Chapter 12 #3
The dowager did not acknowledge the greeting.
She crossed to her customary chair, the high-backed one nearest the fireplace, the position she had occupied in every room of this house for decades, and lowered herself into it with the particular authority of a woman who has never sat anywhere she did not intend to rule from.
“Two cups,” the dowager said.
“I have been enjoying some company this morning.”
“One does not require company to make unnecessary work for the servants.” The pale eyes moved to the window. “Seraphina, I presume. The child has been slinking about the house lately as though she believes herself entitled to be in it.”
Josephine said nothing. She had learned, across a year of these conversations, that engagement on this very terrain was a trap. Every response became a concession, every concession a precedent.
The dowager appeared to take her silence as an invitation. She settled more deeply into the chair. “You will,” she began, with the deliberate preamble of a judge announcing a finding, “have given some thought to the matter of mourning.”
Josephine kept her hands still in her lap.
“Jerome has been dead two months.” The dowager spoke his name the way she spoke most things, with ownership rather than grief, as though he had been a possession that had inconveniently ceased to function.
“Two months. And we are to understand that you intend to remarry before his body is properly cold.”
“The duke has obtained a common license,” Josephine said. “The vicar—”
“Licenses are a matter of law. I am speaking of propriety.” The walking stick tapped once against the carpet, a deliberate sound, the way one might strike a gavel.
“A Duchess of Oxley is expected to maintain full mourning for twelve months. Six months in first mourning. Full black, no ornamentation, no entertainments, no society. Six months in second mourning before the introduction of half-colors. This is not a matter of personal preference. This is the standard to which this family has held for generations.”
“I am aware of the convention.”
“Aware.” The dowager’s tone suggested that awareness, without the corresponding action, was its own variety of moral failure. “Jerome deserved better than a wife who consigns him to history before the season has changed.”
Josephine looked at the woman across the low table and felt the exhaustion of being required to perform indefinitely for a demanding audience that will never be satisfied.
She thought, with involuntary clarity, of Alistair.
The way he had looked at the dowager and declined to be impressed by her, the bone-deep ease of a man who had not spent thirteen months learning to be afraid.
She was not Alistair. She knew what she carried and could not afford to spend courage she might urgently need for something else.
“I have every respect for convention,” she said carefully. “But the circumstances of the household are such that certain arrangements cannot be deferred.”
“The circumstances,” the dowager repeated. “You mean his commercial relatives.”
“I mean the welfare of the family.”
“The welfare of—” A flicker crossed the pale eyes, not warmth, never warmth, but something sharper.
The recognition of an implication being withheld.
The old woman was shrewd, whatever else she was, and she had been reading rooms and people since before Josephine was born.
“You are very anxious to be married, for a woman whose husband is two months dead.”
The room contracted slightly. Josephine held her breath in a way she hoped was invisible.
“It is a practical matter,” she said. “The duke is of the same opinion.”
“The duke.” The dowager said it the way she said everything connected to Alistair, as though the title were a garment that fit him poorly and she was not going to pretend otherwise out of politeness.
“The duke is a man who measures sentiment by the yard. You will forgive me if I place a modest value on his opinion in matters of family honor.”
Josephine stood.
It was not a dramatic gesture, she was constitutionally unsuited to dramatic gestures, but it was composed, and the dowager’s eyes tracked the movement with the attentiveness of a lifetime spent cataloging what other people’s bodies did when their mouths were saying something else.
“I thank you for your counsel,” Josephine said, which was the closest she could currently bring herself to honesty without consequence. “The arrangements will proceed as planned.”
She left the room before the walking stick could be deployed again.
The wedding was soon. Alistair would return. The vicar would marry them. These were facts, not wishes, she assured herself.
And yet …
And yet the arithmetic assembled itself without permission.
Two months since Jerome. Six months of expected full mourning, minimum.
A secret currently invisible that would become visible to everyone in a matter of weeks.
Alistair in Irwyn with a flooded mill and a delayed contract and a dozen competing claims on his attention, every one of them more urgent than a Sunday wedding that could, technically, be moved.
She stopped to stare out the window as her thoughts swirled.
The rain did not relent.