Clara’s hands flew to her mouth. For a moment, she simply stared, her hazel eyes enormous in her fine-boned face, and then the tears came. Not the soundless, measured weeping that both women had perfected in a year of living beneath the dowager’s notice, but great, heaving sobs that crumpled her slight form entirely. Her knees seemed to weaken, and she sank into the chair she had vacated, pressing her hands against her face while her shoulders shook with the force of release.
“Clara.” Josephine crossed the room swiftly and knelt beside her, pulling a handkerchief from her sleeve and pressing it into the maid’s trembling fingers. “Clara, it is good news. Take this.”
“I know.” The words came muffled through the linen. “I know it is good news. Forgive me. I just—” She drew a ragged breath and lowered the handkerchief, her lashes dark and wet, her cheeks blotched with color. “We have been holding on for so long, Your Grace. So very long. And I was so afraid that he would refuse, or that he would leave and never return, or that the old woman would discover …” The unfinished sentence hung between them like smoke.
Josephine remained on her knees, holding Clara’s hand, and let the moment settle around them. They had shared so much. So many mornings when they had looked at each other across the bedchamber and understood without words that another day of endurance lay ahead.
“He is going to protect us,” Josephine said. “He gave his word, and I believe him.”
Clara dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief, her breathing slowly settling. “You believe him? Truly?”
“I do.” The certainty in her own voice surprised her. “He is not like Jerome, Clara. He is not like any man I have known.” She paused, her gaze drifting to the rain-streaked window. She had not talked about her marriage before, not even to Clara, but the proposal made her feel relieved. The answer to their prayers. And the promise of a much better future than her past.
“Jerome visited my bed once a month as though it were an entry in his diary. He arrived after the household retired, performed what he considered his duty, and departed without a word. He did not speak to me between those visits, and he did not permit me to leave the estate grounds because he could not abide the thought of his wife being seen by other men.”
She heard the flatness in her own voice, the distance she maintained from the memories, as though she were describing something that had happened to another woman in another life, and was faintly astonished at how the events of the dayhad loosened her tongue. She had perfected this detachment during her marriage, this ability to step outside herself and observe her own suffering with a clinical remove. It was how she had survived, but her ability to feel something, anything, was apparently returning.
“Thirteen months,” she continued quietly. “Thirteen months forbidden from leaving this estate. Eleven months of silence from a husband who made it clear that my purpose was to produce an heir and otherwise remain invisible. He told me I was cold. That a warmer woman would have given him a son by now.” Her mouth twisted at the irony. “And now I carry his child, conceived in the final months of his life, and the only man who has ever made me feel anything at all is the nephew he never acknowledged.”
Clara’s tears had quieted. She sat quiet still, her reddened eyes fixed on Josephine with an expression of fierce, protective tenderness. “His Grace is nothing like him.”
“No.” Josephine squeezed her hand. “He is not. He sees me. He listens when I speak, and then he considers what I have said and adjusts his course. He argued with me this very afternoon and then asked for my consent instead of demanding my compliance.” She shook her head, marveling at it. “I have never encountered such a man.”
“Then perhaps we might actually survive this,” Clara whispered.
“More than survive.” Josephine rose from her knees, pressing a hand against the small of her back where the familiar ache of pregnancy had taken up permanent residence. “The girls will have their coming-out. Seraphina and Arabella will have a chance at proper matches. The dowager will lose her grip on this household. My mother and my sister will have somewhere to go when Papa’s health fails.” She drew a breath, feeling the weightof all those obligations settle across her shoulders, but lighter now because she was no longer carrying them alone. “And we …”
The familiar shadow gathered at the edge of her thoughts, the dark shape that lived in the space between what had happened in the past and what she hoped to become.
“… we might be able to embrace the future unscathed.”
The wordunscathedhovered in the air between them. Clara’s gaze sharpened, and in the look that passed between the two women lay everything they dared not speak aloud.
“When is the wedding?” Clara asked at last, her voice carefully even.
“Sunday. He is securing a license.”
Clara’s brows rose. “So soon?”
“His Grace must leave for London shortly after. The sooner we are wed, the sooner the dowager loses her power over us.” Josephine smoothed her skirts, a habitual gesture that she knew signaled Clara that she was gathering herself. “It will be quiet. No fanfare. But it will be legal, and that is what matters.”
Clara looked up at her from the chair, the handkerchief folded into a neat square in her lap. She found comfort in small, controllable tasks. Her expression trembled between hope and the old, ingrained caution that neither of them had yet learned to set aside.
“Then we had best alter one of your old gowns, Your Grace,” she said, and a ghost of her former spirit flickered in her reddened eyes. “You cannot marry a duke in mourning black.”
A laugh escaped Josephine, startled and warm and dangerously close to the tears she had been holding at bay since Alistair’s mouth had found hers in the gray light of the library. A gown. Something other than the black bombazine she had worn like armor since Jerome’s death, day after relentless day, until the color had seeped into her very mood and she had forgotten what it felt like to wear anything else.
“I suppose not,” she said. “Though I am certain the dowager will have rather a lot to say about that as well.”
“The dowager,” Clara said, and the belief that entered her voice now was not manufactured but earned, built from the first tentative foundation of safety, “can say whatever she pleases. She is not the only duchess in this house.”
The rain fell on, tireless and gray, streaming down the windows of the bedchamber in rivulets that caught the weak afternoon light and scattered it into fragments. Beyond the glass, the gorge was hidden in mist and cloud, that terrible precipice where Jerome had met his end.
CHAPTER 10
The rain had not relented, but Alistair could no longer abide the walls.
He had spent the morning reviewing Beckwith’s drainage estimates, the afternoon writing letters to his solicitor in Leeds, and the hours between pacing the west library like a man measuring the dimensions of his own cage. The fire had burned low and the gray light through the windows had thickened to the color of pewter, and still the rain fell, drumming its ceaseless rhythm against the glass until the sound became indistinguishable from the silence it replaced.
