“The duke has obtained a common license,” Josephine said. “The vicar?—”
“Licenses are a matter of law. I am speaking of propriety.” The walking stick tapped once against the carpet, a deliberate sound, the way one might strike a gavel. “A Duchess of Oxley is expected to maintain full mourning for twelve months. Six months in first mourning. Full black, no ornamentation, no entertainments, no society. Six months in second mourning before the introduction of half-colors. This is not a matter of personal preference. This is the standard to which this family has held for generations.”
“I am aware of the convention.”
“Aware.” The dowager’s tone suggested that awareness, without the corresponding action, was its own variety of moral failure. “Jerome deserved better than a wife who consigns him to history before the season has changed.”
Josephine looked at the woman across the low table and felt the exhaustion of being required to perform indefinitely for a demanding audience that will never be satisfied.
She thought, with involuntary clarity, of Alistair. The way he had looked at the dowager and declined to be impressed by her, the bone-deep ease of a man who had not spent thirteen months learning to be afraid. She was not Alistair. She knew what she carried and could not afford to spend courage she might urgently need for something else.
“I have every respect for convention,” she said carefully. “But the circumstances of the household are such that certain arrangements cannot be deferred.”
“The circumstances,” the dowager repeated. “You mean his commercial relatives.”
“I mean the welfare of the family.”
“The welfare of—” A flicker crossed the pale eyes, not warmth, never warmth, but something sharper. The recognition of an implication being withheld. The old woman was shrewd, whatever else she was, and she had been reading rooms and people since before Josephine was born. “You are very anxious to be married, for a woman whose husband is two months dead.”
The room contracted slightly. Josephine held her breath in a way she hoped was invisible.
“It is a practical matter,” she said. “The duke is of the same opinion.”
“The duke.” The dowager said it the way she said everything connected to Alistair, as though the title were a garment that fit him poorly and she was not going to pretend otherwise out of politeness. “The duke is a man who measures sentiment by the yard. You will forgive me if I place a modest value on his opinion in matters of family honor.”
Josephine stood.
It was not a dramatic gesture, she was constitutionally unsuited to dramatic gestures, but it was composed, and the dowager’s eyes tracked the movement with the attentiveness of a lifetime spent cataloging what other people’s bodies did when their mouths were saying something else.
“I thank you for your counsel,” Josephine said, which was the closest she could currently bring herself to honesty without consequence. “The arrangements will proceed as planned.”
She left the room before the walking stick could be deployed again.
The wedding was soon. Alistair would return. The vicar would marry them. These were facts, not wishes, she assured herself.
And yet …
And yet the arithmetic assembled itself without permission. Two months since Jerome. Six months of expected full mourning, minimum. A secret currently invisible that would become visible to everyone in a matter of weeks. Alistair in Irwyn with a flooded mill and a delayed contract and a dozen competing claims on his attention, every one of them more urgent than a Sunday wedding that could, technically, be moved.
She stopped to stare out the window as her thoughts swirled.
The rain did not relent.
CHAPTER 13
The clock on the landing struck three as Alistair climbed the last flight of stairs.
He counted the strokes without meaning to, the way a man counts without will when every other faculty has been stripped to its bones. He had been on his feet for twenty-two hours. His boots were ruined, his coat was ruined, and there was a deep, specific ache behind his right shoulder that he suspected would require a week to unknot, which was a week he did not have.
The candle he carried threw unsteady light across the paneled walls, the shadows lurching as his arm wavered with exhaustion. Fortunestone Hall at this hour was its most honest self, none of the careful performance of a household maintaining appearances under the eye of its new duke. It was simply an old house, thick-walled and indifferent, exhaling the chill of a building that had stood through enough centuries to be unimpressed by any single one of its inhabitants.
The ride back from Irwyn had taken longer than it should have, the road through the valley made treacherous by several days of rain and the overflow from the western bank. The gelding had picked his way with the sullen care of an animalworked past reasonable request. Alistair had not argued. He had sat in the saddle with his hands loose on the reins and his mind running its inventory, the one that did not stop regardless of the hour.
The mill was secured. That was the fixed point around which the rest of the damage arranged itself. The machinery was intact. The looms were intact. The engine house was intact. The difference between a setback and a catastrophe.
The insurance assessors would come from Leeds when they came, which would be in their own time, and they would ask a great many questions and eventually offer a figure that would require negotiation. In the meantime, Alistair would cover the costs. Replacement coal and wool sourced from Bentley’s in Bradford at a premium he found offensive. Emergency repairs to the roof. Wages for the workers during the shutdown, because he had not built a workforce of three hundred people by abandoning them when the arithmetic turned inconvenient.
He had the capital. He had always been careful to have the capital. He had run the mill for fifteen years on the principle that a man without a reserve was a man at the mercy of events. He would not need to call on the Hollingford payment early. He would absorb the loss and rebuild, which was uncomfortable and expensive and entirely manageable.
