Chapter 14 #2
“Lord Franklin has arrived,” he said, because there was no good way to begin and beginning was the only way through. “From London.”
She looked at him calmly. “There is a problem.”
“An important new client. They will cancel by the week’s end unless I appear in person.” He watched her face take the information in and arrange it. “I must leave this morning. Within the hour.”
A silence. She moved to the chair across the desk and sat without being invited, which she had never done before, her expression stunned.
“The wedding.” Her voice quavered.
“I will return from London as quickly as I am able. The moment I have secured the contract, I will come back directly, and we will—”
“When will that be?”
It was not quite a question. It had the nature of a question to which she already expected an unsatisfying answer and was arranging herself to receive it.
“I cannot say with certainty.” He kept his voice level. “The roads are heavy. The journey alone is two days in good conditions. The negotiations will require time I cannot predict from here.”
“You cannot say.”
“No.” There was no point in softening it. She would not thank him for the effort. “I will be as quick as the matter allows. You have my word on that.”
She looked at him across the desk. The silence between them had a capacity he could not quite name. Josephine had the appearance of a woman squashing down panic.
* * *
She had thought she was prepared for the conversation.
She had dressed herself for a wedding, and then the footman had arrived, and she had dressed herself instead for whatever the morning required, which was a different kind of armor entirely, and she had walked to the library, telling herself that whatever he said, she would receive it with the equanimity she had spent all these months perfecting.
She had told herself this in the corridor. She had repeated it on the stairs.
She had believed it until she sat down across from him and heard him say he could not tell her when he would return.
After an initial reaction, she did not let her dismay show.
She was very good at not letting things show.
She had been practicing since her arrival at Fortunestone Hall in a carriage that smelled of new leather and had discovered, within a fortnight, that the life she had consented to bore very little resemblance to the one she had been given.
She had not wept then. She had not wept at any of the subsequent discoveries.
She had learned, instead, the discipline of understanding that her feelings were not among the variables anyone had agreed to manage, and she had applied that discipline so thoroughly and for so long that it had become, in most circumstances, indistinguishable from genuine composure.
This was not most circumstances.
What she felt underneath the composure was something she would not have called by its name in any company, including her own.
It is the singular panic that descends when a thing you have permitted yourself, against all your better judgment, to want, is pulled back from reach before you have quite closed your hand around it.
She had wanted this morning. She had wanted the vicar and the brief quiet ceremony and the transition from one condition to another that would render irreversible what was currently merely probable.
And more than that, she had wanted him. A man who commanded genuine admiration.
She had dressed for it. She had allowed herself, in the small hours before dawn, to believe it would happen.
That had been the error, she understood now.
The allowing. She knew better than to allow.
And then there were the other thoughts. The ones she could not dismiss with logic, because logic had limits and fear did not.
What if the roads were worse than expected?
What if London detained him for longer than a week, two weeks, a month?
What if he arrived in London and had occasion to reconsider from a distance what had seemed clear at Fortunestone Hall in the rain and found that the clarity did not survive the journey?
A man in London, surrounded by his own world, his own people, his own concerns, might look back at a promise made in Yorkshire to a woman he had known for a few days and find it less binding than it had seemed at the time.
She would not blame him for it. She would understand it entirely.
That was the worst of it. She would understand it, because she had learned, over the course of one marriage, the precise mechanism by which a man’s intentions and his actions separated from each other without either party quite agreeing that they had.
What if something happened to him on the road? Jerome had died on a cliff a hundred yards from his own house on an ordinary evening with no warning whatsoever. The world did not announce itself before it altered everything.
And if Alistair did not return or was delayed indefinitely or chose not to return at all, she would be here.
At Fortunestone Hall, unmarried, with child, and within the reach of Margaret Oxley, who would take approximately weeks to determine the situation and considerably less time than that to begin exploiting it.
An unmarried duchess carrying the dead duke’s child, potentially his heir, dependent on the goodwill of a woman who had none to spare.
It was the precise circumstance she had spent the past week maneuvering to escape, and the thought of it opened something cold in her chest—the unique fear of having been helpless before and dreading the return to it.
At least if they were married, she would be a Fraser-Oxley by law. Whatever happened after, she and the girls would have some claim on his protection. It was a cold arithmetic, but it was the only one available to her, and she was not above calculating it.
The thought prepared her enough to speak.
“The vicar is in Irwyn,” she said, keeping her voice polite and unhurried, as though she were proposing a revision to the household accounts rather than asking for the one thing she needed most. “Two miles. If we rode now, we could be back before you need to depart.” She met his eyes. “It would take an hour or two.”
She watched him consider it. He was a thorough man, and he gave the proposal the attention it deserved, working through it with the methodical attention he brought to everything, and she could see him weighing the time, the roads, the hour, the cost of every variable against every other.
She kept her face still while he thought.
She was aware, with the heightened clarity that came with suppressed feeling, of the condition of the light in the room, the candles nearly spent, the gray morning pressing at the windows, the faint smell of ink and cold ash from the grate.
She was aware of him looking at her and of the brief, unmistakable flicker in his expression that told her he understood exactly what she was asking and exactly what it cost her to ask it.
“There is no time.” The words came out with an evenness she recognized as costing him something.
“Franklin and I leave within the hour. Every hour before York is an hour before London, and every hour before London is an hour Goss entertains alternatives.” He looked at her directly, with the unflinching honesty she had come to know as his mode of respect.
“I cannot take that hour, Josephine. I sincerely wish I could.”
She had known, even as she asked, that this was the likely answer. She had asked anyway because not asking had not been possible, and because the small persistent hope that he might say yes had required the asking before it could be properly put away.
She put the hope away now, carefully, folding it into the interior space she had been constructing and enlarging, the room inside her mind where the things she could not afford to feel were stored until she could afford to feel them, which was never.
She was aware of him watching her do it.
That was the thing about Alistair Fraser-Oxley that she had not anticipated and still did not entirely know what to do with.
He watched her attentively, actually looking, and she was not accustomed to being actually looked at, and it made the pretense harder to maintain than it would have been in front of anyone else.
She could feel him reading her face with the same scrupulous attention he brought to mill figures and subordinates’ reports, and she understood that he was seeing more than she intended to show, and that there was nothing she could do about it except hold very still and give him as little as possible to read.
She rose, smoothed the front of her gown, and arranged her face into the expression that had served her through worse mornings than this one.
“I should leave you to your preparations,” she said. “But might I suggest you and Lord Franklin break your fast before you go? The roads will not improve because you leave hungry.”
She turned and walked toward the door.
“Josephine.”
His voice stopped her before she reached it. She turned.
“I am sorry,” he said. “For the timing. I would not choose it.”
She looked at him across the library, the candles casting little light, the gray morning filling the tall windows behind him.
He meant it. She could see that he meant it, and she could see beneath it that he understood that sorry was not sufficient and he was saying it anyway because it was the only thing he had.
Which was, she thought, more than Jerome would have bothered to offer.
It did not make it easier. It made it, in some respects, harder. Indifference was simpler to bear than genuine regret.
“I know,” she said.
She went out, and the door closed quietly behind her.