Chapter 15
Clara was sitting in the same chair, her hands folded in her lap, her face arranged with careful stillness, suggesting she had already drawn her conclusions from the sounds of the morning and was waiting only for confirmation.
Josephine closed the door and sat across from her.
“He has gone,” Clara said. Not a question.
“He has gone,” Josephine said.
The silence that followed was different from the silences they had shared in this room before.
Those had been the silences of those who understood each other well enough not to require words.
This one had weight to it, a specific gravity that pressed against the walls of the small room and made the air feel close.
“How long?” Clara asked.
“He could not say with certainty. A week. Perhaps ten days.”
Clara looked at her hands. She did not attempt to conceal her expression. There were limits to what a person could conceal before the concealment itself became its own kind of statement. “And in ten days,” she said quietly, “anything could happen.”
“Yes.” There was no point in softening it. “But he gave his word, and I believe he intends to keep it. That is what we have, and we will manage on it.”
Josephine said it with the dignity she had assembled on the walk back from the library, piece by piece, under pressure, not perfectly and not without cost, but sufficiently.
She was aware that it was not her most convincing performance.
She was also aware that Clara, who had dressed her and mended for her and watched her navigate a marriage that had required daily acts of quiet endurance, was not deceived by it.
Clara said nothing. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears, and she was doing the work of keeping them at bay with the effortful containment of understanding that falling apart was a luxury neither of them could presently afford.
“Clara.” Josephine waited until the maid looked at her. “We have survived a great deal in this house. We will survive a delayed wedding.” She reached across and took her hands, stilling their restless knotting. “He is coming back. And when he does, we will have what we need. All of us.”
The silence between them had just begun to settle into something bearable when a knock came at the door.
It was one of the hall’s older maids, a woman of few words and with a face that gave nothing away, which were qualities the dowager selected for in her personal staff.
She delivered her message without expression.
Her Grace the dowager duchess requested the presence of the duchess in the family drawing room at her earliest convenience.
The phrasing, Josephine noted, was ‘her earliest convenience’. In Margaret Oxley’s vocabulary, that meant now.
She looked at Clara, who had gone very still. “Stay here,” Josephine said. “I will not be long.”
She did not believe that. She could tell, from Clara’s fearful stillness, that Clara did not believe it either.
The family drawing room had been Margaret’s territory since long before Josephine had arrived at Fortunestone Hall.
It smelled of old roses and the sort of cold that accumulated in rooms that were heated as a matter of form rather than comfort.
Margaret was in her chair by the fire. Her walking stick was propped against the arm.
Her pale blue eyes tracked Josephine across the room with the patience of a woman who had been waiting, and was content to have waited, because she was confident in what was coming.
“Sit down,” the dowager said.
Josephine sat.
“I understand,” Margaret said, “that my grandson has departed for London.”
“On a matter of urgent business, yes.”
“Urgent business.” The old woman repeated the phrase with the tone she reserved for things she found beneath contempt. “His mill, I presume.”
“An important client. It is a significant —”
“I am not interested in his clients.” Margaret’s voice was thin and cutting, each word placed with the care of someone laying stones.
“What interests me is that today was to have been your wedding day, and the man who was to marry you has instead ridden to London before breakfast.” She paused. “I find that illuminating.”
“He will return.”
“Perhaps.” The old woman’s gaze did not waver.
“Or perhaps you will discover, as I discovered long ago, that men who belong to the world of trade belong to it entirely. The mill will always require his attention. The contracts will always be urgent. The negotiations will always be just a few days more.” She settled her hands over the head of her walking stick with the assurance of one making a point without needing to state it.
“My grandson is not a duke, my dear. He is a mill owner who has been handed a title he neither earned nor wanted, and it will become apparent, sooner or later, to everyone including himself, that the two things cannot coexist.”
“You are mistaken,” Josephine said carefully.
“Am I?” The words landed with flat certainty that did not require confirmation.
“He has proposed marriage to a woman he has known for less than a week and then abandoned her on the morning of the wedding for those London merchants.” The thin mouth curved very slightly.
“I am many things, but I am not mistaken about men. I have been observing them for sixty years.”
Josephine kept her face still. She was aware, as a woman choosing her ground cautiously, that this conversation had a direction and that Margaret was steering it with confidence. She knew where it was going and was in no hurry to arrive.
“I did not come here to discuss His Grace’s business interests,” Josephine said. “If that is all you wished to say—”
“It is not all I wished to say.”
The room was very quiet. Outside the window, the gray morning continued its indifferent business, the lawns still wet from the week’s rain, the elms standing in their bare rows along the avenue.
“I have been considering,” the dowager said, “a matter that has occupied me for some months. Since the night of my son’s death, in fact.
” She reached beside her chair and lifted something from the small table there, setting it in her lap with an unhurried attitude as if she had rehearsed this moment.
“I have been uncertain how to proceed. The implications for the family, for the title, for the girls, are not inconsiderable. A scandal of this nature would follow them for years.”
Josephine looked at what was in the old woman’s lap.
The shawl was pale blue wool, fine weave, the kind of thing a woman threw over her shoulders on a cold evening when she stepped outside. She had not seen it since January. She had assumed it lost.
She understood, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, everything.
Her hands were very still in her lap. She was grateful for the practice that made stillness possible, that had trained her body not to betray what was happening behind her face, because what was happening there was the cold-handed terror of watching the walls close in from a direction she had not anticipated.
“It was found,” the dowager said, “beneath my son’s body at the base of the cliff.
By one of the groundsmen, the morning after.
A man in my employ, whose discretion I have been able to rely upon.
” She smoothed the fabric across her knees with one hand, a gesture so measured it was almost gentle.
“He brought it to me rather than to the magistrate, because he understood, as servants of long standing generally do, that certain things are better managed within the household.”
The silence stretched. Josephine did not fill it.
She had learned that silence was sometimes the only form of defense available, and that the impulse to speak, to explain, to offer the truth before it was demanded, was a trap that caught women who believed that honesty was a form of protection. It was not. It was a form of exposure.
“I want you gone from this house,” the dowager said.
The pleasantries, such as they had been, were finished.
Her voice had shed its conversational quality entirely, and what remained was the voice she used when she was issuing instructions she expected to be followed.
“There is a carriage waiting in the yard. You will pack what is necessary, and you will go to your father’s house in Hertfordshire. This morning.”
“And if I do not?”
“Then I will send for the magistrate and present him with this.” She lifted the shawl slightly, then set it back in her lap.
“And I will ask him if he knows what it means for a woman to have been present at the edge of the cliff on the night her husband died. And I will allow him to draw his own conclusions, which in my experience magistrates are very capable of drawing, not least when the woman in question is shortly to be married to the man who stands to benefit most from that death.” The pale eyes held hers.
“Do you know what happens to a woman who kills a duke?”
Josephine said nothing. She looked at the shawl instead, and she looked at the woman holding it.
She thought about Clara, who was sitting in the dressing room upstairs waiting for her to return.
She thought about Seraphina and Arabella and the twins, who had survived everything this house had done to them on the strength of the understanding that there was someone in it who would not allow things to get worse.
She thought about the child she was carrying.
She thought about Alistair, somewhere on the York road, and felt an ache in her chest that she did not have time for and could not quite suppress.
There were more pressing things to consider.