Chapter 6
The sound of laughter reached him first.
It was a thin, tentative thing, more breath than mirth, but it stopped Alistair in the corridor outside the family drawing room as surely as if someone had placed a hand on his chest. He had been at Fortunestone Hall for two days now and had not yet heard any of his cousins laugh.
The sound was so unexpected that he paused with his hand on the doorframe, listening.
Someone was speaking in a low, animated murmur, and another voice answered with a bright, rising note that dissolved into that fragile laughter again, and then a third voice shushed them both with an urgency that suggested the hilarity was forbidden and therefore all the more valuable.
He pushed the door open, and the room fell silent.
Four pale faces turned toward him from the settees, arranged in formation like wild geese. Seraphina and Arabella sat on one, Juliet and Genevieve on the other, all of them dressed in formal black dinner gowns that made their fair coloring look spectral in the candlelight.
Josephine stood near the window in her own mourning gown, her hands clasped before her, her expression shifting from unguarded and almost warm to the careful stillness he had come to recognize as her armor.
Their eyes met for the briefest of moments before she looked away, and in that fraction of a second, Alistair felt the full grinding weight of the afternoon settle between them.
He had kissed her. He had accused her. He had sent her away.
And now here they were, gathering for dinner as though the library had not happened, as though the taste of mint tea were not still lodged somewhere behind his teeth like a splinter he could neither extract nor ignore.
Alistair straightened his cravat, which did not need straightening, and entered the room with a brisk stride and the intention to survive the next two hours through sheer force of will.
“Good evening,” he said, addressing the room at large with a formality that felt absurd given the circumstances but was, he suspected, the only manner that would carry him safely through dinner.
Seraphina inclined her head. Arabella murmured a greeting.
The twins glanced at each other with the silent communication he had observed in his own younger brother and sister, a glance that contained entire conversations in the span of a blink.
Josephine said nothing, but her fingers tightened where they were laced together, and Alistair noticed because he had apparently become the sort of man who cataloged the movements of a woman’s hands.
Stop it.
He took his position near the fire, hands clasped behind his back, and tried not to look at Josephine.
This proved as effective as trying not to notice an oil lamp in a darkened room.
She stood at the periphery of his vision, luminous and still, and the effort of not staring at her required more concentration than he cared to admit.
Then, from somewhere deep in the corridor, came the sound.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
The walking stick struck at an even, unhurried pace, each impact carrying the authority of a gavel.
The effect on the room was immediate and total.
Genevieve’s expression hardened. Juliet’s hands found each other beneath the edge of her skirt.
Seraphina’s jaw tightened, a muscle flickering at the hinge.
And Arabella, whose placidity was the most practiced of them all, went so still that she might have been rendered in porcelain.
Even Josephine’s chin lifted fractionally, as a soldier squares to attention at the sound of a drum.
It was, Alistair reflected grimly, the most skillful deployment of fear he had witnessed since a mill inspector had arrived unannounced in his first year of management and sent every worker on the floor into rigid, white-faced obedience.
The difference was that the inspector had carried the authority of the law.
Margaret carried only habit and cruelty and household purse strings, and the fact that it produced the same result told him everything he needed to know.
The door opened and the dowager duchess entered, or rather, occupied the threshold for a long, considered moment before deigning to cross it.
She wore black silk, heavily adorned with jet and garnets, and her iron-gray hair was dressed with a precision that spoke of a lady’s maid who understood that imperfection was not tolerated.
Her pale eyes swept the room with the deliberate appraisal of a woman who regarded her grandchildren as furniture to be inspected rather than people to be greeted.
“You are all here,” she observed, as though this were both expected and mildly distasteful. Her gaze settled on Alistair last. “Your Grace.”
“Ma’am,” Alistair returned, offering the minimal courtesy she had acquired and not a fraction more.
The silence that followed was mercifully brief.
Hobbs materialized in the doorway with the preternatural timing of a life spent waiting on the other side of doors, his skeletal frame bent into a bow that was aimed, Alistair noted, not at the duke who now paid his wages but at the dowager who held his loyalty.
“Dinner is served, Your Grace.”
The address was directed at Margaret. Alistair watched the butler’s eyes slide past him with the careful blankness of chosen allegiance to the past. He thought of what Josephine had told him in the library, that the household staff answered to the old woman, and made a mental note.
Beckwith would need to evaluate the man. Sooner rather than later.
They processed to the dining room in the order Margaret’s rigid adherence to precedence demanded.
Alistair first, as the duke, with the old dowager on his arm because she would accept no other arrangement, then Josephine alone, and the girls trailing behind in order of age like ducklings who had been taught to march rather than waddle.
The dining room itself was long and cold, lit by candelabra that threw more shadow than light, and the table, which could have seated twenty, was set for seven at one end with a formality that felt like a punishment.
Silver gleamed on white linen. Crystal caught the candlelight.
Everything was polished and correct and utterly cheerless.
Alistair seated Margaret, then took his place at the head of the table. Josephine sat to his left, the girls arranged down the sides, and the first course was served in a silence thick enough to cut.
He ate. Or rather, he went through the motions of eating, because the soup was lukewarm and oversalted, and his mind was occupied with the far more pressing business of observing his cousins.
Genevieve pushed her spoon through her broth without lifting it.
Juliet took small, careful sips with the mechanical rhythm of a girl who had been taught that eating was a task to be endured, not enjoyed.
Seraphina ate metronomically but without enjoyment, as though she were fueling herself for a siege.
And Arabella, who alone among her sisters appeared to be eating with any appetite, had quietly worked through her soup and was buttering a roll with small, purposeful movements as though she knew she was being watched and had decided, for once, not to care.
They were too thin. All four of them. It was not the slenderness of youth or constitution.
It was the singular gauntness that came from meals taken under surveillance, from food treated as a privilege to be rationed rather than a basic provision of care.
Alistair had seen the same look on new mill children in his first year of management, before he had instituted the feeding program that his competitors had mocked and his workers had wept over.
Hunger had a posture, drawing the shoulders inward and the eyes downward, and he recognized it now in the dining room of a ducal estate where the silver was sterling and the bread was stale.
“Arabella.” Margaret’s voice cut across the table like a blade drawn from a sheath. “That is your second piece of bread.”
Arabella’s hand froze. She had been reaching for a roll, the smallest one in the basket, and now her fingers hovered above it in a gesture that was both absurd and heartbreaking, the hesitation of a woman of two-and-twenty who had been reduced to asking permission to eat.
“A lady does not overindulge,” Margaret continued, not looking up from her own plate, where a modest portion sat untouched, serving its purpose as a prop rather than a meal. “Corpulence is the enemy of elegance. No gentleman of quality wishes a bride who cannot restrain herself at table.”
The words landed on the room like a frost. Genevieve’s spoon went still. Juliet’s gaze dropped to her lap. Seraphina’s knuckles whitened around her knife, and for one vivid moment, Alistair wondered if his eldest cousin was calculating the trajectory between the blade and her grandmother’s hand.
Arabella withdrew her fingers from the breadbasket and placed them in her lap.
Alistair’s chest tightened. It was the same feeling he had experienced at the mill when he had discovered a foreman docking workers’ pay for lateness caused by the foreman’s own scheduling errors.
A cold, controlled fury that did not show on his face because he had learned, long before he inherited a dukedom, that anger was most effective when it was delivered calmly.
“You mention suitors,” he said, and his voice was conversational, almost pleasant, the tone he used in negotiations when he was about to dismantle an opponent’s position. “That strikes me as an odd concern, given that my cousins appear to have no opportunity to meet any.”
Margaret looked up. Her pale eyes, milky and sharp at the same time, fixed on him with displeasure, as though she were unaccustomed to being questioned at her own table. “I am sure I do not take your meaning, Your Grace.”
“Then I shall be more direct.” He set down his spoon. “Lady Seraphina.”