“It entails responsibility,” the dowager continued, as though he had not spoken. “It entails the stewardship of eight hundred years of history, a seat in the House of Lords, and the upholding of a name that has been carried with dignity through the reigns of eleven monarchs. It does not entail the continued operation of a textile mill.”
Josephine watched Alistair’s face. She had positioned herself carefully, still by the window but angled now so that she could observe both the dowager and the new duke without appearing to study either. It was a skill she had honed to an art form, the ability to watch without being watched, to catalog expressions while presenting to the world the serene, unreadable surface of a woman who had learned that visibility was danger.
Alistair’s expression did not change. That alone was remarkable. Josephine had seen men twice his age quail beneath that certain tone of Margaret’s. The late duke’s solicitor, the village physician, even the archdeacon who had come to deliver Christmas service had once gone pale and fumbled his sermonwhen the old woman remarked upon his pronunciation of the Nicene Creed. But the man by the fireplace merely regarded his grandmother with the unimpressed stillness of someone who had been shouted at by far more formidable adversaries and found the experience educational rather than distressing.
“You will divest yourself of that shameful business,” Margaret continued, gathering momentum as a woman accustomed to monologue. “It has been a source of unspeakable embarrassment to this family for decades. Your father’s little enterprise, parading the Oxley name through the gutters of commerce. That a Duke of Oxley should be associated with manufacturing is beyond mortification.” She drew a breath that quivered with righteous conviction. “But I thank a generous and merciful Lord that Providence has seen fit to correct the error at last. You will take your rightful place at Lords, you will restore the family’s reputation amongst the peerage, and you will put an end to this sordid chapter of industrial dalliance.”
She delivered this speech with unshakable conviction from spending seventy-six years being agreed with, and Josephine felt the familiar twist of nausea, the very blend of anger and helplessness that Margaret’s pronouncements always inspired. The same sick feeling that had accompanied every one of the old woman’s edicts over the past year.The girls would not go into society. The girls would not visit town. The girls would not receive callers.Each decree delivered as though it were divine ordinance rather than the tyranny of a bitter old woman who could not relinquish control.
Josephine waited for Alistair to capitulate. She was so accustomed to watching men buckle beneath Margaret’s certainty that she had already begun forming the expression of polite disappointment she would wear when he agreed.
He did not capitulate.
“I should sell off a thriving family business, leave my loyal employees to their fate, and turn my back on the community of Irwyn all because some pompous arses at Lords will judge me as ungentlemanly for my business dealings? I think not. Fraser & Oxley Textile Mill will remain exactly as it is with direct supervision from me.”
The dowager flinched at his crassness, but Alistair Fraser-Oxley did not seem to give a whit.
Josephine pressed her lips together to prevent the smile that threatened to betray her.Pompous arses at Lords.She had never, in all her years of navigating the razor-edged proprieties of the gentry, heard anyone speak with such magnificent disregard for decorum, and the effect on her was not unlike the first gasp of fresh air after emerging from a room that had been sealed too long.
Margaret’s walking stick trembled against the floorboards. Whether from fury or age, it was difficult to tell. “You are vulgar,” she said, her voice dropping to the register she employed when she wished to wound rather than merely reprimand. “Your father was vulgar, and your mother was the daughter of a shopkeeper, and between them they have produced a man who speaks of arses in a duchess’s drawing room. The eighth duke would be appalled.”
“The eighth duke disinherited his own son for falling in love,” Alistair replied, and there was no humor in his voice now, only the flat, tempered hardness of a man stating facts he had no intention of debating. “His capacity for appallment is not something I aspire to emulate.”
Margaret’s mouth worked, but nothing emerged. Josephine realized, with a shock that was almost physical, that the old woman had been rendered speechless. It was a phenomenon she had believed to be theoretically impossible, the conversational equivalent of a river running uphill, and yet here it was,unfolding before her in a drafty drawing room. For a woman who had governed this household through the sheer force of her tongue for five decades, the silence was an event of historical proportions.
Josephine found herself studying the duke with an attention that went beyond admiration. Here was a man who was unintimidated by titles, airs, societal expectations, or the rules of the upper classes, so direct and unlike anyone she had encountered before. His speech was refined, but he did not plead, did not negotiate, did not soften his position to accommodate the old woman’s sensibilities. He simply stated what was true and let it stand. Josephine wondered, with a quiet fierceness that startled her, whether she could learn to do the same. Whether his manner might be absorbed, studied, made her own, so that the next time she faced Margaret Oxley alone, she might hold her ground without her hands trembling in the folds of her skirt.
The dowager tried a different approach. “You will find that the House of Lords does not look kindly upon men who sully their titles with trade. You will be ostracized. The family will suffer.”
“The family is already suffering,” Alistair said. “The estate is in ruin. The tenants are fleeing. I hazard that your granddaughters have not left these grounds in years. I would venture to suggest, Your Grace, that the mill and its profits represent the only hope this dukedom has of surviving into the next generation, and I will not apologize for the acquired fortune that will be required to drag this estate into the present century.”
Margaret drew herself up, her spine so rigidly straight she might have been a column of iron. She opened her mouth to deliver what would undoubtedly have been a devastating rejoinder, but Alistair was already speaking again, and his tonehad shifted from combative to something quieter but no less final.
“I thank you for your concern, but the decision is made. The mill will remain open under Fraser-Oxley stewardship.” It was his final word on the matter, and he settled into a seat before she could deliver another cut.
The old woman stared at him for a long, crackling moment. Alistair met it with the same immovable strength with which he had met every one of her salvos.
Margaret’s knuckles whitened on the handle of her walking stick. She rose from her chair slowly, with the careful deliberateness of a woman whose joints no longer cooperated with her temper. Josephine saw, in the slight wince the old woman could not entirely conceal, the arthritis she would never admit to.
“You are your father’s son,” Margaret said and invested the words with such venom that they might as well have been a curse. “Common in manner, common in speech, and common in ambition. This family deserved better.”
She clacked across the room without another word, the rhythm of her walking stick marking each step like a metronome set to the tempo of cold fury, and pulled the door shut behind her with a force that rattled the leaded windows in their frames. The porcelain shepherdesses on the mantelpiece shuddered in sympathy.
The room exhaled.
Or perhaps it was Josephine who exhaled. It was difficult to tell, because the departure of Margaret Oxley from any space produced a physical change in the atmosphere so profound, it was almost meteorological, as though a storm front had passed and left behind it the dazed, trembling calm of a landscape that had survived its worst.
She became aware, in the silence that followed, that she was alone with the Duke of Oxley. The fire crackled. Rain murmured against the windows. The fading percussion of Margaret’s walking stick retreated down the corridor and was gone.
Alistair sat on the settee, one hand resting on his knee, his gaze directed at the modest flames in the hearth with abstracted intensity, as though he sorted through a great many competing thoughts. Oxley men, from the portraits she had studied in the long gallery, tended toward the lean and the angular, pale, fine-boned, with the elegant fragility of men who had never lifted anything heavier than a quill.
Alistair Fraser-Oxley was none of these things. He was tall and broad-shouldered and solid in a way that suggested labor rather than leisure, muscle earned in the service of industry rather than sport. His auburn hair caught the firelight and burned like banked copper, and there was a quality to his presence that Josephine associated with the great oak beams of the hall itself. Strong and unlikely to yield to anything short of catastrophe.
Stop it.
She was not here to list out the man’s physical attributes. She was here to secure his support, to make him understand what was at stake, to convince him that the girls and she needed more than a swift assessment and a set of instructions for his estate manager.
“Your Grace,” she began and was relieved to find her voice level. “I must apologize for my mother-in-law’s remarks. They were unkind and unwarranted.”
