Josephine could seeclear to the front gates from the Widow’s Watch, a narrow turret room at the highest point of Fortunestone Hall’s east tower, where generations of Oxley wives had supposedly kept vigil for their husbands’ return from war.
She pressed her fingertips against the cold glass and watched the dark speck of a carriage emerge from the line of elms, trundling along the ruined avenue like a beetle navigating a trough. Her breath fogged the pane, and she wiped it clear with the heel of her hand, an indelicate gesture that would have earned a sharp remark from her mother-in-law had the old woman been present.
But the dowager duchess was in her apartments, as she was most mornings, attended by Hobbs and fortified by resentment, and Josephine had seized the rare liberty of climbing the tower stairs to the one place in this vast, suffocating house where she could breathe.
“He is here,” she said.
Behind her, Clara Trent set down the shawl she had been folding and crossed to the window with careful steps. Her lady’s maid moved through Fortunestone Hall the way a mousenavigated a house full of cats, and though she was eight-and-twenty years of age and possessed of a quiet beauty that painters would have adored, there was something in her wide hazel eyes that had not been young for a very long time.
“Two months,” Clara murmured, peering past Josephine’s shoulder at the approaching carriage. “Two months to travel two miles.”
“It was never the distance that kept him away.” Josephine’s voice was resolute, though her pulse was anything but. She had prepared for this morning. She had rehearsed what she would say, how she would stand, the exact degree of aplomb she would project, as though readying herself for an examination upon which every future hope depended.
Because it did.
So much hinged upon the character of the man in that carriage. More than Josephine could say aloud, even to Clara. She thought of the girls, her stepdaughters whom she had come to love as fiercely as if they were her own, and of the constricted lives they led within these walls. She thought of the promises she had made to herself when she first arrived at Fortunestone Hall and how few of them she had been able to keep.
If Alistair Fraser-Oxley proved to be half the man his reputation in Irwyn suggested, there was a slender chance that this household might finally know something other than fear.
If he proved to be anything like his uncle, there was none.
Please. Let him be different.
The carriage disappeared briefly behind a copse of ash trees, then emerged again, closer now, its outline sharpening against the gray March landscape. Through the rain-streaked window, Josephine could make out the figure of the driver, hunched against the drizzle.
“The vicar told me he has an excellent reputation,” Josephine offered, as much to reassure herself as Clara. “That he takes careof his people. That the mill workers speak well of him, which is not something one hears often of employers.”
She glanced back, noticing how Clara’s fingers found each other and knotted together at her waist, a new habit formed in recent weeks that was a reaction to this melancholy house. It was the gesture she made when she was frightened, which was often.
“What if he is like …” Clara trailed off, unable or unwilling to finish.
She did not need to. The question had haunted Josephine for weeks, ever since word had come that the new duke would finally visit. She knew almost nothing of Alistair Fraser-Oxley, beyond the vicar’s assessment and the scraps of talk she had overheard among the servants. They said he was a man of industry, direct in his manner, and not given to the idle preoccupations of the class he had just inherited. Whether that directness would extend to compassion, she could not yet say.
Josephine turned from the window and reached out to take hold of the other woman’s clasped hands, stilling their anxious twisting. She met the Clara’s gaze with the calm, unshakable dependability that she had learned to summon when she herself was shattering inside. It was the expression she wore when the walls of this ancient prison pressed too close, when the weight of the past threatened to buckle her knees.
“He will not be like Jerome,” she said. “No two men are alike, and everything I have heard suggests this one is cast from entirely different metal. But whoever he is, Clara, you can count on me. I will convince him to take the reins of Fortunestone Hall. I will make him see what is needed here. You have my word.”
Clara’s eyes glistened, but she blinked the moisture away with resignation from learning long ago that tears were a luxury this household did not afford. “And if he will not listen?”
Josephine squeezed her hands. “Then I shall be more … persuasive.”
A silence settled between them, filled only by the whisper of rain against the turret’s ancient stone and the distant, mournful cry of a curlew somewhere over the moors.
The room smelled of damp plaster and the faintest ghost of lavender from a long-forgotten pot in the corner. Through the pocked glass, the Yorkshire landscape stretched in muted greens and grays, beautiful in its bleakness and indifferent to the small dramas playing out within these walls.
Josephine released Clara’s hands and turned back to the window. The carriage was crossing the bridge now, its wheels clattering over the worn stone. Close enough that she could see the gleam of the horses’ damp flanks and the mud caking their hooves.
“Right,” Josephine said briskly. “Well? Will I do?”
Clara was already in motion, stepping forward to examine her mistress with the practiced eye of a lady’s maid who had learned to perform miracles with limited resources. She smoothed a crease from Josephine’s sleeve, tucked an errant strand of honey-blonde hair back into its modest arrangement of pins, and adjusted the fall of the black crepe fichu at her neck. The gown was in simple mourning black, as protocol demanded, but it was well-maintained and fit her slender figure with quiet elegance. A duchess ought to have had a dozen such gowns. Josephine had two, and Clara kept both in impeccable repair through sheer force of will and an expert needle.
“You look well,” Clara pronounced, though her tone suggested she wishedwellwere more emphatic. “Calm and composed. A duchess.”
“A dowager duchess,” Josephine corrected gently. “An important distinction. Especially to the other dowager duchess.”
Dark amusement flickered across Clara’s face. It was rare, and it was fleeting, but Josephine treasured those moments,evidence that the woman inside the frightened shell was still alive.
They descended the narrow spiral staircase together, their slippers whispering against stone worn smooth by centuries of footsteps. The tower stairs opened onto the upper corridor of the east wing, where the air was cooler and smelled faintly of old wood and beeswax. Fortunestone Hall had the peculiar character of feeling both vast and confining at once, its corridors stretching in long, shadowed reaches while its rooms pressed in with low ceilings and dark paneling. Josephine had not grown accustomed to it, not in a year of living here. She suspected she never would.
