She had made her decision before dawn, lying alone in the great canopied bed, a bed far too large for one person and all the more lonely for it. She would seek the duke out. She would find him alone, away from Margaret’s scrutiny and the butler’s pale, watchful eyes, and she would make her case, not with feminine wiles but with the plain, unflinching truth of what life in this house had become.
The difficulty, of course, was reaching him undetected.
Fortunestone Hall was a house of eyes. Margaret’s grip on the staff was absolute, a network of loyalty that had calcified over decades into something approaching omniscience. Hobbs was the worst, that tall shadow who appeared in thresholds with unnerving regularity. But the housekeeper reported to the dowager every morning, and the footmen watched Josephine through the halls with an attentiveness that had nothing to do with service and everything to do with surveillance.
Clara understood the geography of danger better than anyone.
“Hobbs is in the kitchens,” Clara murmured, pressing herself flat against the wall of the upper corridor and peering around the corner with the vigilance of a scout reconnoitering enemy territory. Her hazel eyes darted left, then right, and shebeckoned with a quick flutter of her fingers. “Quick now. The back staircase is clear.”
They moved through the house like a pair of mice navigating a larder full of cats, Clara leading and Josephine following. Along the upper corridor of the Duchess’s Wing, down the narrow back staircase to the first floor, past the housekeeper’s sitting room with its door mercifully shut, and through the long gallery where the ancestral portraits watched their progress with collective disdain. At the far end, the gallery gave way to the western corridor, and the library door came into view.
Here Clara stopped, her hand raised. Voices, faint but distinct, filtered through the library’s heavy oak door.
Josephine pressed herself into the shadow of a stone alcove, deep enough to conceal a person from casual observation, and listened.
The first voice must belong to Mr. Beckwith, the new steward. Josephine had caught only a glimpse of the man, but his voice was not known by her. Calm, nonchalant, with a mild Hertfordshire inflection.
“The accounting books are in a lamentable state, Your Grace,” Beckwith was saying. “Entries are sporadic, categories inconsistent, and there are gaps where nothing was recorded at all. Either the steward was grossly negligent, or he was deliberately obscuring the figures. I am inclined toward the latter.”
A pause. Then the duke’s voice, lower and clipped. “Pocketing money?”
“There are discrepancies in the tenancy receipts that are difficult to explain by incompetence alone. Small amounts, but they accumulate. And entries have been amended in a different hand, as though someone adjusted the numbers after the fact.”
“Is there any value in keeping the man around?”
Beckwith’s reply came without hesitation. “None whatsoever. I spoke with tenant farmers yesterday, and their opinion of him is uniformly poor. They would not mourn his departure.”
A fierce surge of relief momentarily weakened her knees. The steward, Mr. Hatchley, had been a source of quiet dread since her arrival. His eyes lingered on the twins whenever they passed,a slithering gaze no decent man would direct at girls of seventeen. She had mentioned it to the dowager once and been told that Hatchley was a loyal servant and that Josephine’s imagination was overactive. She had ensured, with Clara’s help, that the twins were never left alone in his vicinity.
“Very well,” the duke said. His tone reminded Josephine of the way a surgeon might discuss the removal of a gangrenous limb. Necessary, unpleasant, and best done quickly. “Inform Hatchley that I wish to see him this afternoon. I shall dispatch him myself.”
“Understood, Your Grace.”
A chair scraped. Footsteps crossed the library floor. Josephine pressed deeper into the alcove, her heart drumming against her ribs, and Clara, who had positioned herself at the corridor’s far end like a sentinel, gave a sharp, almost imperceptible shake of her head.
The library door opened, and Beckwith emerged, notebook in hand. He turned in the opposite direction and disappeared around the corner without a glance toward the alcove.
Clara caught Josephine’s eye and gave the faintest nod.
Josephine smoothed her skirts, drew a fortifying breath, and walked toward the library with what she hoped was an unhurried gait. She stopped just outside the doorway.
“Oh,” she said, allowing a note of mild surprise to color her voice. “Your Grace. I did not expect to find you here.”
It was, she acknowledged privately, not her finest performance. But the duke did not appear to notice. He wasseated behind a battered walnut desk that had been reorganized with ruthless efficiency—papers in neat stacks, a ledger open before him, an inkstand and a row of sharpened quills that might have been soldiers awaiting orders.
The library itself was a revelation. Arched windows admitted pale morning light in long bars across faded rugs, and the barrel-vaulted ceiling was carved with oak medallions depicting owls and scrolls. Bookcases rose to the ceiling, coated in gray velvet dust. But around the desk, the dust had been banished.
Alistair looked up from his ledger. His auburn hair was slightly disordered, his coat discarded over the back of his chair, his shirtsleeves rolled to the forearm in a fashion that would have given the dowager palpitations. The informality of it sent a small traitorous flutter through Josephine’s midsection that she determinedly ignored.
He rose, setting down his quill.
“Duchess.” His tone was courteous but guarded, the same careful reserve she had noticed the previous afternoon, as though he were holding her at arm’s length, not out of unkindness but out of some private, unexamined caution. “Please come in.” He indicated one of the worn leather wingback chairs before the desk.
She crossed the threshold and resisted the impulse to glance behind her before closing the door. Clara would be watching the corridor. Clara always watched the corridor.
“I hope I am not intruding,” Josephine said, taking the offered seat. The hearth held a modest fire, and its warmth was welcome against the perpetual chill of the hall. She folded her hands in her lap and arranged her features into the expression of calm resolve she had rehearsed that morning.
“Not at all.”
