Chapter 18
Alistair drew back enough to reach into his coat pocket, and brought the handkerchief to her face himself, folding it once and dabbing it carefully beneath her eyes, and the gesture was so matter-of-fact and so wonderfully tender that she had no defense against it.
It was not a gesture she had expected from any man, and the unexpectedness of it undid what little equilibrium she had left in a way that all the words preceding it had not quite managed.
When he had finished, he kept the handkerchief in his hand and looked at her gravely. Not with the patience of enduring an inconvenience, but the patience of a man who had decided to be somewhere and was entirely willing to wait his turn.
He has every reason to reconsider, she thought, and he has not.
Josephine felt something in her chest give way entirely.
She had told him everything, all of it, and he was still here, still beside her, still entirely unmoved from where he had placed himself.
She had not known, until this moment, how much of herself she had been holding in reserve against the possibility that he would not be.
The relief of it was not the relief of a danger avoided but something she had not felt since leaving Hertfordshire with the late duke. She felt … safe.
“The vicar is waiting,” Alistair said.
She nodded, but hesitated. “She still has the shawl and the groundsman. Even after today.”
“She does.” He did not soften it, which she had come to understand was not coldness but its opposite.
“And she will have, for the first time, a reason to think carefully before she acts. The magistrate in Irwyn is a man named Carlisle. I have known him for years, and he is not a man who would willingly serve as an instrument against a duke who has been his neighbor and his ally.” He held her gaze.
“The dowager knows Carlisle by reputation. She does not know him as I know him. When she considers that difference, she will arrive at the correct conclusion.”
Josephine thought about the pale blue eyes, the walking stick, and the shawl smoothed across Margaret’s lap with measured practice like she had been rehearsing for that moment.
She thought about sixty years of accumulated expertise in the application of social pressure.
And she thought about the fact that all of that expertise had been developed in a world of men who operated within the rules Margaret understood, and that Alistair Fraser-Oxley did not operate within any rules except his own.
She suspected the dowager was about to discover that distinction.
“Very well,” she said. She straightened her bonnet and smoothed her gloves.
St. Elinor’s received them with a welcoming hush that restored her battered spirits.
The light inside was weak and filtered, the cold clean and faintly mineral, and the smell was candle wax and old wood and stone that had drunk in centuries of weather and prayer and the human business of marking the moments that required marking.
The Norman pillars stood in their rows without comment.
The vicar was waiting at the chancel steps.
He had come to Fortunestone for private services every week, so his mild, spectacled face was familiar, but she had never before seen him in his own church, on his own ground, which gave him a quiet authority she had not previously had occasion to observe.
He had arranged his expression with the applied discretion of a man who had been given the essential facts of a situation and had decided to be entirely uncurious about the rest.
Beside him stood his wife, whom Josephine had met on two or three occasions at the hall and who had always struck her as a woman of genuine warmth imperfectly concealed behind correct manners.
That warmth was not concealed now. Her eyes were already bright with what Josephine recognized as the particular emotion of a woman who found weddings deeply satisfying, regardless of the circumstances producing them.
Beside her stood the curate, a young man who was making a creditable effort at professional composure and not entirely achieving it as he eyed the duke and his bride with some awe.
Josephine stood at the chancel steps and looked toward the altar, and the difference between this moment and the last time she had stood in a church to be married pressed quietly upon her.
She had been in Hertfordshire, beside a man she had met only a handful of times and understood not at all.
Jerome had known the correct forms and had observed them with the ease of a man for whom correctness was entirely habitual, which she had mistaken for character.
It was not character. It was fluency. A man could be thoroughly fluent in the language of a gentleman and have nothing whatsoever of a gentleman’s substance, and Jerome had been the fullest possible demonstration of this truth.
She had stood at that altar and made promises she intended to keep, with a heart that was open and willing and entirely unprepared for what followed.
She was not that woman now. She was standing in a church she had walked past on a shopping trip, beside a man she had known for eight days who had turned a horse around on a road to London and come back for her when he had every reason not to.
Who had listened to her confession and stayed anyway.
The man standing beside her who had mud on his coat.
Josephine had never in her life been so glad of what that mud represented.
Pay attention, she told herself. You will not have this morning again.
The vicar opened his book, and she listened to the words with the full attention she had not given them before, intending to correct the omission thoroughly.
She gave each phrase its weight. When it came to her own part, she said the words as she meant them, without reservation, with the clarity that came from understanding exactly what she was saying and to whom she was saying it and why it mattered.
With this ring I thee wed.
The plain gold band settled onto her finger, and she looked at it and thought that it was a more honest ring than the first one had been, because this one had been placed there by a man who sincerely accepted what the vows required of him.
* * *
Alistair was angry.
The anger had taken root when he had encountered the carriage and grown sharper with every mile of the drive to Irwyn. It was not the hot, unreflecting rage of a young man. It was the cold, focused fury of discerning a willful cruelty and calculating the most effectual means of redressing it.
Margaret Oxley had not acted in haste or passion.
She had plotted. She had waited. She had chosen the very morning of Josephine’s canceled wedding, when his betrothed stood most alone, most exposed, most in want of protection, to deliver the final, calculated stroke that would keep her widowed daughter-in-law powerless forever.
Forever under the thumb of the autocratic harpy.
The confession Josephine had made in the carriage had not quenched the anger; it had honed it into something keener and more resolute.
He would summon the solicitors in Leeds. He would proceed methodically, because method prevailed against malice of this order, and the anger would serve as fuel rather than distraction.
But now Josephine stood beside him in the dim nave of St. Elinor’s, very straight, very still, and her nearness did what it had been doing since the day he met her.
It introduced a calmness into the storm of his thoughts that nothing else had ever achieved.
He drew a slow breath, felt the cold March air bite the back of his throat, and gave the moment the attention it demanded.
He was marrying her.
He had known this day was coming for nearly a week.
He had treated it in his usual fashion …
as a decision made, a course set, a matter of execution rather than reflection.
Yet standing here at the chancel steps, with the gray light falling through the lancet windows and the vicar closing the prayer book, he discovered that execution and reflection were not so easily divided.
The ancient stones, the faint scent of old wood and beeswax, the woman at his side, they required him to be present in a way his mind, forever racing several paces ahead, found both unfamiliar and strangely necessary.
He turned his head and looked at her.
She was gazing toward the altar with an expression that spoke of quiet determination, not to suppress what she felt but to meet it without flinching.
There was no artifice in her face now, no careful mask.
Only Josephine. Open, undefended, and so achingly beautiful that his chest seized and refused to release.
She told you the worst of it, he thought. She laid bare the shame and the fear and the months of silent endurance, and she trusted you with every word. Do not forget what that cost her.
He would not forget. He was not a man who forgot what mattered, and this mattered in ways he was only beginning to comprehend.
The vicar’s voice had moved through the familiar words of the service, refined and monotonous.
Alistair’s mind, never truly quiet, had turned to his future plans as it always did when it needed an anchor.
The pastures. The river. The numbers were good, better than he had dared hope.
Properly managed, the estate could support three times its present flock within two seasons.
The wool would go directly to Fraser & Oxley.
No middlemen. No price volatility. A secure supply to meet the Hollingford contract’s demands and more.
He had arrived at Fortunestone telling himself the dukedom was a burden to be endured. He was revising that judgment with every passing hour.