Chapter 6 #3
These girls were not nine. They were women, and they had been robbed of years, and the fact that a trip to the modiste could produce this reaction was itself an indictment so damning that no court in England could have delivered a harsher sentence.
“Oh,” Genevieve breathed, and then caught herself, pressing her lips together as though the sound had escaped without permission.
She glanced at Margaret, then away, and then, with the reckless courage of a girl who had spent too long being careful, added, “Might we also visit the bookshop? I have heard there is one on Merchant Row, and I should so love to see it.”
The words came out in a rush, tumbling over each other in their haste to be spoken before prudence could intervene, and the look on her face was that of someone who had lobbed a stone at a window and was bracing for the crash.
“You may visit every shop on Merchant Row if time allows,” Alistair said and was rewarded with a smile so wide and so quickly suppressed that it resembled a lamp being lit and immediately shuttered.
“What a charming notion,” Margaret said, and her voice could have frozen the River Irwyn in August. “I suppose I shall have to accompany you, since clearly no one in this household considers the proprieties.” She delivered this with the air of conferring a tremendous favor, her gaze sweeping the table as though daring anyone to challenge her claim.
Alistair opened his mouth to reply, but Josephine spoke first.
“That will not be necessary, Your Grace.” Her proclamation was distinct.
“I am their chaperon and a perfectly adequate one. Besides,” she continued, and something entered her tone that Alistair could only describe as surgical politeness, the kind of courtesy that conceals a blade, “The roads to Irwyn are not kind to carriages this time of year, and I should hate for your arthritis to suffer from several hours of bumping and walking about town. The girls and I shall manage quite well.”
Margaret’s hand tightened on the stem of her wineglass.
Her lips compressed into a line so thin that they nearly disappeared.
She looked at Josephine, and Josephine stared back, and for a moment, the two women held each other’s gazes across the remains of the second course with the focused intensity of duelists who had already chosen their weapons and were merely waiting for the count.
Margaret yielded. She did so with a stiff inclination of her head, the concession of a general who had lost a skirmish but did not intend to lose the war, and returned her attention to her plate with an expression that promised consequences at a later and more private hour.
The walking stick, which had been propped against the edge of the table, shifted slightly, and the sound it made against the wood was like the cocking of a pistol.
Alistair said nothing. He lifted his wineglass and drank, and over the rim of it, he watched the young woman who had just outmaneuvered the most formidable person in the household with nothing more than courtesy and a reference to swollen joints.
The anger from the library, the sense of betrayal, the bitter knowledge that she had approached him with calculation as well as feeling, all of it was still there, banked and smoldering beneath the necessary civility of a family dinner.
But layered over it now was something more complicated, a grudging, unwilling admiration that he did not want and could not seem to prevent.
She had not merely survived in this house.
She had positioned herself, serenely and without fanfare, as the only person standing between four young women and an old woman’s tyranny.
She had done it without resources, without authority, without a carriage or a coin to her name, armed with nothing but patience and the kind of courage that does not announce itself because it cannot afford to be noticed.
Not wholly.
The words returned to him unbidden, and with them the memory of her in the library, flushed and tearful and brave, telling him that her interest in him was not entirely a stratagem.
He had rejected the admission because the hurt of it had been too sharp, and because a man who has spent fifteen years being needed does not easily trust the possibility that he might also be wanted.
But watching her now, this woman who had just taken on a dragon with nothing sharper than politeness, Alistair found himself considering the possibility that he had been wrong.
Not about the calculation, which was real, but about the proportion.
Perhaps desperation and desire were not as neatly separable as he had needed them to be.
Perhaps a woman could scheme to save the people she loved and still, at the same time, mean the kiss.
He could ill afford to waste a day. London awaited.
The Hollingford contract was ticking like a clock he could not slow down.
But his cousins had not left their own grounds in half a decade, and his youngest had just asked to visit a bookshop with the trembling hope of a prisoner begging leave to walk in the yard.
Tomorrow, they would go to Irwyn. The contract could wait one more day. Some issues were more pressing than commerce.