She opened her mouth. Closed it. Pressed her hands flat against her lap in the gesture she made when she was arriving at a decision.
“Not here,” she said at last.
He stepped back from the door and looked up at the coachman. “Step down.”
“Alistair.” Her voice came through the door with the note he recognized, the one that meant she was deciding whether to argue. “What are you doing?”
He closed the carriage door.
Then he instructed the coachman to ride the cob back to Fortunestone Hall before climbing up to the driver’s box himself, where he took up the leads. He did not explain himself. She would understand when they arrived at the vicarage, and he intended to ensure they arrived before she had time to construct a sufficient argument against it. They needed to reach it while services were still happening.
He drove without hurrying. The anger had finished sharpening and had become more useful in the cold, focused resolve of having identified the problem, assessed the variables, and arrived at the only acceptable course of action. Margaret Oxley had spent the morning very effectively. She had timed it well and executed it with the ruthlessness of someone whose ill intent never wavered. The old shrew had not, however, accounted for a horse at the White Hare and a road that ran in both directions.
The Irwyn spire was visible through the pale morning cloud ahead, and he kept his eyes on it and did not look back at the gates of Fortunestone Hall receding behind him and did not think about what was being left behind in that house or what it would require to retrieve it.
One step at a time. First Irwyn. Then the vicar. Then everything else.
* * *
She was notcertain what she had expected. She had spent a great deal of the morning not permitting herself to expect anything, on the reasonable grounds that the morning had already taken everything she had offered it and returned nothing. Then the carriage had stopped. The door had opened. Alistair Fraser-Oxley had been standing on the other side of it. Something in her chest had simply given way.
She had not wept in front of him before. She had not wept in front of anyone in a very long time, but oh how she had wanted to when she had seen his face.
She watched Irwyn approach through the window and felt the conflict of his return settle over her like two weathers at once. He was here. The relief of it was so immediate and so physical that it frightened her. She was conscious, even as she felt it, that she had no right to it. Hundreds of people in Irwyn had more claim on him than she did. The mill was real. The livelihood of every worker who drew wages from Fraser & Oxley was real, and she was not the kind of woman who placed her own difficulty above the difficulties of people who had no one else to advocate for them. She had made that accounting on the estate road and accepted it, and it had been the correct accounting, and now he was here anyway and she did not know what to do with the fact that she was glad. Not because of everyone who would beaffected, or the girls, or Clara, or even the babe in her womb. She had simply been … glad.
She was not going to examine that too closely. There was a conversation coming that she had never had with anyone, not aloud, not in any form that gave it a shape outside her own memory, and she needed whatever fortitude she still possessed to get through it.
When the carriage slowed, she recognized the church, the tall stone building behind its garden wall at the edge of the high street, the one she had driven past with the girls on the shopping trip that now felt like a memory from another woman’s life. She heard Alistair’s footsteps on the stone path and then silence.
She sat in the carriage and looked at her hands and thought about that January evening. The bench near the cliff’s edge. The fading winter light, pale and flat across the moor. She and Clara had gone out for air, as they sometimes did when the house felt too close, and Clara had gone back inside to fetch tea against the cold. Josephine thought about how ordinary it had all been, right up until it was not.
Alistair returned after a quarter of an hour and opened the carriage door. His expression told her before he spoke.
“The vicar will marry us,” he said. “Now. In the church.”
The warmth that moved through her at the words was immediate and involuntary. The cold that followed was equally so. She had been wanting this, and now it was being offered back to her and she could not take it, and the distance between wanting something and being unable to accept it was one of the more bitterly cruel varieties of suffering she had encountered.
“I cannot,” she said.
His gaze did not waver. “Tell me what she said.”
Tell him. All of it.
She was afraid. She understood that clearly in this moment in a way she had not permitted herself to understand it before.Not afraid of his judgment, though that fear was present too, a low hum beneath the other one. But she was afraid of what happened when the last private room in herself was opened and examined.
“The dowager has my shawl,” she said. “A pale blue one. I had not thought of it since January. I did not know it was missing.” She looked at her hands. “It was found beneath Jerome’s body at the base of the cliff. By one of the groundsmen, a man in her employ who brought it to her rather than the magistrate.” She paused and glanced up at him. “She has been holding it since, deciding what to do with it.”
His jaw firmed. “And this morning she decided.”
“This morning, she decided.” She kept her voice even. “She told me to leave the estate or she would present the shawl to the magistrate and ask him what he made of it. She would like to know, she said, what happens to a woman who kills a duke.”
He was very quiet. The kind of quiet that had weight in it. “And did she offer her own conclusions on the matter?”
“She had a carriage waiting in the yard.”
“God damn her.” He said it low and very sharp, and then was silent for a moment.
Outside, a cart passed on the high street, its wheels loud on the cobblestones, and a pair of women talking outside the baker’s shop fell silent as it went by and then resumed.
