Clara’s hands stilled. In the candlelight, her wide eyes were very bright, and Josephine recognized the look. She had seen it in those first terrible days after Jerome’s death, that expression of a woman holding herself together by an act of will she was not sure she could sustain.
“The wedding,” Clara said. The words came out with a careful restraint that made them heavier. “Do you think … will it still?—”
“Yes.” Josephine said it with more certainty than she currently possessed, which was itself a kind of gift she knew how to give. “Yes, Clara. Nothing has changed. His Grace is tired. The roads from Irwyn were brutal, but he will be himself by morning, and the wedding will proceed as arranged.”
Clara exhaled. Not quite a sob, but adjacent to it, quickly suppressed.
“Come here,” Josephine said, and when Clara sat beside her on the edge of the bed, she took the girl’s cold hands between her own. She felt, not for the first time, the absurdity of the position. A duchess of twenty-five comforting a woman of twenty-eight in the small hours, two people whose respective vulnerabilities had fused them into an unlikely alliance.
“Listen to me,” Josephine said. “Whatever happens. Whatever is said, or discovered, or—” She chose her words with care, each one weighed before it was allowed out. “Whatever may arise regarding events that preceded my husband’s death. I need you to hear me, Clara, and believe me. You will not be named. Not by me. Not in any document, any statement, any version of events that I am in any position to influence. You werenever there. You saw nothing. You know nothing. Whatever burden there is to carry from that night, I carry it alone, and I am the one with the rank and the connections to weather it.”
Clara’s hands tightened around hers, her voice urgent but low, mindful that the walls had ears. “Your Grace, I would never … I don’t blame you, I’ve never once?—”
“I know you do not.” Josephine’s voice was placating. “And I know you would not. But that is not what I am trying to say. I am telling you that if anyone were ever to suggest otherwise … if the dowager, or Hobbs, or anyone else were to imply that the circumstances of that evening involved anyone in this household other than my late husband and his own considerable devotion to the bottle, you are to say nothing. You are to look blank and confused and refer them to me. That is all. Do you understand me?”
The silence between them was the kind that meansyeswithout requiring the word.
Jerome had drunk himself to the edge of that cliff. That was the truth she returned to when the nights became too long and her imagination too active. He had been drinking since noon, which was not unusual. He had quarreled with one of the stable-men and dismissed him on the spot, which was not unusual. He had made remarks at supper that were not fit for repetition and had then taken the bottle with him when he left the table. None of this had been unusual. Jerome’s singular path of destruction had been so well-trodden that it had its own geography, its own seasons, its own predictable progression from charm to cruelty to the oblivion he chased with such reliable, exhausting dedication.
He had walked too close to the cliff edge in the dark. He had been well-documented in his habits. His own boots had testified to where he had gone.
It was the truth. It was enough.
“The wedding will happen,” Josephine said again, releasing Clara’s hands and rising. “And when it does, your position here is secure. Not merely tolerated at the dowager’s whim, not subject to whatever Hobbs chooses to think, but genuinely, legally secure. Alistair has already indicated that the household arrangements are to be revised. You will be properly employed, properly compensated, and the only person in this house with the authority to dismiss you will be me.”
Clara looked at her with an expression that Josephine could not name. Something between gratitude and grief and something more complicated still—the look of a woman who has been conditioned to expect so little that the offer of basic security feels like an impossible extravagance.
“Get some sleep,” Josephine said gently. “Both of us need it.”
After Clara had gone, Josephine sat alone in the gray pre-dawn stillness of her room, looking at nothing specific. She thought about Alistair. She thought about his hand open on the pillow. She thought about Jerome’s absences, the days of hollow silence after he had ridden out, returning smelling of things she had learned not to identify too specifically, offering no explanation and expecting none to be required, because she was his wife, which meant she was his property, and property did not interrogate its owner.
She thought about what it meant that she was frightened now. Not of cruelty or absence or humiliation, but of loss. Genuine loss. The possibility that something she had barely allowed herself to want might be taken before she had finished understanding that she wanted it. She could tell herself that Alistair represented security, but the truth was more complicated than that, and her heart was far more engaged than she wished to admit.
It was, she supposed, an improvement of sorts. To be afraid of losing something good was at least an acknowledgment that something good existed.
She pulled the coverlet around herself and watched the window as the darkness continued to lighten.
Soon. She would be wed soon and then she would have the foothold she needed to take care of everyone in this household and her own. Because Alistair was a good man who took care of his people.
CHAPTER 14
The knock came around seven on Sunday.
Alistair was at the library desk, working through his preliminary notes on the flood damage by the light of two candles. He had been at it since six. The mill’s revised production schedule, a letter to Beckwith about the drainage work that could no longer be deferred, the details for the Hollingford order that needed to leave before the week was out. The list had been longer than he liked and shorter than he feared, and he had been making reasonable progress until the knock interrupted him.
The footman who entered was one of the senior ones, a man whose tenure had survived two changes of duke and showed no signs of strain. He stopped at a formal distance from the desk. “Lord Franklin has arrived, Your Grace. He is asking for you.”
Alistair set down his quill. He glanced at the clock on the mantel, noted the hour, and looked back at the footman.
“At this time?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
Franklin did not ride through the night for convenience.
“Bring him here,” Alistair said. “And have someone see to his horse.”
The footman withdrew. Alistair set his papers aside, and waited.
