Chapter 2 #3
“And I am Genevieve,” said the dreamy one, with slightly more volume and a great deal more eagerness.
“We are twins, though not identical. I read novels. All manner of them, but Gothic novels especially … Mrs. Radcliffe and Miss Edgeworth and anyone who writes about castles and ghosts and—” She caught sight of her grandmother’s expression and fell silent, the bright spark of enthusiasm extinguished as though someone had blown out a candle.
Alistair’s hands curled into fists behind his back. The girl’s reaction had been so immediate, so instinctive, commanded by a single glance from the old woman. It told him everything he needed to know about the daily texture of life in this house, and none of it was tolerable.
“No need to censor yourself on my account, Genevieve,” he said, keeping his voice level and warm.
“I find that people who read widely tend to think more clearly. It is not an interest to be discouraged.” He turned to Juliet.
“And you? What are your interests beyond the extraordinary talent of being the quieter of a pair of twins?”
The faintest color crept into Juliet’s pale cheeks. She opened her mouth, closed it, and then, with the air of someone taking a running leap off a very high wall, said, “Numbers.”
“Numbers,” Alistair repeated.
“Mathematics. Puzzles. I … I enjoy accounts and ledgers.” She said this last part so quietly that it might have been a confession of murder, her eyes darting toward her grandmother with visible dread.
The dowager’s walking stick struck the floor. “Ledgers are not a suitable occupation for a young lady of breeding. I have told her so repeatedly.”
Alistair looked at Juliet. Juliet looked at the floor.
The girl’s small hands were knotted together so tightly that her knuckles had gone white, and in that moment, she reminded him of Charlotte at twelve years old, hunched over their father’s books in the mill office, whispering the figures to herself while the adults discussed business.
“On the contrary,” Alistair said, addressing the dowager without turning to look at her.
“A head for numbers is an asset in any situation. I employ several women in my mill whose facility with accounts is superior to most gentlemen I have encountered in commerce.” He allowed the full weight of the word to land upon the old woman’s sensibilities.
“You should be proud of her, Your Grace.”
He could not see Margaret Oxley’s face, but the rigid silence from her corner of the room was eloquent enough.
Over by the settee, Juliet’s grip on her own fingers loosened by a fraction, and when she looked up, her pale eyes held the ghost of something that might, given sufficient nourishment, grow into pride.
Alistair pulled the small notebook from his coat pocket and added a new entry beneath roof, gatehouse, and fencing:
The girls.
He underlined it twice.
The list was growing at an alarming rate, and every addition to it represented another anchor chaining him to this place when he needed to be in London, at the negotiating table with Hollingford & Goss, and at the mill.
Charlotte, his own sister, was a creature of motion and opinion, of loud laughter and louder arguments, who strode through the mill as though she owned half of it.
She had been raised to occupy space. These four girls, with their pale lashes lowered and their voices modulated to a whisper, had been taught to disappear.
The contrast was so stark, it bordered on the obscene.
The estate’s decay could be cataloged and delegated. The roof could be repaired by tradesmen, the fences by laborers, the accounts by Beckwith. But four young women who flinched at the sound of their grandmother’s walking stick could not be mended with a ledger entry and a bank draft.
He looked across the room to where his uncle’s widow still stood by the window, her gray eyes watching him with an expression he could not quite decipher.
Assessment, certainly, but laced with something else.
Hope, perhaps. Or the careful, guarded cousin of hope that belonged to a woman who had learned not to trust it.
Their gazes held for a beat longer than propriety recommended, and Alistair felt again that curious cooling sensation, as though the forge of his thoughts had been met with a soft, persistent rain. It was disconcerting. He was not a man who was easily gentled.
He looked away first, because looking at the widow Oxley was proving to be an inconvenience of the highest order, and returned his attention to the notebook in his hand.
He was going to have to stay longer than a week.
The thought hit him with the dull weight of certainty.
Franklin would manage the preliminary discussions with Hollingford & Goss.
Benedict and Gregory could oversee the mill floors.
The contract would hold. It had to hold.
Because if it did not, three hundred livelihoods in Irwyn hung in the balance, and Alistair did not have the luxury of attending to his conscience in Yorkshire while his people suffered for his absence.
And yet.
He had looked into the faces of four girls who bore his family’s blood and his sister’s features, and he could not, in any conscience that his mother would recognize, simply walk away.
Confound it all to blazes.