Chapter 7
For the first time in over a year, Josephine was leaving.
The thought struck her as the carriage jolted over the rutted avenue and the stone towers of Fortunestone Hall receded behind the line of elms, growing smaller and less imposing with every turn of the wheels until they were swallowed by the mist that clung to the high ground like a reluctance to let go.
Now the road was opening before her and the sky, though gray and threatening rain, felt impossibly vast.
The girls felt it too. She could see it in their relaxed postures, their shoulders dropping the moment the carriage passed the gates, as though they had collectively exhaled a breath held for years.
The twins, seated across from Josephine, had abandoned all pretense of restraint.
“A journal,” Genevieve sighed, pressing her fingertips together as though she might conjure it from the air.
“With marbled endpapers, the sort a heroine would keep her secret correspondence in. And a novel with a crumbling abbey and a mystery that is not resolved until the very last page. Or anything at all that is not one of Grandmama’s improving tracts. ”
“New pencils,” Juliet added, more quietly but with no less conviction. “And a commonplace book with proper ruled pages.”
Josephine listened, with an ache that was equal parts joy and grief, to these bright, buoyant girls whom the dowager had spent years pressing flat.
Whom their late mother had declined to pay attention to, deserting them for London long before her death to escape this depressing estate.
Whom their father had neglected in pursuit of his own selfish interests.
It had taken a stranger with a notebook and the blunt pragmatism of a proprietor to accomplish in three days what she had been unable to do in over a year.
She had shielded them. She had soothed them.
But she had not freed them. That required authority, and authority was the one thing she had never possessed.
That authority was sitting beside her.
Alistair occupied the far end of the seat, quiet since they departed, his gaze directed at the window.
They had not spoken of the library, of the kiss or the desperate proposal that had left her lips before she could weigh its cost. She had confessed to partial deception, and he had sent her away, and now here they were, pressed together while four young women chattered about pencils and marbled endpapers, and the warmth of his thigh against hers through the layers of bombazine and wool was doing things to her fortitude that no careful breathing could remedy.
She had thought herself incapable of this.
Intimacy with her late husband had been an obligation endured in darkness and silence, his hands perfunctory, his attention elsewhere even when his body was not.
Afterward, he would roll away and reach for the glass on the night table, and Josephine would lie very still and wonder whether this peculiar deadness was what all women felt or whether there was something wrong with her specifically.
Frigid, Jerome had called her once with casual cruelty, never considering that the fault might lie with his own indifference, and the word had lodged in her like a fishhook, buried so deep that removing it would cause more damage than leaving it in place.
But Alistair’s effect on her had begun dismantling that conclusion from the moment he took hold of her elbow in the library and drew her toward him with a gentleness that had undone her more completely than force ever could have.
The kiss had been a revelation. Not merely because of what he had done, the thoroughness of it, his mouth claiming hers with a hunger that was somehow both fierce and careful, but because of what it had awakened in her.
She had felt it. The wanting. The heat. The desperate, climbing urgency that had made her arch against him and grip his waistcoat and forget, for the space of a few shattering minutes, that she was a woman with a plan and a secret and a child growing beneath her stays.
She was not frigid. She had simply been married to a man who could not be bothered to discover otherwise.
The carriage hit a rut, and Josephine’s shoulder knocked against Alistair’s arm.
He steadied her, brief and reflexive, and then withdrew, and the point of contact burned through like a brand.
She did not look at him. She looked at Genevieve, who was now describing the plot of a Gothic novel she wished to purchase with an enthusiasm that bordered on the evangelistic, and tried to quell her panic.
I am in very serious trouble.
Because she was no longer merely scheming to secure his protection.
She wanted him. She wanted his hands in her hair again and his mouth on hers and the solid weight of his presence pressed against her, not because he was useful but because he was him, and the distinction between those two things was becoming harder to maintain with every hour.
She folded her hands in her lap and made herself look forward.
The road descended into the valley, and the town of Irwyn materialized through the mist like a painting emerging from varnish.
Bleached stone cottages with slate roofs lined the hillside in uneven rows, and below them, the canal cut a dark ribbon through the green, a barge moving slowly along its length with bales stacked high under oilcloth.
A stone market square. The spire of St. Elinor’s Church.
And above it all, the dark column of the mill’s chimney rising past the roofs, trailing a banner of smoke that meant hundreds of people were at their work and the engines were turning.
The air, even through the closed carriage windows, carried the faint tang of lanolin and coal smoke.
The girls pressed against the windows. Genevieve clutched Juliet’s hand.
Arabella cocked her head to watch the passing scenery over their heads, and Seraphina, who had maintained her aloofness through the entire drive, leaned forward with an eagerness that made her look, for the first time, like a young woman of four-and-twenty rather than a prisoner granted a temporary reprieve.
The carriage turned onto Merchant Row and drew to a halt.
Alistair descended first and handed the girls down one by one, followed by Josephine.
Up close, the shops were even more inviting than they had appeared from the carriage, their bow windows displaying bolts of cloth, leather-bound books, jars of sweets, and the quiet prosperity of a town that owed its existence to wool and water.
They had barely taken a dozen steps along the pavement before Genevieve sniffed the warm air drifting from a bakery. “Spiced gingerbread,” she declared. “With black treacle and clove.”
“I shall not leave without a square of it,” Juliet said, and before Josephine could respond, all four girls had hurried through the bakery door with a tinkling of the bell, a flurry of black bombazine and bright eyes that made the shopkeeper look up from his counter in mild alarm.
Josephine and Alistair followed at a slower pace, entering to find the girls assembled before the display, their faces luminous with the very longing of young women who had been denied small pleasures for far too long.
It was Juliet who turned first, her pale eyes finding Josephine. “Josephine, might you …”
She trailed off because Josephine was already reaching for her reticule, but before her fingers found the edges, Alistair stepped forward and laid coins on the counter with the unhurried manner of a gentleman settling an account.
“Choose what you like,” he said, addressing the remark to no one in especial and all of them at once.
Genevieve’s face broke into a smile, and Juliet ducked her head as if she was trying not to cry. Arabella’s lips curved into an uncharacteristic smile, and even Seraphina, who trusted no kindness that had not yet proven itself, allowed something to soften at the edges of her expression.
Alistair caught Josephine’s eye briefly and murmured, “They will need pin money. A regular allowance. I shall see to it.”
He left the girls to their gingerbread and stepped back outside, and Josephine followed after a moment, leaving them to exclaim over black treacle and clove without the constraint of adult observation.
They fell into step together along Merchant Row, the damp air carrying the faint sweetness of the bakery behind them.
“Thank you,” she said. “For all of this. Not merely the gingerbread.”
He acknowledged this with a nod but did not look at her.
They walked a few more paces, past the draper’s window where a bolt of deep blue wool caught the gray light, and then he spoke again, and the question arrived without preamble, in the direct manner she had come to expect from a man who considered verbosity a waste of time.
“How did you come to marry a man long past his fiftieth year?”
She could have deflected. She could have offered the polished version, the one she had rehearsed in the early months of her marriage when acquaintances inquired with thinly veiled curiosity. But Alistair had told her he would set things right, and it seemed wrong to answer his honesty with evasion.