“I should leave you to your preparations,” she said. “But might I suggest you and Lord Franklin break your fast before you go? The roads will not improve because you leave hungry.”
She turned and walked toward the door.
“Josephine.”
His voice stopped her before she reached it. She turned.
“I am sorry,” he said. “For the timing. I would not choose it.”
She looked at him across the library, the candles casting little light, the gray morning filling the tall windows behind him. He meant it. She could see that he meant it, and she could see beneath it that he understood that sorry was not sufficient and he was saying it anyway because it was the only thing he had. Which was, she thought, more than Jerome would have bothered to offer.
It did not make it easier. It made it, in some respects, harder. Indifference was simpler to bear than genuine regret.
“I know,” she said.
She went out, and the door closed quietly behind her.
CHAPTER 15
Clara was sitting in the same chair, her hands folded in her lap, her face arranged with careful stillness, suggesting she had already drawn her conclusions from the sounds of the morning and was waiting only for confirmation.
Josephine closed the door and sat across from her.
“He has gone,” Clara said. Not a question.
“He has gone,” Josephine said.
The silence that followed was different from the silences they had shared in this room before. Those had been the silences of those who understood each other well enough not to require words. This one had weight to it, a specific gravity that pressed against the walls of the small room and made the air feel close.
“How long?” Clara asked.
“He could not say with certainty. A week. Perhaps ten days.”
Clara looked at her hands. She did not attempt to conceal her expression. There were limits to what a person could conceal before the concealment itself became its own kind of statement. “And in ten days,” she said quietly, “anything could happen.”
“Yes.” There was no point in softening it. “But he gave his word, and I believe he intends to keep it. That is what we have, and we will manage on it.”
Josephine said it with the dignity she had assembled on the walk back from the library, piece by piece, under pressure, not perfectly and not without cost, but sufficiently. She was aware that it was not her most convincing performance. She was also aware that Clara, who had dressed her and mended for her and watched her navigate a marriage that had required daily acts of quiet endurance, was not deceived by it.
Clara said nothing. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears, and she was doing the work of keeping them at bay with the effortful containment of understanding that falling apart was a luxury neither of them could presently afford.
“Clara.” Josephine waited until the maid looked at her. “We have survived a great deal in this house. We will survive a delayed wedding.” She reached across and took her hands, stilling their restless knotting. “He is coming back. And when he does, we will have what we need. All of us.”
The silence between them had just begun to settle into something bearable when a knock came at the door.
It was one of the hall’s older maids, a woman of few words and with a face that gave nothing away, which were qualities the dowager selected for in her personal staff. She delivered her message without expression. Her Grace the dowager duchess requested the presence of the duchess in the family drawing room at her earliest convenience.
The phrasing, Josephine noted, was ‘her earliest convenience’. In Margaret Oxley’s vocabulary, that meantnow.
She looked at Clara, who had gone very still. “Stay here,” Josephine said. “I will not be long.”
She did not believe that. She could tell, from Clara’s fearful stillness, that Clara did not believe it either.
The family drawing room had been Margaret’s territory since long before Josephine had arrived at Fortunestone Hall. It smelled of old roses and the sort of cold that accumulatedin rooms that were heated as a matter of form rather than comfort. Margaret was in her chair by the fire. Her walking stick was propped against the arm. Her pale blue eyes tracked Josephine across the room with the patience of a woman who had been waiting, and was content to have waited, because she was confident in what was coming.
“Sit down,” the dowager said.
Josephine sat.
