The vicar was waiting at the chancel steps. He had come to Fortunestone for private services every week, so his mild, spectacled face was familiar, but she had never before seen him in his own church, on his own ground, which gave him a quiet authority she had not previously had occasion to observe. He had arranged his expression with the applied discretion of a man who had been given the essential facts of a situation and had decided to be entirely uncurious about the rest.
Beside him stood his wife, whom Josephine had met on two or three occasions at the hall and who had always struck her as a woman of genuine warmth imperfectly concealed behind correct manners. That warmth was not concealed now. Her eyes were already bright with what Josephine recognized as the particular emotion of a woman who found weddings deeply satisfying, regardless of the circumstances producing them. Beside her stood the curate, a young man who was making a creditable effort at professional composure and not entirely achieving it as he eyed the duke and his bride with some awe.
Josephine stood at the chancel steps and looked toward the altar, and the difference between this moment and the last time she had stood in a church to be married pressed quietly upon her.
She had been in Hertfordshire, beside a man she had met only a handful of times and understood not at all. Jerome had known the correct forms and had observed them with the ease of a man for whom correctness was entirely habitual, which she had mistaken for character. It was not character. It was fluency. A man could be thoroughly fluent in the language of a gentleman and have nothing whatsoever of a gentleman’s substance, and Jerome had been the fullest possible demonstration of this truth. She had stood at that altar and made promises sheintended to keep, with a heart that was open and willing and entirely unprepared for what followed.
She was not that woman now. She was standing in a church she had walked past on a shopping trip, beside a man she had known for eight days who had turned a horse around on a road to London and come back for her when he had every reason not to. Who had listened to her confession and stayed anyway. The man standing beside her who had mud on his coat.
Josephine had never in her life been so glad of what that mud represented.
Pay attention,she told herself.You will not have this morning again.
The vicar opened his book, and she listened to the words with the full attention she had not given them before, intending to correct the omission thoroughly. She gave each phrase its weight. When it came to her own part, she said the words as she meant them, without reservation, with the clarity that came from understanding exactly what she was saying and to whom she was saying it and why it mattered.
With this ring I thee wed.
The plain gold band settled onto her finger, and she looked at it and thought that it was a more honest ring than the first one had been, because this one had been placed there by a man who sincerely accepted what the vows required of him.
* * *
Alistair was angry.
The anger had taken root when he had encountered the carriage and grown sharper with every mile of the drive to Irwyn. It was not the hot, unreflecting rage of a young man. It was the cold, focused fury of discerning a willful cruelty and calculating the most effectual means of redressing it.
Margaret Oxley had not acted in haste or passion. She had plotted. She had waited. She had chosen the very morning of Josephine’s canceled wedding, when his betrothed stood most alone, most exposed, most in want of protection, to deliver the final, calculated stroke that would keep her widowed daughter-in-law powerless forever. Forever under the thumb of the autocratic harpy. The confession Josephine had made in the carriage had not quenched the anger; it had honed it into something keener and more resolute.
He would summon the solicitors in Leeds. He would proceed methodically, because method prevailed against malice of this order, and the anger would serve as fuel rather than distraction.
But now Josephine stood beside him in the dim nave of St. Elinor’s, very straight, very still, and her nearness did what it had been doing since the day he met her. It introduced a calmness into the storm of his thoughts that nothing else had ever achieved. He drew a slow breath, felt the cold March air bite the back of his throat, and gave the moment the attention it demanded.
He was marrying her.
He had known this day was coming for nearly a week. He had treated it in his usual fashion … as a decision made, a course set, a matter of execution rather than reflection. Yet standing here at the chancel steps, with the gray light falling through the lancet windows and the vicar closing the prayer book, he discovered that execution and reflection were not so easily divided. The ancient stones, the faint scent of old wood and beeswax, the woman at his side, they required him to be present in a way his mind, forever racing several paces ahead, found both unfamiliar and strangely necessary.
He turned his head and looked at her.
She was gazing toward the altar with an expression that spoke of quiet determination, not to suppress what she felt butto meet it without flinching. There was no artifice in her face now, no careful mask. Only Josephine. Open, undefended, and so achingly beautiful that his chest seized and refused to release.
She told you the worst of it, he thought.She laid bare the shame and the fear and the months of silent endurance, and she trusted you with every word. Do not forget what that cost her.
He would not forget. He was not a man who forgot what mattered, and this mattered in ways he was only beginning to comprehend.
The vicar’s voice had moved through the familiar words of the service, refined and monotonous. Alistair’s mind, never truly quiet, had turned to his future plans as it always did when it needed an anchor. The pastures. The river. The numbers were good, better than he had dared hope. Properly managed, the estate could support three times its present flock within two seasons. The wool would go directly to Fraser & Oxley. No middlemen. No price volatility. A secure supply to meet the Hollingford contract’s demands and more.
He had arrived at Fortunestone telling himself the dukedom was a burden to be endured. He was revising that judgment with every passing hour.
The Irwyn flows through three miles of that land, he had thought, watching the vicar’s lips form the ancient phrases. Three miles of water that could link the estate’s production to Liverpool without a single unnecessary mile of road.
And then there was the Lords. The thought had been circling for days, treated as an irksome duty. He was no longer so certain he felt the same way. The people of Irwyn had no voice in legislation. No say in the laws that governed their wages, their hours, the safety of the machinery they operated. He had a voice. A seat. And he knew exactly how to use them.
The title has uses after all, he thought, and felt the weight of it shift on his shoulders. Not a yoke, but a lever.
The vicar asked the question. Alistair answered with the same directness he brought to every vow he had ever made in his life. He meant every word. There was no reservation, no equivocation. The promises landed in him with a gravity he had not anticipated, each syllable carrying the full dimension of what it required … protection, fidelity, honor, care. He felt the enormity of it settle into his bones, and he was glad, deeply and fiercely glad, to bear it. For Josephine.
The ring slid onto her finger. He looked down at her hand, slender and collected despite the faint tremor he could feel beneath the skin, and then lifted his gaze to her face.
She was no longer looking toward the altar. She had turned her head the smallest degree and met his eyes instead.
