He waited until she was settled before returning to his own chair. Once seated, he gave her his full attention, which was amore formidable experience than she had anticipated. His blue eyes were direct and assessing, absent of the social glaze that most gentlemen employed as a screen. When Alistair Fraser-Oxley looked at you, helookedat you.
“I wished to speak with you privately,” she said. “About the household. About the girls.”
He leaned back in his chair and waited. He did not prompt, did not hurry, did not fill the silence with meaningless pleasantries. He simply waited, and Josephine understood that this was a man who knew the most powerful tool in any conversation was patience.
She drew a breath and began.
“The girls have been kept here,” she said. “Cloistered. They have not been permitted to leave the estate in years. Seraphina is four-and-twenty, Your Grace. She is perilously close to being considered on the shelf, and she has never attended a single ball, a single assembly, a single dinner beyond these walls. None of them have.”
She watched his face as she spoke. His expression did not change. It was the same assessing regard, but the muscles around his eyes tightened, a contraction she might have missed had she not spent a year studying the subtle play of expression as a matter of survival.
“They do not go into Irwyn for shopping. They do not attend Sunday services. The vicar comes here instead, because the dowager will not permit them to travel. Even the younger girls have spent the whole of their girlhood within these walls, without companions, without tutors, without any of the experiences that young women of their station ought to have.”
Alistair’s jaw shifted. It was the physical tell of a man whose temper ran deep and whose self-control was formidable but not infinite.
“This is their grandmother’s doing,” he said. It was not a question.
“It is. And their father’s, before his death. Jerome saw no reason to invest in their future. He wanted a male heir, and the girls were … an inconvenience. An expense he was not willing to incur.” She kept her voice level, though the words tasted of ash. “The dowager has a similar attitude, and has continued the practice after his death. The girls are fed, clothed, housed. But they are not living, Your Grace. They are existing. There is a vast difference.”
He regarded her for a long moment, his fingers steepled before him in the posture which might be his thinking position, the businessman’s equivalent of a scholar’s furrowed brow.
“And you,” he said. “You are the dowager Duchess of Oxley. You have authority in this household. Why have you tolerated it?”
The question was not cruel. But it struck with the exactitude of a blade slipped between ribs, and Josephine felt the blood rush to her face. Because the question was fair. It was the question she had asked herself a hundred times in the dark, small hours.
Why have you tolerated it?
“I have been in residence for one year, Your Grace,” she said, and the effort to keep her voice from breaking cost her dearly. “I arrived as a bride and became a widow within twelve months. My authority in this household is nominal. The dowager controls the servants. The butler, the housekeeper, the coachman, the footmen. All of them are hers, appointed by her, loyal to her, and answerable to no one else. She controls the purse strings and brooks no dissent to her wishes.”
She was not going to cry. But the admission that followed required her to swallow twice before she could push the words past the constriction in her throat.
“I, too, have not been permitted to leave the estate since my arrival.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Alistair’s steepled fingers came apart. His hands settled on the arms of his chair, and his posture shifted.
“You have not left,” he repeated, and his voice had dropped to a note she had not heard from him before, one that belonged not to a businessman but to a man discovering the limits of his patience.
“I tried once,” she said. “I asked for the carriage to be brought around so that I might visit the village. The coachman informed me he could not oblige without the dowager’s express permission. When I requested it, Her Grace told me the carriage was reserved for the family’s use and my errands did not qualify.” She paused. “I am the family, of course. But not in her estimation.”
“And walking?”
“I considered it, but I was afraid that if I left without permission, the dowager would bar me from returning. And if I were cast out, there would be no one left to stand between her and the girls.”
She looked at him directly then, without the protective mask she had worn since setting foot in Fortunestone Hall. She let him see what was beneath. The exhaustion, the fear, the stubborn determination to protect four young women who had become the reason she continued to endure.
“I am all they have,” she said quietly. “I know I have failed to change their circumstances. But I am the only person in this house who cares whether they are happy or safe. And I am terrified—” Her voice cracked, and she caught it, clenching her jaw until the tremor subsided. “I am terrified that something will happen, something I cannot control, and I will no longer be in a position to care for them.”
She did not say what that something was. She could not. Not yet. Her secret was still guarded with a ferocity born of the certain knowledge that its discovery would change everything. For better or for ruin, she could not say.
Alistair studied her for a long time. The fire popped in the grate, and somewhere beyond the walls, the old house creaked and settled, as though it, too, were holding its breath.
His expression had softened during her account, not to pity, which she would have resented, but to the grim recognition of a man confronting a problem worse than he had calculated.
“Well,” he said at last, and the single word carried no outrage, no hesitation. Only purpose. “I suppose we shall need new servants.”
Of all the responses Josephine had prepared herself for, this had not been among them. She had expected dismissal, skepticism, a patronizing assurance that he would see to things from a safe distance in Irwyn. The sheer practicality of it was so unexpected that she felt the prickle of tears behind her eyes and had to look away, fixing her gaze on the faded globe in the corner until the sting subsided.
“You … you would replace them?”
