Chapter 17
The cob was not a fast animal. Alistair had established this within the first quarter mile and had been working around it since, which was an exercise in frustration because he understood that urgency and pace were not the same and currently found that insight insufficient comfort.
He had told himself, on the road from the inn, that he was not certain what he would find when he arrived.
That was not true. He had known since the inn yard, since the moment he handed Franklin into the carriage and stood watching it move south along the road and felt the inconvenient clarity that arrived only when there was no longer anything to be done about it, that he had left the wrong matter behind.
The contract was the right decision. Franklin was more than capable.
The mill would not fall apart in his absence.
Josephine was alone in a house with Margaret Oxley, on the morning that was supposed to be their wedding day, with no one in it who had the authority or the inclination to stand between her and whatever the old woman had decided to do with the void his departure had created.
He had told himself it would be fine. He had told himself this approximately four times between the inn yard and the first mile marker, at which point he stopped telling himself anything and focused on getting back.
The gates of the Fortunestone estate came into view at the end of the avenue of elms, and he was perhaps two hundred yards from them when a carriage appeared.
Moving out along the drive at a brisk pace, with the Fortunestone livery on the coachman’s coat, the carriage had trunks strapped to the roof with neat finality.
Alistair pulled the horse to a halt in the middle of the road.
He sat for a moment looking at those trunks.
He had not expected to feel the cold, clean anger that arrived now, the kind that came not at a person but at a situation, at the variety of human cruelty that operated through institutions and propriety and the accumulated weight of social authority.
He had felt it before, once or twice, in the early years at the mill when men with money had attempted to use it as a lever against men who had none.
He had learned, in those years, to let the anger sharpen rather than scatter.
It sharpened now into something very definite and very quiet.
The carriage drew up when the coachman marked the obstruction. Alistair dismounted, tied the beast to the nearest elm, and looked up at the man on the box. “Stay where you are.” He crossed to the carriage door and knocked once.
A pause. Then he opened it.
Josephine had been crying. The evidence was not entirely gone from her face despite the evident effort she had made to remove it.
Her eyes were reddened. Her composure was present, and it was costing her in the way he had come to recognize, the way a well-maintained wall costs something to maintain when the ground beneath it has been disturbed.
She looked at him. He watched her take in the fact of him …
the mud on his coat, the horse tied to the elm behind him, the bearing of a man who had turned around and ridden back without caring what he looked like when he arrived.
He watched her understand what it meant, and he watched what that understanding did to her face.
“Why are you here?” Her voice was wobbly.
“To marry you,” he said. “Obviously.”
Something moved through her expression that he did not have a name for and did not require one.
It crossed her face the way weather moved through a landscape, swift and complete, and in its wake her poise broke, cleanly and all at once, and she pressed her fingers to her mouth and turned toward the window.
Her shoulders worked with the effort of containing something that was not, he thought, entirely grief.
He waited. He was capable of waiting without filling a silence, which was a quality developed in meetings with vendors and clients alike and found useful in a great many contexts since.
When she turned back, her face was reconstructed.
She had done it quickly and well, which told him a great deal about how often the skill had been called upon.
He had seen her compose herself in difficult rooms, in front of the dowager and the girls, and each time, the composure had arrived with the smooth authority of an art long practiced.
This was different. This was the dignity of a woman reassembling herself after her defenses had been severed entirely, and the seams were difficult to pull back together.
“I am going home,” she said. “To my father’s house in Hertfordshire.”
“I can see that.” He kept his voice level. “Why?”
She looked at her hands. “Circumstances have changed.”
“Josephine.” He said her name in the tone he used when he needed something to stop moving so he could get a proper look at it. “What has happened since I left this morning?”
She said nothing. He had learned a great many things about her in eight days, which was both more than he would have credited and considerably less than he intended to know.
Whatever had put her in this carriage with her trunks on the roof had happened in the hours since he left, and it had not been of her own choosing.
He was as certain of that as he was of anything.
“What did she say to you?”
The silence changed quality. It shifted underneath, a small movement, the kind a person made when a question arrived at the thing they were hiding.
“It does not signify,” she said.
He examined her thoughtfully. “It signifies entirely.” He thought about what he knew of her, which was not everything but was considerably more than a week warranted.
He thought about the trunks on the roof, packed in a hurry by a woman who did not do anything in a hurry unless she had been given no choice.
“I am going back to that house,” he said quietly, “regardless of what you tell me. The only question is whether I understand what I am walking into.”
Her chin lifted. It was another small movement and she controlled it immediately, but he saw it. “You cannot simply walk back in there and—”
“I can and I will.” He declared. “I am the Duke of Oxley. That house is mine, and everyone in it is my responsibility, which the dowager seems to have temporarily forgotten. What I would prefer,” he said, “is to understand what she has said to you before I say anything to her.”
She stared at him across the carriage step.
The morning light was not kind, and she looked tired and stripped of her usual careful management and entirely, adorably herself, and he thought, not for the first time, that the version of her without the composure was considerably harder to be in the same room with, for reasons that had nothing to do with dislike.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Pressed her hands flat against her lap in the gesture she made when she was arriving at a decision.
“Not here,” she said at last.
He stepped back from the door and looked up at the coachman. “Step down.”
“Alistair.” Her voice came through the door with the note he recognized, the one that meant she was deciding whether to argue. “What are you doing?”
He closed the carriage door.
Then he instructed the coachman to ride the cob back to Fortunestone Hall before climbing up to the driver’s box himself, where he took up the leads.
He did not explain himself. She would understand when they arrived at the vicarage, and he intended to ensure they arrived before she had time to construct a sufficient argument against it.
They needed to reach it while services were still happening.
He drove without hurrying. The anger had finished sharpening and had become more useful in the cold, focused resolve of having identified the problem, assessed the variables, and arrived at the only acceptable course of action.
Margaret Oxley had spent the morning very effectively.
She had timed it well and executed it with the ruthlessness of someone whose ill intent never wavered.
The old shrew had not, however, accounted for a horse at the White Hare and a road that ran in both directions.
The Irwyn spire was visible through the pale morning cloud ahead, and he kept his eyes on it and did not look back at the gates of Fortunestone Hall receding behind him and did not think about what was being left behind in that house or what it would require to retrieve it.
One step at a time. First Irwyn. Then the vicar. Then everything else.
* * *
She was not certain what she had expected.
She had spent a great deal of the morning not permitting herself to expect anything, on the reasonable grounds that the morning had already taken everything she had offered it and returned nothing.
Then the carriage had stopped. The door had opened.
Alistair Fraser-Oxley had been standing on the other side of it.
Something in her chest had simply given way.
She had not wept in front of him before. She had not wept in front of anyone in a very long time, but oh how she had wanted to when she had seen his face.