Chapter 1 #3
The room smelled of damp plaster and the faintest ghost of lavender from a long-forgotten pot in the corner. Through the pocked glass, the Yorkshire landscape stretched in muted greens and grays, beautiful in its bleakness and indifferent to the small dramas playing out within these walls.
Josephine released Clara’s hands and turned back to the window. The carriage was crossing the bridge now, its wheels clattering over the worn stone. Close enough that she could see the gleam of the horses’ damp flanks and the mud caking their hooves.
“Right,” Josephine said briskly. “Well? Will I do?”
Clara was already in motion, stepping forward to examine her mistress with the practiced eye of a lady’s maid who had learned to perform miracles with limited resources.
She smoothed a crease from Josephine’s sleeve, tucked an errant strand of honey-blonde hair back into its modest arrangement of pins, and adjusted the fall of the black crepe fichu at her neck.
The gown was in simple mourning black, as protocol demanded, but it was well-maintained and fit her slender figure with quiet elegance.
A duchess ought to have had a dozen such gowns.
Josephine had two, and Clara kept both in impeccable repair through sheer force of will and an expert needle.
“You look well,” Clara pronounced, though her tone suggested she wished well were more emphatic. “Calm and composed. A duchess.”
“A dowager duchess,” Josephine corrected gently. “An important distinction. Especially to the other dowager duchess.”
Dark amusement flickered across Clara’s face. It was rare, and it was fleeting, but Josephine treasured those moments, evidence that the woman inside the frightened shell was still alive.
They descended the narrow spiral staircase together, their slippers whispering against stone worn smooth by centuries of footsteps.
The tower stairs opened onto the upper corridor of the east wing, where the air was cooler and smelled faintly of old wood and beeswax.
Fortunestone Hall had the peculiar character of feeling both vast and confining at once, its corridors stretching in long, shadowed reaches while its rooms pressed in with low ceilings and dark paneling.
Josephine had not grown accustomed to it, not in a year of living here. She suspected she never would.
When she had first arrived as Jerome Oxley’s bride, she had imagined the marriage would be tolerable. Her husband had presented himself as a distinguished gentleman of the old school, weathered but dignified, who wished for companionship and an heir.
The reality had proved to be altogether different, and the discovery of it had come too late. But she had stayed. She had stayed for the girls, because they had no one else. And she had stayed because she had no money, no carriage, and nowhere else to go.
At the landing, Clara paused and drew a breath that was almost a shudder.
“I suppose I shall have to alert Hobbs,” she said. The name fell from her lips like a dropped stone. “So he can inform Her Grace of the duke’s arrival.”
They both swallowed.
Hobbs, the butler, had served the Oxley family since the reign of the eighth duke and had long since calcified into an extension of the dowager’s will.
He was dry and disapproving, thin as a rail and twice as rigid, and possessed of a talent for appearing in doorways at precisely the wrong moment, his pale eyes recording every misstep for later reporting.
Josephine had learned within a fortnight of her arrival that nothing occurred in Fortunestone Hall without Hobbs’s knowledge, and nothing reached the dowager’s ear that Hobbs did not carry there himself.
He was not cruel in the way of men who raised their voices.
He was cruel in the way of men who remembered everything and forgave nothing.
“Well,” Josephine said, drawing herself up, “it will certainly reveal quickly whether Alistair Fraser-Oxley is up to the task of standing up to dragons.”
Clara’s eyes widened. “You are going to call her a dragon to his face?”
“Of course not. I am going to be the very picture of grace and propriety.” Josephine smoothed her skirts and lifted her chin. “But between us, Clara, if this man cannot hold his own against Margaret Oxley, he is of no use to anyone in this household.”
With that, she set off down the corridor toward the main staircase, her bearing serene, her heart hammering so loudly she was quite certain Clara must hear it.
Below, somewhere in the bowels of the great hall, a door thudded.
The new duke had arrived.
And from the distant reaches of the north wing, faint but unmistakable, came the rhythmic clack of a walking stick against stone floors.
The dowager was on the move.
Josephine’s stomach turned to ice, but she kept walking, kept breathing, kept her face relaxed.
She had survived a year in this house. She had survived a marriage that had been nothing like the one she was promised.
She had survived things she could not yet speak of, and the weight of what she carried for all of them had not broken her.
She would survive this, too.
She had to.