Weekly visits to Fortunestone for private services had made his mild, spectacled face familiar enough, though she had never once seen him upon his own ground, inside his own church, and the sight lent him an authority she had never before had occasion to notice.
His expression revealed nothing beyond a pleased willingness to perform the ceremony without asking questions.
His wife stood at his side, a woman Josephine had met on two or three occasions at the hall, always striking her as someone of genuine warmth only partly concealed behind correct manners.
That warmth stood fully uncovered now. Her eyes already shone bright with what Josephine recognized as the unmistakable delight of someone who found weddings deeply satisfying, regardless of what circumstances had produced them.
The curate stood beside her, a young man attempting professional calm with creditable effort and only partial success, watching the duke and his bride with something bordering on awe.
Josephine stood at the chancel steps and looked toward the altar, and the difference between this moment and the last time she had stood in a church to be married pressed quietly upon her.
That first time, she had stood in Hertfordshire, beside a man met only a handful of times and understood not at all.
Jerome knew the correct forms and observed every one of them with the ease of habit rather than conviction, and she had mistaken that ease for character.
Character it was not. Fluency, rather. A man might speak the whole language of a gentleman without possessing one scrap of a gentleman’s true substance.
Jerome had proven that truth as thoroughly as any man alive could have managed.
At that altar she had made promises fully meant, with a heart open and willing and utterly unready for what waited on the other side of them.
That woman no longer existed. In her place stood a woman inside a church she had once merely walked past on a shopping trip, beside a man known only days, a man who had turned around on the London road and ridden back for her despite every reason not to.
A man who had heard her confession in full and stayed regardless.
The very man now beside her, mud still drying on his coat.
Never in her life had she been so glad of mud.
Pay attention, she told herself. You will not have this morning again.
The vicar opened his book. This time she gave the words her full attention, the attention she had failed to offer the first time round, determined now to make up the omission in full.
Each phrase received its proper weight. When her own part arrived, she spoke every word as she meant it, without reservation, with the earnestness that only comes from understanding exactly what is being said, to whom, and why any of it matters at all.
With this ring I thee wed.
The gold band settled onto her finger, and she looked down at it and thought it a more honest ring than the first had ever been, because a man who sincerely accepted what the vows demanded of him had placed this one there.
* * *
Alistair was angry.
The anger had taken root the moment he came upon the carriage and sharpened with every mile of the drive into Irwyn.
It bore none of the hot, unreflecting rage of a younger man.
It was cold, focused fury instead, the kind that comes of recognizing willful cruelty and setting about calculating the most effective means of answering it.
Nothing about Margaret Oxley’s actions had come from haste or passion.
She had plotted this. Waited for it. Chosen the very morning of Josephine’s canceled wedding, the morning his betrothed stood most alone, most exposed, most desperately in need of protection, to land the final, calculated blow meant to render her widowed daughter-in-law powerless for good.
Forever under the thumb of that autocratic harpy.
Josephine’s confession in the carriage had done nothing to quench the anger.
If anything, it had honed the edge finer and made it more resolute still.
The solicitors in Leeds would want correspondence. He would proceed with method, since method alone triumphed against malice of this order. The anger could be put to use as fuel rather than allowed to become distraction.
Just now, though, Josephine stood beside him in the dim nave of St. Elinor’s, straight-backed and motionless, and her nearness accomplished what it had accomplished since the very first day he met her.
It brought calm into the storm of his thoughts in a way nothing else ever had.
He drew a slow breath, the cold March air biting at the back of his throat, and gave the moment the full attention it demanded.
He was marrying her.
For several days he had known this day was coming.
He had handled it in his usual fashion. He had made a decision and had set a course, a matter for execution rather than reflection.
Yet here at the chancel steps, gray light falling through the lancet windows and the vicar closing his prayer book, he found that execution and reflection refused, after all, to divide so neatly.
The ancient stones. The faint scent of old wood and beeswax.
The woman standing beside him. All of it called for his full presence, in a way his mind, forever racing several paces ahead of the moment, found both unfamiliar and strangely essential.
He turned his head and looked at her.
Toward the altar she gazed. No artifice remained in her face now, no careful mask left standing. Only Josephine. Open, undefended, and so achingly beautiful his chest seized up and refused to let go.
She told you the worst of it, he thought. She laid bare the shame and the fear and the months of silent endurance, and she trusted you with every word. Do not forget what that cost her.
He would not forget. He was not a man who forgot what mattered, and this mattered in ways he was only beginning to grasp fully.
The vicar’s voice carried through the familiar words of the service, while Alistair’s mind, never truly at rest, turned toward his plans for the future.
The river. Figures better than he had dared hope for.
Properly managed, this estate could carry three times its present flock inside two seasons.
The wool would go directly to Fraser & Oxley, freeing the mill from fluctuating prices and unreliable outside suppliers.
A secure supply to meet the Hollingford contract’s demands, and more besides.
He had come to Fortunestone convinced the dukedom was a burden simply to be endured. That judgment revised itself a little further with each passing hour.
The Irwyn runs through three miles of that land, he thought, watching the vicar’s lips shape the ancient phrases. Three miles of water that could link the estate’s production straight to Liverpool without a single unnecessary mile of road.