The dowager said nothing.
Josephine walked to the door and out of it and pulled it closed behind her with quiet control. She would not give anyone in this house the satisfaction of hearing it slam.
The shawl.
She had not thought to account for it in the chaos of that night, the days afterward, the weeks of managing the story and the household and the girls and the grief she had not been permitted to feel and the relief she had not been permitted to feel and everything that had followed. She had not thought about the shawl.
She pushed off from the wall and went to find Clara.
She did not allow herself to think, on the walk back through the corridors, about Alistair. There were thoughts one could afford and thoughts one could not, and the thought of what might have been if the wedding had happened this morning, if she had been a Fraser-Oxley by law, if she had possessed the protection of his name, was a thought she could not afford. Nor could she afford to feel any sentiment about the man himself.
She would not think it. She was already thinking it.
She had needed one hour. One hour and a vicar two miles down the road and a man willing to ride that distance before breakfast. One hour, and the thing that was now dismantling her would have had no purchase.
She pushed the thought aside and kept walking.
* * *
The Great North Roadwas better than the valley road had been, which was the one thing about the morning that was proceeding as it should. The horses moved at a reasonable pace, the carriage springs absorbed the worst of the ruts with only moderate protest, and Franklin had fallen asleep within the first quarter hour. That was a proficiency Alistair envied in his brother, the capacity to sleep anywhere, in any condition, as a straightforward response to tiredness, without the intervention of a restless mind.
Alistair was watching the countryside.
The moors had given way to lower ground as they descended from the hills, the landscape flattening into the broad, pale green of early-spring fields, broken by stone walls and bare hedgerows and the occasional farm set back from the road at the end of a muddy track. It was not a beautiful landscape in the conventional sense. It was a working one, which he had always found more interesting.
He was not thinking about the landscape.
He had left Fortunestone Hall an hour ago and had been, since the moment the carriage turned out of the gates, engaged in a running argument with himself that he was losing on every front. The argument concerned Josephine, and the nature of what he was feeling, and the inadvisability of feeling it, and the complete irrelevance of its inadvisability given that he was feeling it regardless.
He had told himself, when he proposed, that he was being prudent. He had laid it out with the same methodical logic he brought to business decisions. There were people in that house who required his protection. The simplest legal mechanismfor providing it was marriage. Josephine was the sensible and willing party, and the fact that he found her interesting and capable and unusually attractive was an advantage rather than a complication. He had been, he believed, clear-eyed about it.
He had been, he now understood, entirely wrong.
He was not clear-eyed. He had not been clear-eyed since approximately the second day at Fortunestone Hall, when she had stood her ground in the drawing room with the dowager’s walking stick striking the floor and with her face arranged in that unreadable expression, and he had understood that the woman before him was not managing the situation but surviving it. She had been surviving it for a year, and was going to go on surviving it by sheer force of will and in the absence of any alternative, and he knew that this was not passivity but courage of a specific and unglamorous kind. Alistair recognized it because he had exercised it himself, in years when the mill’s future was uncertain and his father was recently dead and the only thing between livelihoods and ruin was his own refusal to concede that ruin was possible.
He had perceived something in her. That was when the trouble had started.
Since then, it had gotten considerably worse. Making love to her had only strengthened his feelings, the sensation of her against him a constant pressure, a memory of true joy.
She had sat across his desk in the library this morning and asked if they might ride to Irwyn before he left, and he had watched her hold herself completely still while he considered it, and he had seen in that stillness exactly what the asking had cost her. Not the indignity of asking, because she was not a woman who spent much energy on dignity for its own sake, but the hope of it, the small and carefully maintained hope that he might say yes, and the preparation to put that hope away if he did not. He had watched her put it away. He had watched herrise and offer him breakfast with the solemn courtesy of one who gives what she can when she cannot give what she wants to give, and he had stood in the empty library afterward and been, for approximately four minutes, utterly lost.
He had then picked up his coat and gone to find Franklin, because the contract required London and London required leaving, and the only alternative was to lose something that three hundred people in Irwyn needed him not to lose.
He did not regret the decision. He would make it again. But he was discovering, somewhere on the road south of Irwyn, that knowing he had made the right decision and being at peace with it were not the same experience, and that the distance between them was precisely the width of the expression on Josephine’s face when he had said there was no time.
He had not wanted to leave her. He had not known, until the moment the carriage pulled away and he felt the physical pull of it, how much he had not wanted to leave her. He had always been a man who left things without difficulty. But he had looked back at the gates of Fortunestone Hall.
There had been nothing to see except the gates and the avenue of elms and the gray towers receding against the pale sky. But he had looked.
Franklin shifted in his sleep, resettling his shoulder against the carriage wall, and Alistair returned his attention to the window. The fields continued in their orderly sequence. A farmhand was working a stile at the edge of a far pasture, his coat dark against the pale grass. A flock of rooks lifted from a stand of ash trees and distributed themselves across the sky.
He was in love with her. He might as well acknowledge it, since it was evidently not going to leave him alone until he did. He was in love with a woman he had known for less than a week, which was not a situation he had ever anticipated.
He wanted to give her things. Not the things he was already obligated to provide. Not the name, the legal protection, the household security. Nay, the other things, the things that were not in any agreement and could not be arranged by any solicitor. He wanted to give her a morning in which she did not have to manage anything. He wanted to give her the conversation they had almost had, several times, in the library and in the dark hour before dawn, the one where both of them said the actual thing rather than the manageable approximation of it. He wanted to be worth the trust she was extending to him at considerable personal cost, and to do it so that she could see and not merely infer.
He was also on the road to London with a contract to save and a flooded mill to explain and a brother asleep against the carriage wall, and none of those desires were immediately actionable.
He thought about Fortunestone Hall without him in it. The dowager in her rooms, marshaling her resources. The disappointed girls trying to read and failing. And Josephine, who would take the household in hand because that was what she did, who would stand against whatever Margaret contrived to make difficult, who would do it all with the competence and the grace that had made him, from the very beginning, deeply enamored.
