Chapter 2 #2
There was the widow, the dowager duchess.
She was standing by the window, sunlight creating a halo around her honey-blonde hair, and her expression was serene as if she were the subject of a portrait waiting for the artist to dab his paint brush.
Her gray eyes reminded him of a gentle summer rain breaking the heat of the day with the soft patter of rain.
The widow Oxley did not heat his blood. She cooled it.
And it was an unexpectedly soothing sensation for a man accustomed to be moving quickly, who never had rest from his thoughts and plans for his future.
She was dressed in a simple black mourning gown with a crepe fichu at the neck that spoke of sensibility rather than vanity.
Her bearing was composed, her hands clasped before her with a stillness that he suspected was hard-won rather than natural.
She was young. Younger than he had expected, certainly no more than five-and-twenty, and the realization that his uncle had married a woman barely older than his own eldest daughter sat poorly in Alistair’s stomach.
The pins in her hair glinted where the pale sunlight caught them, and for one entirely unwelcome moment, he imagined pulling them free, one by one, to watch the silk of it fall.
Confound it.
He pulled his gaze away from the widow Oxley with rather more effort than the task should have required and turned to his cousins with what he hoped was an expression of calm authority.
“Now, then.” He softened his voice, because the souls behind the four pairs of blue-green eyes watching him with varying degrees of trepidation deserved it. “I have been remiss. I know your faces but not your names, and that will not do. Will you introduce yourselves?”
A silence fell, so thick with hesitation that Alistair could almost hear it creak.
The girls glanced toward their grandmother, whose expression had arranged itself into a mask of frigid disapproval, and then they glanced toward the window, where the widow stood.
It was a small movement, four heads turning in near unison, but it spoke volumes.
The widow gave the faintest inclination of her head, barely more than a dip of the chin, but the effect was immediate.
The eldest straightened her shoulders and lifted her gaze to meet his.
Interesting.
So the girls looked to the young widow for permission, not to their grandmother. That told him rather a great deal about the invisible architecture of this household. Who protected and who menaced.
The young women rose as one.
“I am Seraphina.” The eldest curtsied. Her voice was low and clear, with a controlled tension that he recognized as the sound of someone choosing each word with great care.
She was four-and-twenty, if his information was correct, and her face had the fine-boned Oxley structure sharpened by something fiercer.
Intelligence, perhaps, or anger held on a very short leash.
Her blue-green eyes met his without wavering, which told him she possessed more steel than even her rigid posture suggested.
She was afraid, yes. But she was also, he sensed, furious.
“The eldest. Welcome to Fortunestone Hall, Your Grace.”
“Thank you, Seraphina.” He inclined his head. “Tell me, what occupies your time here?”
A fractional pause. Another glance toward the widow. “We read. We sew. We … practice the pianoforte.” The words came out like items recited from a list, dutiful and colorless.
Alistair waited, but nothing further was offered.
He turned to the second sister, who had been watching the exchange with the carefully neutral expression of a seasoned diplomat observing negotiations.
She was perhaps two-and-twenty, her fair hair arranged with a neatness that bordered on the structural, a pearl pin holding everything neatly in place.
Where Seraphina radiated a kind of banked fire, this one was porcelain.
Cool, collected, and, he suspected, harder to read.
The sort of woman who revealed nothing until she chose to, and who chose to very rarely.
“Arabella,” she offered before he could ask, dropping into a perfect curtsy.
“I play the pianoforte rather better than Seraphina does, though she will not admit it.” A ghost of a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth, so brief he might have imagined it.
“And I paint. Watercolors, mostly. Landscapes and botanicals.”
“And do you paint what you see from these windows or from memory?”
The question was deliberate, and he watched its effect with the same attention he gave to the testing of a new loom mechanism.
Arabella’s mask of propriety did not crack, but something behind her eyes shifted.
A flinch so subtle it was almost invisible.
“From the windows, Your Grace. We do not … venture far.”
No. I rather thought not.
He turned to the twins, who stood side by side at the far end of the settee, their shoulders nearly touching.
They were not yet eighteen, he judged, still hovering in that uncertain territory between girlhood and womanhood, and their proximity to each other had the aspect of a fortification.
Two against the world, or at least against this household.
The one on the left was smaller, finer-boned, with large pale eyes that watched him from beneath a fringe of silvery lashes with the wary attentiveness of a creature accustomed to being overlooked.
The one on the right was softer, rounder of feature, with the dreamy expression of someone whose thoughts were perpetually elsewhere, a trait Alistair associated with his more creative machinists, the ones who solved problems by staring into the middle distance until the answer presented itself.
“Juliet,” said the quiet one, barely above a whisper. Her gaze dropped to the floor almost immediately, as though the act of speaking her own name had exhausted her reserves of courage.