Genevieve and Juliet stood together, as they always stood, the small distance between them negligible in any actual sense. Genevieve’s face was working hard at aplomb and not quite achieving it. Juliet, who processed the world more quietly than her twin, had gone very still in the way she did when she was frightened and did not wish to show it. They both looked younger than they were, standing on those steps in the gray morning, which was perhaps because on their faces were the expressions of disappointed children and not the carefully managed faces they had learned to present to the world inside this house.
“Will you write?” Genevieve asked.
“Every week,” Josephine said. “And you will write back and tell me everything, and I will read every word.”
Juliet reached out and touched her sleeve very briefly, the lightest possible contact, the gesture of a child who had learnednot to reach for things and was reaching anyway. Josephine caught her hand before she could withdraw it and held it for a moment.
“Be brave,” she said. She knew it was insufficient. It was also all she had.
She looked at them, these four girls who had not asked for any of the circumstances of their lives and had endured them with a resilience that she found, even now, astonishing. She thought about what the hall had been when she arrived a year ago, the silence of it, the way the girls moved through its rooms like people trying not to be noticed in their own home, the absence of anything that might have been called warmth or ease or simple ordinary comfort. She thought about what six days of Alistair Fraser-Oxley had done to that atmosphere. The way he had sat at the dinner table and asked them questions and listened to the answers. The way he had stood in the drawing room and told the dowager, in a voice that needed no elevation to carry authority, how things were going to be. The way Genevieve had laughed at something he said two days ago with the unstudied spontaneity of a girl who had temporarily forgotten to be careful.
Eight days. She had not thought it possible to grieve something that had lasted only eight days, and yet here she was, grieving it on the front steps in the cold.
She released Juliet’s hand, straightened her gloves, and turned to find Clara waiting at the foot of the steps beside the carriage.
There had been no time to prepare her properly. The morning had moved too fast. The dowager’s summons, the drawing room, the shawl laid across Margaret’s lap like a sentence already passed, the carriage waiting in the yard as though it had been arranged while Alistair was still leaving, which it almost certainly had. Josephine had gone to Claradirectly afterward with perhaps twenty minutes before she needed to be downstairs, and that had been enough time to say the essential things and not nearly enough time for anything else. She had watched Clara absorb the news, with the white-faced stillness of receiving a blow she had not seen coming, and then pull herself upright and begin, wordlessly, to pack.
Josephine whispered the most essential thing again now, quietly, for the last time. “Not a word about that night. Whatever is asked, whatever is implied. You know nothing.”
“My lady.” Clara’s voice was very steady, which told Josephine exactly how much effort the steadiness was costing her. “I know what you have asked, and I will do it. But I need you to tell me that you are going to be all right. You and the—” She stopped. Glanced at the girls on the steps, still within earshot. “You and … yours.”
“We are going to be perfectly well,” Josephine said. “I am going to my father’s house, which is a warm and comfortable house, and I am going to write to His Grace and explain that circumstances have changed and he needs to return from London rather sooner than planned.”
Clara looked at her with the expression that meant she understood more than was being said and was choosing, for both their sakes, not to say it. “And if he cannot return quickly enough.”
“Then I will manage until he can.” She kept her voice level. “I have been managing for a long time, Clara. I am not going to stop now.”
She could see that it was not adequate, that Clara wanted something more solid than this, some guarantee that the ground was not going to give way. But guarantees were not available, and Clara, who had been at her side learning the difference between what was true and what was merely comforting, would not have believed one if she had offered it.
What she could offer was that she was going to meet whatever was asked of her. Whatever the mechanics required, whatever had to be navigated or waited out or endured, she was going to meet it. She had done it before. She would do it again. She was four months along and in full possession of her faculties, and she had, for the first time in as long as she could remember, a person somewhere in the world who knew the truth of her situation and had given his word to stand at her side.
She was going to hold on to that. It was not much, but it was enough.
“Take care of them,” she said to Clara. “And take care of yourself. Do not let her make you small.” She held Clara’s gaze for a moment, putting into it everything that could not be said with four girls watching. “You are not small, Clara. You never have been.”
Clara’s expression broke, briefly and completely, and then reassembled itself with the speed of long practice. She nodded, pressed her quivering lips together, and stepped back.
Josephine turned to the carriage. The trunks were secured to the roof, two of them, with what she had arrived with. The coachman held the door. She placed her foot on the step.
She did not want to look back at the house. She had learned, a long time ago, that looking back was a luxury that cost more than it yielded, and she could not afford it today.
But she looked back.
The girls were on the steps in a row, Seraphina still straight-backed and clear-eyed, Arabella dignified and watchful beside her, the twins standing close together with their faces open and unhappy and very young. Clara stood slightly apart, her hands folded, her expression the one she wore when she was holding herself together by the narrowest margin.
Josephine raised her hand. A small gesture of reassurance.
Then she stepped into the carriage and the door closed behind her, and the coachman lifted the reins and the horses moved and Fortunestone Hall receded through the window, the towers diminishing against the gray sky, the avenue of elms passing in their bare rows. They drove through the gates and it all fell behind, and then there was only the estate road and the pale morning and the sound of wheels on wet earth.
She sat very still with her hands in her lap and her face turned toward the window, and she allowed herself, because there was no one to see it and no reason not to, to feel the full weight of what had just happened. All of it. The morning, the library, the drawing room, the dowager’s face, the shawl, the girls on the steps, Clara’s composure, the specific ache of a door closing on something she had, against all her better judgment, allowed herself to want.
She sat with it for no more than the time it took the carriage to reach the bottom of the hill, where the road from the hall met the Irwyn road and the church spire was just visible through the trees.
Then she straightened in her seat, opened the small traveling case on the bench beside her, and took out a quill and ink.
She had a letter to write.
CHAPTER 17
