Chapter 15 #2
The magistrate. The shawl. The groundsman.
The question of what a woman was doing at the cliff on the night her husband died.
The truth of that night was not simple, it had never been simple, but laid before a magistrate by a woman of Margaret Oxley’s standing, with physical evidence and a witness prepared to testify, it would not be received as the complicated, terrible thing it actually was.
It would be received as the simplest possible version of itself.
She could not protect Clara from that. She could not protect the girls from that. She could not protect the child she was carrying from that.
“I will need an hour,” she said. “To pack and to make arrangements.”
Something moved through the dowager’s expression. Not satisfaction, quite. Something older and more tired than satisfaction. “You will have until noon,” she said.
Josephine rose. She kept her hands at her sides and her spine very straight, and she looked at the old woman for a long moment before she spoke.
“Whatever you believe about that night,” she said, “the girls did not ask for what was done to them in this house. Seraphina and Arabella and the twins. Whatever you intend to do with this, I ask that you remember that.”
The dowager said nothing.
Josephine walked to the door and out of it and pulled it closed behind her with quiet control. She would not give anyone in this house the satisfaction of hearing it slam.
The shawl.
She had not thought to account for it in the chaos of that night, the days afterward, the weeks of managing the story and the household and the girls and the grief she had not been permitted to feel and the relief she had not been permitted to feel and everything that had followed. She had not thought about the shawl.
She pushed off from the wall and went to find Clara.
She did not allow herself to think, on the walk back through the corridors, about Alistair.
There were thoughts one could afford and thoughts one could not, and the thought of what might have been if the wedding had happened this morning, if she had been a Fraser-Oxley by law, if she had possessed the protection of his name, was a thought she could not afford.
Nor could she afford to feel any sentiment about the man himself.
She would not think it. She was already thinking it.
She had needed one hour. One hour and a vicar two miles down the road and a man willing to ride that distance before breakfast. One hour, and the thing that was now dismantling her would have had no purchase.
She pushed the thought aside and kept walking.
* * *
The Great North Road was better than the valley road had been, which was the one thing about the morning that was proceeding as it should.
The horses moved at a reasonable pace, the carriage springs absorbed the worst of the ruts with only moderate protest, and Franklin had fallen asleep within the first quarter hour.
That was a proficiency Alistair envied in his brother, the capacity to sleep anywhere, in any condition, as a straightforward response to tiredness, without the intervention of a restless mind.
Alistair was watching the countryside.
The moors had given way to lower ground as they descended from the hills, the landscape flattening into the broad, pale green of early-spring fields, broken by stone walls and bare hedgerows and the occasional farm set back from the road at the end of a muddy track.
It was not a beautiful landscape in the conventional sense.
It was a working one, which he had always found more interesting.
He was not thinking about the landscape.
He had left Fortunestone Hall an hour ago and had been, since the moment the carriage turned out of the gates, engaged in a running argument with himself that he was losing on every front.
The argument concerned Josephine, and the nature of what he was feeling, and the inadvisability of feeling it, and the complete irrelevance of its inadvisability given that he was feeling it regardless.
He had told himself, when he proposed, that he was being prudent.
He had laid it out with the same methodical logic he brought to business decisions.
There were people in that house who required his protection.
The simplest legal mechanism for providing it was marriage.
Josephine was the sensible and willing party, and the fact that he found her interesting and capable and unusually attractive was an advantage rather than a complication.
He had been, he believed, clear-eyed about it.
He had been, he now understood, entirely wrong.