Chapter 17 #2
She watched Irwyn approach through the window and felt the conflict of his return settle over her like two weathers at once.
He was here. The relief of it was so immediate and so physical that it frightened her.
She was conscious, even as she felt it, that she had no right to it.
Hundreds of people in Irwyn had more claim on him than she did.
The mill was real. The livelihood of every worker who drew wages from Fraser & Oxley was real, and she was not the kind of woman who placed her own difficulty above the difficulties of people who had no one else to advocate for them.
She had made that accounting on the estate road and accepted it, and it had been the correct accounting, and now he was here anyway and she did not know what to do with the fact that she was glad.
Not because of everyone who would be affected, or the girls, or Clara, or even the babe in her womb. She had simply been … glad.
She was not going to examine that too closely. There was a conversation coming that she had never had with anyone, not aloud, not in any form that gave it a shape outside her own memory, and she needed whatever fortitude she still possessed to get through it.
When the carriage slowed, she recognized the church, the tall stone building behind its garden wall at the edge of the high street, the one she had driven past with the girls on the shopping trip that now felt like a memory from another woman’s life.
She heard Alistair’s footsteps on the stone path and then silence.
She sat in the carriage and looked at her hands and thought about that January evening.
The bench near the cliff’s edge. The fading winter light, pale and flat across the moor.
She and Clara had gone out for air, as they sometimes did when the house felt too close, and Clara had gone back inside to fetch tea against the cold.
Josephine thought about how ordinary it had all been, right up until it was not.
Alistair returned after a quarter of an hour and opened the carriage door. His expression told her before he spoke.
“The vicar will marry us,” he said. “Now. In the church.”
The warmth that moved through her at the words was immediate and involuntary.
The cold that followed was equally so. She had been wanting this, and now it was being offered back to her and she could not take it, and the distance between wanting something and being unable to accept it was one of the more bitterly cruel varieties of suffering she had encountered.
“I cannot,” she said.
His gaze did not waver. “Tell me what she said.”
Tell him. All of it.
She was afraid. She understood that clearly in this moment in a way she had not permitted herself to understand it before.
Not afraid of his judgment, though that fear was present too, a low hum beneath the other one.
But she was afraid of what happened when the last private room in herself was opened and examined.
“The dowager has my shawl,” she said. “A pale blue one. I had not thought of it since January. I did not know it was missing.” She looked at her hands.
“It was found beneath Jerome’s body at the base of the cliff.
By one of the groundsmen, a man in her employ who brought it to her rather than the magistrate.
” She paused and glanced up at him. “She has been holding it since, deciding what to do with it.”
His jaw firmed. “And this morning she decided.”
“This morning, she decided.” She kept her voice even. “She told me to leave the estate or she would present the shawl to the magistrate and ask him what he made of it. She would like to know, she said, what happens to a woman who kills a duke.”
He was very quiet. The kind of quiet that had weight in it. “And did she offer her own conclusions on the matter?”
“She had a carriage waiting in the yard.”
“God damn her.” He said it low and very sharp, and then was silent for a moment.
Outside, a cart passed on the high street, its wheels loud on the cobblestones, and a pair of women talking outside the baker’s shop fell silent as it went by and then resumed.
“What happened that night?” he said. His voice was entirely without judgment. “Not what the shawl suggests. What actually happened?”
He opened the carriage door wider and stepped in, pulling it closed behind him. He sat beside her, and the simple fact of him there, close enough that she could feel the cold still coming off his coat, did something to the architecture of her composure that she could not entirely account for.
She heard the cry from the path again in her memory, sharp as the January air had been. The way she had been on her feet before she understood why. The way her heart had known before her thoughts did.
You have carried this since January. Tell him the truth.
“It was Clara, my lady’s maid,” she said.
Her voice did not shake, but the effort of keeping it even was a physical one, a held breath dressed as composure.
“Jerome had been drinking since noon. He did that, toward the end, whenever his mother was excessively insistent about something. He had been pestering Clara for some weeks. Following her through the house. Making remarks. I had taken to ensuring she was not left in rooms where he might find her alone.”
She stopped. In the pause was everything she had not said aloud before, the memory examined only in the dark and never given words.
Not because she had wanted to protect herself.
Because giving it words would have made it something she had to decide what to do with, and she had not had anyone to tell.
“Clara had gone back to the house for tea,” she said.
“I was alone on the bench when I heard her cry out from the path above the gorge. I ran.” She stared at her hands again.
“He had found her on the path. He had his hands on her, and she could not get free. She was fighting him, but he was larger and very drunk and past caring.” The words came faster now, not because she had lost control but because they had been waiting too long, and once the door was open, they would not be stopped.
She looked up at Alistair, not able to explain the pure joy that he was the one she was finally telling her darkest truth.
“I pulled at him. I called his name. He did not stop. So I pulled harder, and he stumbled back from her and Clara ran. He lost his footing on the edge of the path and reached out, and he must have caught hold of my shawl and I could not —” She stopped again and drew an unsteady breath.
“I could not hold him. He fell. And the shawl went with him.”
The silence in the carriage was complete.
She felt the telling of it move through her like cold water, that specific chill of a secret released after too long, both relief and exposure arriving at once.
She had not known how much she had needed to say it until the words were gone from her and she was still sitting upright and he was still there and the world had not rearranged itself into something unrecognizable.
“We killed him. I killed him,” she declared in defeat.
“Oh, Josephine.” Alistair pulled her into a firm embrace, resting his chin on her head as he ran soothing hands up and down her slender back. “You did nothing. Jerome killed himself with poor choices.”
She did not speak. She was aware of the solidity of him, the steadiness of his hands, the smell of damp wool and mud, the complete absence of any of the reactions she had feared.
No judgment. What she found instead was a person who was simply present, and it undid her more thoroughly than anything else could have.
“He had been making poor choices for a very long time,” Alistair said above her head.
“He made them in the direction of a woman who could not refuse him and a cliff that did not care and a bottle he should have put down. That is not your accounting to carry.” He pulled back slightly, enough to look at her face.
“What you did for Clara is what anyone with a conscience would have done. You protected her when she had no one else to protect her. That is not something to carry with shame. That is something to carry with your head up.”
“The magistrate will not see it that way.”
“The magistrate will not see it at all.” His voice was quiet and very firm.
“A duchess with a duke beside her is a rather different proposition than a dismissed widow with no one to stand beside her. The dowager knew that this morning. That is why she moved when she did, before the wedding and not after. The shawl was never about justice, Josephine. It was about timing.”
She looked at him and felt the last of her dignity release entirely, not with drama but with the quiet inevitability of something that had been held too long and too tightly and had finally been permitted to go.
And she wept, but it was not the weeping of confession, nor the raw and ragged thing that had come with the telling.
It was milder than that and more complete, the tears from carrying a weight in the dark and then handing it to someone who had not flinched at the receiving of it.
She did not wipe them away. She did not turn from him.
She simply let them finish in their own time, because for the first time in longer than she could accurately account for, there was no one in the room she needed to hide them from.
Outside, the high street was entirely indifferent to what had just happened in the carriage outside the vicar’s house, which was, she thought, as it should be.
Some things did not require an audience.
Some things were simply true, between two people, in a cold carriage in March, and that was enough.