Assuring herself he was well, her thoughts returned to the night before, warming her cheeks and making her heart thump a little faster until she chastised herself to set such lasciviousness aside. It would not do to be caught blushing by her sharp-eyed stepdaughters.
She found Seraphina in the family drawing room, curled at one end of the settee with a volume of verse and the expression of a young woman who has recently discovered she is permitted to sit where she likes. Josephine had been noticing the changefor days now. The color in her stepdaughter’s cheeks, the quiet vitality of a person who had been kept too long in a small room and was only beginning to understand the width of the one she had just been let into. Not unlike a caged bird being set loose … in a bigger cage.
Josephine settled at the other end of the settee and accepted the cup that Seraphina poured without ceremony, having appointed herself keeper of the tea tray and taking the responsibility with a gravity that Josephine found both touching and slightly hilarious.
“He has gone to the mill,” Seraphina said. She was not asking.
“Before five this morning. There is flooding.”
Seraphina was quiet for a moment, moving the page of her book without reading it. “He will come back.”
“Of course he will.”
“I meant …” Seraphina set the book down and looked at her with the directness that was, Josephine had learned, her natural mode once she had been given sufficient reason to trust the person she was addressing. “I meant that hewillcome back. He is not the kind of man who leaves things unfinished.”
Josephine looked at her stepdaughter for a moment and felt the familiar, complicated warmth, love, and sorrow, and something adjacent to pride, for a young woman who had spent years learning to read character from behind a locked gate and had still managed to form accurate conclusions.
“No,” she agreed. “He is not.”
The rain pressed against the windows with the roaring insistence it had maintained for days, and they sat together in the quiet that had become, over the last week, a comfortable rather than a tense one, the silence of two people who had newfound faith in the future.
She found herself at the window without quite deciding to go there.
The moors had dissolved into a gray wash beyond the glass; the river below would be swollen and brown and moving with an urgency that mirrored her uneasiness. Beckwith had said the roads were passable. Beckwith had also said the flood was worsening, which suggested his definition of passable was fluid with every passing moment.
He rode out before breakfast. In this.
She was not worried about the mill. She was not … she was aware this was an irrational distinction, especially worried about the looms, or the coal stores, all of which were undeniably more important than the thing she was actually worried about, which was whether he had stopped somewhere to eat, and whether his coat was waterproof, and whether the road north of the estate had turned to mud in heavy rain.
These were not thoughts that were useful to have. She had known the man a few days, and he was certainly able to take care of himself.
She pressed her fingers to the cold glass and watched the gray, and did not move until the sound reached her from the corridor … the slow, distinct clack of a walking stick against uncarpeted stone.
Josephine turned in alarm in the same instant as Seraphina sprung to her feet. A year in this house had sharpened her hearing to that sound the way a hunted animal learned the specific crack of a branch. She caught Seraphina’s arm and propelled her quietly toward the door at the far end of the room, the one that gave onto the music room passage, pressing a finger to her lips. Seraphina went without a word, silent in her slippers, closing the door with the practiced care learned over years spent moving through her own home without being noticed.
Josephine turned back for the tea tray. She was reaching for the second cup, the evidence that required removing, when the door opened.
The dowager Duchess of Oxley entered the drawing room with the walking stick and the ramrod spine and the iron-gray hair arranged with a rigidity that suggested her maid had been at work on it since dawn. She surveyed the room with the pale blue eyes that had always struck Josephine as the color of winter ice over shallow water, beautiful but discouraging of contact.
Her gaze dropped immediately to the tea tray.
“Your Grace,” Josephine said and set her own cup down with a steadiness she did not entirely feel.
The dowager did not acknowledge the greeting. She crossed to her customary chair, the high-backed one nearest the fireplace, the position she had occupied in every room of this house for decades, and lowered herself into it with the particular authority of a woman who has never sat anywhere she did not intend to rule from.
“Two cups,” the dowager said.
“I have been enjoying some company this morning.”
“One does not require company to make unnecessary work for the servants.” The pale eyes moved to the window. “Seraphina, I presume. The child has been slinking about the house lately as though she believes herself entitled to be in it.”
Josephine said nothing. She had learned, across a year of these conversations, that engagement on this very terrain was a trap. Every response became a concession, every concession a precedent.
The dowager appeared to take her silence as an invitation. She settled more deeply into the chair. “You will,” she began, with the deliberate preamble of a judge announcing a finding, “have given some thought to the matter of mourning.”
Josephine kept her hands still in her lap.
“Jerome has been dead two months.” The dowager spoke his name the way she spoke most things, with ownership rather than grief, as though he had been a possession that had inconveniently ceased to function. “Two months. And we are to understand that you intend to remarry before his body is properly cold.”
