“I understand,” Margaret said, “that my grandson has departed for London.”
“On a matter of urgent business, yes.”
“Urgent business.” The old woman repeated the phrase with the tone she reserved for things she found beneath contempt. “His mill, I presume.”
“An important client. It is a significant —”
“I am not interested in his clients.” Margaret’s voice was thin and cutting, each word placed with the care of someone laying stones. “What interests me is that today was to have been your wedding day, and the man who was to marry you has instead ridden to London before breakfast.” She paused. “I find that illuminating.”
“He will return.”
“Perhaps.” The old woman’s gaze did not waver. “Or perhaps you will discover, as I discovered long ago, that men who belong to the world of trade belong to it entirely. The mill will always require his attention. The contracts will always be urgent. The negotiations will always be just a few days more.” She settled her hands over the head of her walking stick with the assurance of one making a point without needing to state it. “My grandson is not a duke, my dear. He is a mill owner who has been handed a title he neither earned nor wanted, and it will become apparent, sooner or later, to everyone including himself, that the two things cannot coexist.”
“You are mistaken,” Josephine said carefully.
“Am I?” The words landed with flat certainty that did not require confirmation. “He has proposed marriage to a woman he has known for less than a week and then abandoned her on the morning of the wedding for those London merchants.” The thin mouth curved very slightly. “I am many things, but I am not mistaken about men. I have been observing them for sixty years.”
Josephine kept her face still. She was aware, as a woman choosing her ground cautiously, that this conversation had a direction and that Margaret was steering it with confidence. She knew where it was going and was in no hurry to arrive.
“I did not come here to discuss His Grace’s business interests,” Josephine said. “If that is all you wished to say?—”
“It is not all I wished to say.”
The room was very quiet. Outside the window, the gray morning continued its indifferent business, the lawns still wet from the week’s rain, the elms standing in their bare rows along the avenue.
“I have been considering,” the dowager said, “a matter that has occupied me for some months. Since the night of my son’s death, in fact.” She reached beside her chair and lifted something from the small table there, setting it in her lap with an unhurried attitude as if she had rehearsed this moment. “I have been uncertain how to proceed. The implications for the family, for the title, for the girls, are not inconsiderable. A scandal of this nature would follow them for years.”
Josephine looked at what was in the old woman’s lap.
The shawl was pale blue wool, fine weave, the kind of thing a woman threw over her shoulders on a cold evening when she stepped outside. She had not seen it since January. She had assumed it lost.
She understood, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, everything.
Her hands were very still in her lap. She was grateful for the practice that made stillness possible, that had trained her body not to betray what was happening behind her face, because what was happening there was the cold-handed terror of watching the walls close in from a direction she had not anticipated.
“It was found,” the dowager said, “beneath my son’s body at the base of the cliff. By one of the groundsmen, the morning after. A man in my employ, whose discretion I have been able to rely upon.” She smoothed the fabric across her knees with one hand, a gesture so measured it was almost gentle. “He brought it to me rather than to the magistrate, because he understood, as servants of long standing generally do, that certain things are better managed within the household.”
The silence stretched. Josephine did not fill it. She had learned that silence was sometimes the only form of defense available, and that the impulse to speak, to explain, to offer the truth before it was demanded, was a trap that caught women who believed that honesty was a form of protection. It was not. It was a form of exposure.
“I want you gone from this house,” the dowager said. The pleasantries, such as they had been, were finished. Her voice had shed its conversational quality entirely, and what remained was the voice she used when she was issuing instructions she expected to be followed. “There is a carriage waiting in the yard. You will pack what is necessary, and you will go to your father’s house in Hertfordshire. This morning.”
“And if I do not?”
“Then I will send for the magistrate and present him with this.” She lifted the shawl slightly, then set it back in her lap. “And I will ask him if he knows what it means for a woman to have been present at the edge of the cliff on the night herhusband died. And I will allow him to draw his own conclusions, which in my experience magistrates are very capable of drawing, not least when the woman in question is shortly to be married to the man who stands to benefit most from that death.” The pale eyes held hers. “Do you know what happens to a woman who kills a duke?”
Josephine said nothing. She looked at the shawl instead, and she looked at the woman holding it. She thought about Clara, who was sitting in the dressing room upstairs waiting for her to return. She thought about Seraphina and Arabella and the twins, who had survived everything this house had done to them on the strength of the understanding that there was someone in it who would not allow things to get worse. She thought about the child she was carrying. She thought about Alistair, somewhere on the York road, and felt an ache in her chest that she did not have time for and could not quite suppress. There were more pressing things to consider.
The magistrate. The shawl. The groundsman. The question of what a woman was doing at the cliff on the night her husband died. The truth of that night was not simple, it had never been simple, but laid before a magistrate by a woman of Margaret Oxley’s standing, with physical evidence and a witness prepared to testify, it would not be received as the complicated, terrible thing it actually was. It would be received as the simplest possible version of itself.
She could not protect Clara from that. She could not protect the girls from that. She could not protect the child she was carrying from that.
“I will need an hour,” she said. “To pack and to make arrangements.”
Something moved through the dowager’s expression. Not satisfaction, quite. Something older and more tired than satisfaction. “You will have until noon,” she said.
Josephine rose. She kept her hands at her sides and her spine very straight, and she looked at the old woman for a long moment before she spoke.
“Whatever you believe about that night,” she said, “the girls did not ask for what was done to them in this house. Seraphina and Arabella and the twins. Whatever you intend to do with this, I ask that you remember that.”
