He is tired. Men tire. It does not mean anything.
But it did mean something, and some stubborn, sleepless part of her refused to pretend otherwise.
The wedding was soon.
Soon she would enjoy the legal safety of Alistair’s name, his protection, the transformation of her situation from one of desperate precariousness to something resembling permanence. Alistair would stand between her unborn child and the dowager’s glacial, relentless reach.
She had told herself, in the privacy of her own mind where she permitted herself honesty she could not afford elsewhere, that she did not need Alistair to love her. She needed him tolive.She needed him to remain standing, remain vigorous, remain the sort of man who bent a room to his will. She needed the version of him that made her feel, for the first time in years, that she was not entirely alone in managing the slow catastrophe of her life.
She needed himwell.
I need the wedding to take place.
The thought arrived with the soft, devastating persistence of water finding stone, and she could not stop it seeping through.
She sat up.
The room was cold. She had not truly noticed until this moment, when the warmth of his body was no longer behind her and the air came at her all at once. The candle on the mantel was nearly spent. Through the heavy curtains, she could see nothing, but the sensation of the darkness had shifted while she was not attending to it. Not fully night anymore. Something between, that uncertain gray hour before the servants began to stir.
She had to go. She could not be found here. For all the understanding she and Alistair had come to, for all that their situation was unprecedented, their intimacy born of crisis and deepening into something she had no adequate vocabulary for. The proprieties of the house still existed, and the people who enforced them were rising soon. Hobbs moved through Fortunestone before six, that creeping, starch-scented figure with his unspoken indictments and his dull-coin eyes. He reported to the dowager the way other men breathed … automatically, without conscience, as an extension of his essential nature.
If she were seen leaving Alistair’s rooms at dawn, whatever fragile diplomatic position she currently held would combust entirely. The dowager would eviscerate her with that unyielding judgment.
Josephine eased herself from the bed with the careful deliberateness of someone crossing ice. She found her dressing gown, pulled it around herself, and reached for the wool shawl she had worn over it. Then she stood for one unplanned moment, looking at him.
He slept on his side, one hand open against the pillow. His auburn hair had been disarranged; with a warmth she could not currently afford, she noted how it lay in the careless disorder that daylight and propriety would correct before anyone else saw him. His breathing was still even, still deep.
Get well, she thought, with a fierceness that surprised her.You are not permitted to be unwell. Not now. Not when I have just found reason to believe that things can be different.
She left.
The corridor outside Alistair’s rooms was dark. Not the comfortable dark of a room with embers and familiar furniture, but the operative dark of an old house that had been designed for grandeur, not navigation. All long stretches of flagstone and portrait-hung walls that absorbed the shadows and gave nothing back.
Josephine pressed herself along the wall and moved east.
She had counted the doors. Fourteen paces from his to the junction where the ducal wing met the older gallery, then a right turn past the tapestry of the fourth duke’s boar hunt, then down the servants’ back stair, not the formal staircase, which was visible from the entrance hall, and along the lower passage, through the morning room passage, and up again to the private corridor where her own rooms sat. Seven minutes, perhaps ten, if she was cautious.
She had reached the gallery junction and turned when she heard it … the acoustic signature of someone approaching from the servants’ corridor below. Not the tentative shuffle of early morning drowsiness, but the purposeful, heavy-heeled rhythmof a person already committed to a destination. A man, she thought. One of the footmen, most likely, beginning the grate-laying that preceded the household’s waking hour.
Josephine did not freeze. Freezing was for women who had not spent a year living at the mercy of another person’s moods. She moved, stepping sideways into the deep doorway recess of the old music room, pressing herself into the carved frame and drawing the shawl close around her as though she might persuade the shadow to absorb her entirely.
The footsteps grew louder. A flicker of lamplight preceded the figure around the corner and then, mercifully, turned away from her and continued east, down toward the long wing that housed the formal dining room. She waited. Counted thirty heartbeats. Listened to the silence refill itself.
Then she moved again.
By the time she reached her own door, she was cold through, her slippered feet aching from the chilly flagstones, her heart still conducting itself at slightly too rapid a tempo. She pressed the latch and slipped inside.
Clara was sitting in the chair beside the cold fireplace.
She had not been sleeping. The evidence was clear, the candle lit, her hair braided for the night, but her back straight with the alertness of maintaining a vigil, not dozing. She rose the moment Josephine entered, relief and anxiety running together across her face which she did not attempt to conceal.
“Your Grace.” Her voice was barely above a breath.
“Clara.” Josephine shut the door with careful silence and turned to face her. “You should have slept.”
“I could not.” Clara moved to her side, reaching for the shawl with practiced hands. The instinctive choreography of the lady’s maid, always oriented toward tending. “I kept thinking—” She stopped.
“I know what you kept thinking.” Josephine allowed her to take the shawl and settled herself on the edge of the bed with the exhaustion of pretending impassiveness for too long. “And I kept thinking it too. But there is nothing to be done about it at four in the morning, and fretting has never once changed the outcome of anything in the history of the world.”
