Chapter 18 #3
Happiness. Pure and uncomplicated happiness, at simply being heard.
Alistair turned to Josephine at last. His face carried the satisfaction of a matter resolved, readiness for whatever waited next, though beneath that easy confidence she found she could read his unspoken thoughts clearly now.
What she had learned to seek out, tucked beneath the energy and certainty, was the man who had made choices that morning nothing could unmake now, choices he had no wish to see undone.
“Well,” he said, quietly enough for her alone. “We have made a beginning.”
Her eyes met his. Pale spring light through the tall windows moved across them, turning them the color of stormwater over the moors, and for one moment the whole rest of the room simply fell away.
The girls, the fire, eight hundred years of cold stone.
There was only this. Here stood the man who had ridden back to her when every instinct of self-preservation should have carried him toward London instead.
Who had stood before the vicar and spoken unhesitating vows.
Who had looked at her inside that ancient church as though she were not merely a duty discharged but a choice he would make again, in the very next breath, without a moment’s consideration.
She might love him for that alone. She very probably already did.
“More than a beginning,” she said. “You left for London in a carriage and returned on a horse. You have made yourself an enemy. Spent time in a church, and rather longer arguing with a woman who has not been successfully argued with in sixty years. All in a single morning.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “I work efficiently.”
“You do.” She held his gaze. “And I find myself grateful for it.”
His eyes darkened, just fractionally. He leaned the merest inch closer, near enough that she felt the warmth of his breath against her temple, and for a moment neither of them spoke at all.
“Then we shall continue working efficiently,” he murmured. “Together.”
She turned her hand beneath his, fingers threading slowly through his in a clasp that meant I am choosing this, not merely I am here. His grip tightened once, firm and certain, and did not let go.
“Yes,” she said. “Together.”
* * *
The house had settled into its evening quiet by the time the last candles in the drawing room were put out.
Clara had ushered the girls off to their rooms, with her usual soft capability and the shared, unspoken understanding that the day had run long enough for everyone.
Before leaving, she had looked at Josephine across the threshold with an expression that said everything it needed to and required nothing spoken aloud.
The corridor fires had burned low. Beyond every window, the moors lay dark, giving no ground to the lingering light.
Josephine stood at the window of the duchess’s sitting room, still in the traveling gown she had married in, the gold band warm against her finger. She had stood there some minutes now. The day had gathered inside her in layers.
She heard him in the corridor before she saw him. Not the heavy steps she had spent a year dreading, but an unhurried footfall through a space considered fully and decidedly his to cross. He paused at the open door, and she turned.
Alistair stood in the doorway with his coat still on, though he had removed his cravat sometime in the hours since dinner, and the absence of it lent him a different air than she had yet seen in him.
Less the duke, more simply the man. Firelight from behind her reached him at an angle and caught the auburn in his hair, and she thought, not for the first time and not with any real surprise, that he was very handsome when he was not attempting to be. Which was always.
He did not speak at once, simply examining her with undisguised affection.
“Josephine.” He kept his voice low, as though the house had already fallen asleep and he did not wish to disturb it. “There is a matter I wished to raise. A question, rather.”
She waited.
“I would like you to move to my chambers tonight.” The words came quiet and entirely without ceremony, as though he had turned the matter over enough times already and concluded that speaking direct was the only approach worth taking.
“I want you close. If that is agreeable to you.” He held her gaze without wavering.
“I want to wake in the morning and find you beside me.”
The room went quiet.
She was certain she had heard him correctly. And yet.
“Move? To the—” She stopped. Began again. “The ducal chambers.”
“Yes.”
She had not known, exactly, what to expect of the wedding night.
She had not allowed herself many expectations at all, having been thoroughly schooled by her first marriage in what expectations tended to cost. She had assumed whatever occurred would occur on ground already hers, the duchess’s rooms, the familiar blue drapes and worn carpet and bed she had occupied this past year.
She had not imagined being asked as though nearness to her were something he had simply decided he wanted, not for propriety’s sake or convenience or the sensible matter of an heir, but because he simply wanted it.
Because waking to find her there struck him as worth having.
She was astonished.
“Yes,” she said, once she trusted her own voice. “It is quite agreeable to me.”
His expression shifted, fractionally. Not relief, exactly. She did not think he had ever seriously entertained the alternative. More a confirmation of what had already been decided, like a man testing ground he already knew would hold.
“Good.” He offered her his arm. “Then let us go.”
She had entered the ducal chambers only once before tonight, after the flood.
In a full year of residence at Fortunestone Hall, she had passed the door in the south tower wing a hundred times over.
She had learned every other corridor by heart, knew the complaint of every drafty stair, could have walked the route from the kitchen garden to the west library blind.
But the ducal chambers had belonged to Jerome, and Jerome had come to her when he came at all, and the question of what lay behind that door had occupied perhaps a single incurious moment before ceasing to matter to her entirely.
Tonight the room received her with the air of a chamber claimed rather than truly inhabited.
Swept clean of its previous occupant, made functional by a man who wanted order more than comfort.
The massive hearth stood lit, its fire well established and throwing generous warmth across the stone flags.
The four-poster bed with its deep green velvet hangings rose against the far wall, tall and formal, built for a grander century entirely, and yet the rest of the room ran almost aggressively ordinary.
A worktable against the wall bore ledgers and correspondence stacked in careful order.
The night table held two worn books, spines creased from long use.
No ornaments graced the mantel, save one small framed miniature she could not yet see clearly, and the air carried the faintest trace of cedar and wool and black tea, unmistakably his.
She crossed toward the hearth, and the miniature resolved itself as she drew nearer. A man and a woman, painted in the style of the previous generation, standing together with the ease of two people deeply connected. The woman wore Alistair’s own deep red hair. The man had given him his jaw.
“Your parents,” she said.
“Yes.” He had followed her and stood a few feet behind. “My mother painted it herself, when I was small. She is quite accomplished.”
Josephine studied the tiny painted faces, felt the fire’s warmth, and thought about what it meant that this one portrait had been kept, and kept carefully, in a room that otherwise held nothing else she would have called sentimental. To her, it meant a very great deal.
She turned from the mantel to find him watching her with a warmth with none of the careful distance he wore for the rest of the world. Whatever remained of the day’s exhaustion, its fear and relief and the sheer weight of everything survived to reach this room, eased out of her all at once.
Josephine looked past him to the window, where the last of the light had gone from the sky, leaving only that deep, endless blue that comes just before true dark.
Fortune’s Hall, she thought again, here in the room that would now be hers as well. Hope was still new and difficult to trust, but she believed he might be right about the future he had promised. She meant to find out.