Chapter 10
The rain had not relented, but Alistair could no longer abide the walls.
He had spent the morning reviewing Beckwith’s drainage estimates, the afternoon writing letters to his solicitor in Leeds, and the hours between pacing the west library like a man measuring the dimensions of his own cage.
The fire had burned low and the gray light through the windows had thickened to the color of pewter, and still the rain fell, drumming its ceaseless rhythm against the glass until the sound became indistinguishable from the silence it replaced.
By half past three, he had reached the limits of his tolerance.
He shrugged into his overcoat in the entrance hall, ignoring the startled expression of a footman who clearly thought His Grace had taken leave of his senses.
Alistair had built a career on decisive action.
Four days confined to a medieval ruin while the sky emptied itself upon Yorkshire had left him restless to the point of agitation, his thoughts circling the same worn grooves of the mill, the contract, the estate, Josephine until he could no longer distinguish one anxiety from another.
He needed to move. To see the land he had inherited with his own eyes rather than through the intermediary of Beckwith’s careful maps.
The rain struck him the moment he stepped through the side door, cold and insistent, soaking through his hat brim within seconds.
He pulled his collar higher and set off along the gravel path that skirted the south gardens, his boots crunching in the saturated stone before the gravel gave way to mud and the mud to a narrow track that disappeared into the tree line.
The woods closed around him with an abruptness that surprised him.
One moment he was crossing open ground with the bulk of Fortunestone Hall at his back, its medieval towers dark against the low sky, and the next he was beneath a canopy of bare oak and ash whose branches interlaced above him like the vaulting of a ruined cathedral.
The rain still found him through the leafless boughs, but the wind dropped away and the air grew still and cold and smelled of wet bark and old leaves turning to earth.
He followed the track without clear intention, letting his legs carry him while his mind worked.
The path was overgrown but discernible, winding through the wood in a gentle descent toward the sound of water.
Not the rain but the river. He could hear it now, a low, persistent rush beneath the patter of the downpour, growing louder with each step.
The trees thinned. The ground beneath his feet changed from soft loam to exposed stone, slick with rain and furred with moss, and the path curved sharply around a massive outcropping of limestone before opening onto—
Alistair stopped.
The ground ended. Not gradually, not with the gentle slope of a riverbank, but with the sudden finality of a blade. He stood at the edge of a cliff, and the world dropped away.
Below him, perhaps two hundred feet down, the River Irwyn carved through a narrow gorge, its waters swollen and brown with the week’s rainfall, churning against a rocky beach of gray stone that flanked the current on either side.
Fortune’s Fall.
The sheer drop stole the breath from his chest. There was no fence, no wall, no marker of any kind to warn a man that the path he walked led to oblivion. Simply earth and stone and then nothing, a void filled with rain and the roar of water and the gray indifference of gravity.
His uncle had fallen from this place. Likely from this very spot.
Alistair’s jaw tightened as he stared down at the rocks and tried to imagine it.
Jerome Oxley, inebriated and careless in the gathering dark, stumbling along this very path.
Had he known where he was? Had the drink so addled his senses that he walked straight off the edge?
Or had there been a single, terrible instant of clarity when the ground vanished and he understood what was happening, and that understanding had come too late?
The official account held that it was an accident.
A duke in his cups, a slippery path, an unfortunate fall.
The coroner had been satisfied. But Alistair had heard the whispers in Irwyn, that Jerome Oxley’s death might not have been accidental at all.
That a man who had driven his estate to ruin and his family to despair might have found in the cliff’s edge a solution to problems he lacked the courage to face.
Alistair did not know which possibility disturbed him more.
He became aware that the rock beneath his boots was treacherous. The limestone was glazed with rain, its surface polished by centuries of weather into something approaching glass, and the moss that clung to its edges offered no purchase. A man could lose his footing here without warning.
He stepped back. Then back again, until solid earth replaced the treacherous rock and the cliff edge was a gray absence ahead of him rather than a void beneath his feet.
His heart was beating harder than it ought to.
What a way to die.
He stood for a long moment in the rain, breathing deliberately, his hands clenched in his coat pockets, while the great house waited somewhere behind him in the mist.
This was the legacy he had inherited. Not merely the crumbling walls and the neglected tenants and the bitter old woman with her walking stick. This. A cliff that had swallowed a duke and proved the veracity of the estate’s sobriquet.
He turned his back on Fortune’s Fall and retraced his steps through the wood, walking faster than was wise on the muddy path.
By the time he emerged from the trees, the hall’s towers were visible through the rain, dark and solid against the colorless sky, and the sight of them quieted him in a way he had not expected.
He had work to do.
* * *
The rain was still falling at dinner, an endless sound that clung to the sky like aged wallpaper.
Josephine had grown accustomed to it over the past two days, the way it wove itself into the fabric of the household until it became the texture of silence itself, but the girls had not.
Genevieve pressed her nose to the drawing room window while they waited for Hobbs to announce the meal, her breath fogging the glass as she stared mournfully at the sodden gardens.
“It has been raining for a hundred years,” she declared with the theatrical despair of a girl who had read too many old novels from the estate’s moldering library. “We shall all grow fins and swim to Irwyn.”
“It has been raining for two days,” Juliet corrected from her seat by the fire, not looking up from the small leather-bound book she held open in her lap. “Which only feels like a hundred years because you have exhausted every novel in the house.”
“I have not exhausted them. I have merely … revisited the best passages.”
“Three times.”
Josephine exchanged a glance with Arabella, who sat writing a letter at the writing desk with serene concentration, having perfected the art of ignoring her younger sisters.
The faintest curve touched Arabella’s lips before she returned to her correspondence to one of her numerous cousins scattered across England.
Seraphina stood apart from the others, near the doorway, her arms folded across her bodice in the manner she adopted when she was bracing for the dowager’s arrival.
Alistair entered the drawing room looking as though he had recently been caught in a downpour and had attempted to make himself presentable in its aftermath.
His auburn hair was still damp at the temples, darkened to the color of old copper, and though he had changed into dry evening clothes, there was a restlessness about him that the rain seemed to have intensified rather than quenched.
His gaze found Josephine’s across the room, and the warmth in it, the private acknowledgment, made her pulse quicken beneath the stiff bombazine of her mourning gown.
Do not blush. Not here. Not in front of the girls.
She managed her features and inclined her head in greeting, and he returned it with the ghost of a smile before turning to address the room.
“I trust you are all well this evening.”
“We are imprisoned,” Seraphina said flatly, though there was no real venom in it. “The rain has seen to that.”
“Indeed. I ventured out this afternoon and can confirm that the grounds are attempting to return to the sea.” He moved to the fire and extended his hands toward the flames, and Josephine noticed the faint tremor in his fingers before he curled them into fists and lowered them to his sides.
Something about his walk had unsettled him.
The sound arrived before the woman did. The rhythmic clack of a walking stick against uncarpeted stone, growing louder with the inexorable patience of approaching weather.
Josephine felt the familiar tightening in her chest, the involuntary clenching of her hands in her lap, and watched the same tension ripple through the room.
Genevieve withdrew from the window. Juliet closed her book.
Arabella set down her pen. Seraphina’s jaw hardened.
The dowager duchess Margaret Oxley entered the drawing room as she entered every room, as though she were bestowing a favor upon its occupants by deigning to appear.
Her iron-gray hair was dressed with severity beneath a cap of black lace, and her mourning gown was heavy with heirloom jet that glittered against the dark fabric like the eyes of carrion birds.
Her thin mouth was set in an expression of permanent dissatisfaction.
Hobbs materialized behind her, spectral and silent. “Dinner is served, Your Grace.” He addressed the old woman, and the slight was as calculated as it was familiar.