Chapter 18 #2
And then, the Lords. That thought had circled for days already, dismissed each time as an irksome duty.
He no longer felt so certain of the dismissal.
The people of Irwyn had no voice in the laws made over them.
No say in what governed their wages, their hours, the safety of the machinery they worked.
He held a voice. A seat. And he knew exactly how to put both to use.
The title has its uses after all, he thought, and felt its weight shift on his shoulders. Not a yoke. A lever.
The vicar put the question to him. Alistair meant his reply entirely.
No reservation anywhere in it. No equivocation either.
The promises settled into him with a gravity he had not foreseen, each syllable bearing the full weight of what it asked of him.
Protection, fidelity, honor, care. He felt the enormity of it settle into his bones, and he was glad, deeply and fiercely glad, to carry it. For Josephine.
The ring slid onto her finger. He looked down at her hand, slender and outwardly calm despite the faint tremor he could feel beneath the skin, then lifted his gaze to her face.
No longer did she look toward the altar. Her head had turned the smallest possible degree, and her eyes met his instead.
Gray, her gaze, and stripped now of the resigned endurance belonging to a life that had demanded far too much while giving back far too little.
In that single unguarded look he saw her whole, this woman who had confessed her shame and fear to him, who had trusted him with the worst of her past and the precious life growing inside her, who stood at his side now speaking vows toward a future he had not known he had been yearning for.
Tenderness caught him off guard as the vicar murmured his blessing and cold light slanted across the stone floor.
Alistair had prepared himself for duty, for responsibility, and for the weight of taking a wife.
He had not prepared for the realization that Josephine saw him as more than a means of escape.
She had trusted him enough to let him see her fully.
He held her gaze and made no attempt to conceal what she might find in his expression. Resolve, certainly. Beneath it lay the impossible affection and desire he no longer had any reason to deny.
She is worth a great deal more than I have yet managed to give her.
Once the final words had been spoken and the register signed, they stepped back out into pale winter light.
The carriage stood waiting, trunks still lashed to its roof.
Back toward Fortunestone Hall they drove, moors rolling past in their early spring pallor, the house’s towers rising ahead beneath a sky that promised still more rain.
Looking at those towers, he felt the appetite that had been building since morning reach its full expression at last. It was no longer anything like the reluctant stewardship of an unwelcome inheritance.
In its place was a determination fiercer and considerably more potent than even the hunger he had known in the mill’s early years, back when every obstacle counted as a challenge worth meeting and the difficulty itself was the entire point of the exercise.
A glance at Josephine on the box beside him found her watching the landscape pass, her profile serene, and he felt the difference of it keenly. Alone in none of this any longer. And despite the grimness of the morning, his lips twitched into a contented smile.
“A new era is beginning,” he announced. He was aware another man might have chosen something more tender for the occasion, and that the occasion would have borne it well enough.
He was not that man. “Within a decade, this estate will no longer be known as Fortune’s Fall.
It will be Fortune’s Hall, and I stake my reputation on it. ”
She turned her head and smiled at him. “Then I shall hold you to it,” she replied.
He reached across the driver’s bench and took her hand.
Her fingers closed round his without a moment’s hesitation.
On rolled the carriage, the towers drawing ever nearer, and Alistair Fraser-Oxley, tenth Duke of Oxley, felt, for the first time in his life, that the future was not merely a series of problems awaiting solution, but a promise he would delight to fulfill.
* * *
The family drawing room’s door stood ajar by the time Josephine reached it. She paused a moment, fingertips against the wood, feeling out its grain and solidity, before stepping through.
All of them were there. Seraphina stood at the window, back to the room, motionless as if she was bracing herself for news of any kind, good or catastrophic alike.
Arabella sat in the chair nearest the fire, posture correct, eyes fixed on her needlework with the discipline that served as her chosen shield against an overbearing grandmother.
The twins sat pressed together on the settee, Genevieve’s head resting on Juliet’s shoulder in the instinctive closeness of two people who had learned early on that the world shrinks and turns cold whenever they cannot find each other.
By the door stood Clara, the one who saw to things, who kept herself ready at every threshold so no one else would ever need face it alone.
Every face lifted at once when she entered. On each of them she saw the same suspended look, the held breath, hope kept firmly in check by hard experience of having hoped once before and paid dearly for it.
“I am married,” Josephine said.
Total stillness took the room, as if lightning itself had just struck the very rug beneath their feet.
Then Genevieve was on her feet. “Truly?” She crossed the room before the word had even finished leaving her mouth, ecstatic. “This morning? He came back, and you are actually, truly married?”
“In St. Elinor’s. The vicar was very obliging.”
Genevieve’s laughter turned to crying, which then became both together.
Close behind her twin came Juliet, quieter but no less present, no less moved by it all.
She pressed Josephine’s hand between both of hers and said nothing at all, though her eyes said everything words would only have diminished.
Arabella rose, set her needlework aside. “That is wonderful news,” she proclaimed. Coming from Arabella, the warmth in those words meant more than any effusive display could have done.
Still Seraphina had not moved from the window. “He came back,” she finally said. Not a question. Not surprise. Something closer to vindication, earned and private. Faith restored, perhaps.
“He did.”
Seraphina nodded once and said nothing more, a smile spreading across her cheeks.
Clara, too, had not stirred from the door.
Josephine’s glance back at her acknowledged the strain the two of them had shared, carrying in it everything that could never be spoken aloud in a room full of other people.
The history shared between them. The fear kept from everyone else.
The nights the future had felt entirely uncertain.
Clara pressed her lips together, nodded, eyes shining bright, and turned to stare out the window, and Josephine understood every bit of it.
We are all right, she thought. We are actually, genuinely, finally all right.
Full belief had eluded her until this very moment. She believed it now, letting the belief in slowly and completely, the way warmth returns to cold hands, never all at once, yet undeniable all the same.
Alistair arrived a quarter of an hour later, carrying the purposeful directness of an unpleasant task concluded and brought to its proper end.
“She has been informed,” he said to Josephine, “that you are my wife. That I am personally acquainted with the magistrate, and that I have written to my solicitors. And that any action she chooses to contemplate ought to be weighed with that in mind.” He paused.
“She did not respond. I did not require her to.”
It needed no more words at all, moving through her like a change in weather, the end of a long cold front, some easing loose in the very air itself. Clara drifted to the window, and this time her shoulders carried a lightness Josephine had not seen in them in longer than she could name.
“There is a further matter.” Alistair remained standing, unhurried.
“I have written to Franklin. He is to secure a house in London for a month. We shall go as a family. The girls will be properly outfitted, and I intend to find a suitable sponsor to introduce them for the coming Season. Someone familiar with the marriage mart, who knows the right gentlemen to make the necessary introductions.”
Seraphina’s chin lifted. “Not the dowager.”
“No. She will have no role whatsoever in your presentation, your introduction, or any part of your Season.”
Seraphina’s expression suggested she found the announcement pleasing.
“London,” Genevieve said, half to herself, softly. “I had thought myself long accustomed to doing without it.” She tested the thought carefully, the way one tests ice before stepping onto it. “It seems I was mistaken.”
“A month in London,” Alistair confirmed.
“With new wardrobes.” He said it with the matter-of-fact ease of a man for whom this counted as simple logistics.
Not charity. Not magnanimity. Merely the next sensible matter requiring arrangement, and Josephine watched the girls take it in.
She saw on their faces the look of being offered something without having to calculate the cost of accepting it, or muster up the correct measure of gratitude, or diminish themselves in the act of receiving. An ache rose in her chest.
Juliet said, to nobody especially, “I should like to see the British Museum.”
“Then we shall go to the British Museum,” Alistair said, as though it were the simplest arrangement in the world, as though wanting a thing and being given it followed as naturally as one thing follows another.
Juliet said nothing in return, but her face settled into an expression Josephine had not seen there before. It took her a moment to name it.