Chapter 2
The butler materialized from the dim interior of the entrance hall with the silent specificity of one who had spent decades perfecting the art of the unannounced arrival.
He was tall, gaunt, and possessed of a face so thoroughly drained of warmth, it might have been carved from the same gray stone as the manor itself.
His pale eyes swept over Alistair with a flicker of assessment, calculating, Alistair suspected, not the measure of a duke but the measure of a threat.
“Your Grace,” he intoned. The words were correct. The tone was not. It carried the barest edge of something that sounded less like deference and more like an indictment. “Hobbs, Your Grace. The family awaits you in the drawing room. If you will follow me.”
Alistair did not care for the man on sight, which was not a judgment he often made so swiftly.
He prided himself on giving people time to reveal their characters before forming conclusions.
But there was something about the butler’s bearing, the rigid spine, the faintly contemptuous set of his mouth, that put Alistair in mind of a gatekeeper who had decided, long before his arrival, that the new master was not welcome.
“Beckwith,” Alistair said, turning to his estate manager who stood a pace behind, hat in hand, taking in the crumbling grandeur of the entrance hall with the expression of a surgeon surveying a patient.
“Get yourself settled and find the estate office. We will meet this evening to discuss your initial observations.”
Beckwith inclined his head and departed without ceremony, which left Alistair to follow the cadaverous butler through a succession of corridors that smelled of damp plaster, beeswax, and the certain brand of antiquity that came from centuries of accumulated dust, grief, and poor ventilation.
The floorboards groaned beneath his boots.
Tapestries hung in faded silence along one wall, their hunting scenes so darkened by age that the stags appeared to be fleeing into shadow.
Portraits of dead Oxleys peered down from the walls with expressions of collective disapproval, as though the entire lineage had foreseen this moment and found it wanting.
Alistair noted the cracks in the plaster, the slight bow in a ceiling beam, the places where the paneling had warped from damp. His notebook hand itched. He had been in the building mere minutes, and already the repair list threatened to outgrow its binding.
Charming.
He was already preparing the letter to Franklin in his head.
The estate is worse than anticipated. The butler appears to be an automaton. The portraits are hostile. Expect my return within the week.
Hobbs paused before a set of double doors at the end of a paneled gallery.
The wood was dark oak, carved with the Oxley crest that Alistair recognized from the solicitor’s correspondence, a griffin rampant above a motto he did not bother to translate.
Hobbs rapped twice with a bony knuckle and pushed them open without waiting for a response.
“His Grace, the Duke of Oxley,” he announced and stepped aside.
Alistair crossed the threshold into the family drawing room and stopped.
The room was smaller than he had expected, given the proportions of the rest of the hall.
Tudor ceiling beams ran overhead, dark with age, and a stone fireplace held a modest fire that was fighting a losing battle against the drafts.
The mantelpiece was crowded with porcelain figurines of shepherdesses, their painted smiles incongruously cheerful amid the general air of decline.
Threadbare settees flanked the hearth, a Turkish carpet had surrendered most of its color to time, and the leaded-glass windows admitted a gray, watery light that made the whole scene look like a painting left too long in the rain.
But it was not the room that arrested him. It was its occupants.
Four young women sat upon the long settee nearest the fire, arranged in a row with their hands folded and their spines held so rigidly straight that Alistair was reminded, with a sharp and unwelcome pang, of the new workers at the mill on their first morning.
Desperate to please, terrified of putting a foot wrong, uncertain whether the man in charge would prove kind or cruel.
They closely resembled his younger sister with their thick silver-blonde hair and symmetrical features, their lashes so pale as to appear they had naught framing their striking blue-green eyes.
Alistair felt the undesired tug of familiarity followed by a rush of protectiveness as he took in how much they looked like his Charlotte, whom he and his mother had comforted as a young girl when their father had left this world.
All four Oxley daughters, ranging from schoolgirls to mid-twenties, were attired in the color of mourning; their black bombazine brought that period of distress back to mind as if it had just happened the day before rather than the fifteen years that separated him from that time.
Something cold settled behind his sternum. It was not pity. Alistair did not trade in pity. It was the hard, clear-eyed recognition of neglect made manifest in the careful stillness of four young bodies trained to take up as little space as possible.
Before he could address them, a voice cut across the room like the crack of a whip.
“You are a ginger.” The old woman’s lined lips curled in disdain as she clacked her walking cane against the floorboards to emphasize the harshness of her declaration.
Alistair’s jaw firmed. So this was his grandmother. The woman who had supported the disinheritance of her own son for daring to break from tradition.
He had no trouble at all dismissing their familial connection. No feelings to squash. She was a charmless aristocrat, an entitled embodiment of all that was wrong with high society and their disconnection from the everyday affairs of ordinary people.
“Indeed. It must be my inferior Scottish blood,” he agreed with a cold smile.
She pursed her mouth in resentment, the fine lines of her advanced age accentuated by the expression. Apparently, Her Grace did not appreciate that he had preempted her effort to insult him.
On the settee, the eldest cousin’s mouth had fallen open.
The second was staring at him with an expression of barely concealed wonder, as though she had just witnessed a conjuring trick she could not explain.
The youngest, the twins, were exchanging a glance of such naked astonishment that Alistair might have laughed under different circumstances.
He did not laugh. He caught and held the old woman’s gaze with a firmness born of thirty-five years in the company of men who respected directness and despised pretension.
Margaret Oxley was not the first person to look down her nose at him.
She would not be the last. And she would find, as they all did, that Alistair Fraser-Oxley did not flinch.
“You will find that I will be a recurring disappointment, Your Grace. I have no intention of altering it.”
The dowager’s iron-gray hair was pinned beneath a widow’s cap of starched white, and her pale blue eyes, the same shade as those of the four girls on the settee, were sharp as cut glass.
She sat in a high-backed chair positioned to command the room, a position she had clearly occupied so long that no one else would have dared claim it.
Her walking stick, a lacquered affair with a silver handle, rested against the arm of the chair like a scepter laid aside between edicts.
“You are impertinent,” she declared.
“I am direct.” Alistair clasped his hands behind his back.
“A trait that I understand may be unfamiliar in this household, but which I intend to exercise liberally during my visit. I am not here to exchange pleasantries, Your Grace. I am here to assess the condition of the estate and make the necessary arrangements for its management, after which I shall return to my business in Irwyn.”
The dowager’s nostrils flared. It was a minute dilation that conveyed more contempt than most people could manage with an entire tirade. “Your business,” she repeated, investing the word with the profound horror the aristocracy reserved for commerce. “You speak of trade as though it were a virtue.”
“It is.”
A faint stir passed through the room. Not audible, more a collective exhalation, a faint release of held breath from the direction of the settee.
Alistair did not look at his cousins. He did not need to.
He could feel the weight of their attention like sunlight on the back of his neck, and he understood, with a grim certainty that settled into his bones, that no one had spoken to Margaret Oxley in this fashion for a very long time.
The old woman turned her glacial gaze upon the girls. “Sit up straight, all of you. You look like scullery maids gaping at a circus. Have I taught you nothing of deportment?”
Four spines, already rigid, somehow found additional vertebrae to straighten. The eldest pressed her lips together so tightly they went white, and the smaller of the twins dropped her gaze to her lap with a swiftness that spoke of long habit.
Alistair ground his teeth. He had seen this before, not in drawing rooms but on the mill floors of competitors, how a worker’s shoulders hunched when an overseer passed.
The body learning faster than the mind that punishment followed visibility.
He had spent years ensuring such a breed of fear never infected his operation.
He did not care for finding it here, dressed in bombazine and seated on a threadbare settee.
He swallowed the sharp retort that wanted out and turned intentionally away from the dowager. There would be time enough to deal with the old dragon. For now, there was someone else in the room he had not yet acknowledged.