“There is a further matter.” Alistair remained standing, unhurried. “I have written to Franklin. He is to secure a house in London for a month. We will go as a family. The girls will be properly outfitted, and I intend to find a suitable sponsor to introduce them for the following Season. Someone familiar with the marriage mart and who knows the right gentlemen to make introductions.”
Seraphina’s chin lifted by the exact amount required to communicate everything and commit to nothing. “Not the dowager.”
“No. She will have no role in your presentation, your introduction, or any element of your Season. That is entirely settled.”
What moved across Seraphina’s face was not quite a smile, but close; her expression suggested that she had been seen clearly and found it unexpectedly bearable.
“London,” Genevieve said, half to herself, softly, like something retrieved from a long distance. “I had thought myself long accustomed to doing without it.” She touched the edge of the thought the way one tests ice before stepping. “It seems I was mistaken.”
“A month in London,” Alistair confirmed. “With new wardrobes.” He said it with the matter-of-fact ease of a man for whom this was simply logistics. Not charity, not magnanimity, simply the next sensible matter to be arranged, and Josephine watched the girls receive it. She saw in their faces the quality of being offered something without being required to calculate the cost of accepting it, or to perform the proper quantity of gratitude, or to diminish themselves in the receiving. She felt an ache in her chest.
Juliet said to no one in especially, “I should like to see the British Museum.”
“Then we will go to the British Museum,” Alistair said, as though it were the simplest arrangement in the world, as though wanting a thing and being given it were the most natural sequence imaginable.
Juliet did not respond, but her face settled into an expression Josephine had not seen there before. It took a moment to name it.
Happiness. Pure and uncomplicated happiness, at being heard.
Finally, Alistair turned to Josephine. In his face was the satisfaction of a situation resolved and his readiness for whatever came next, but underneath that self-possession, she could read his unsaid thoughts now. What she had learned to find, tucked beneath the energy and the confidence, was the manwho had made choices this morning that could not be unmade, and he did not wish them to be.
“Well,” he said, quietly enough for her alone. “We have made a beginning.”
She met his eyes. The pale spring light from the tall windows moved through them, turning them the color of stormwater over the moors, and for a moment, the rest of the room fell away. The girls, the fire, the eight hundred years of cold stone. And there was only this. Here was the man who had ridden back to her when every instinct of self-preservation should have carried him toward London. Who had stood before the vicar and spoken unhesitating vows. Who had looked at her in that ancient church as though she were not merely a duty discharged but a choice he would make again, in the next breath, without deliberation.
She thought she might love him for that. She thought, with a quiet clarity that surprised her, that she very probably already did.
“More than a beginning,” she said. “You left for London in a carriage and returned on a horse. You have made an enemy. Spent time in a church, and rather longer than that arguing with a woman who has not been successfully argued with in sixty years.”
The corner of his mouth lifted, slow and private, and she felt its echo in her own chest. “I work efficiently.”
“You do.” She held his gaze. “And I find myself grateful for it.”
His eyes darkened fractionally. He leaned in the merest inch, close enough that she felt the warmth of his breath against her temple, and for a moment, neither of them spoke.
“Then we shall continue to work efficiently,” he murmured. “Together.”
She turned her hand beneath his, fingers threading slowly through his in a clasp that was deliberate and unhurried, thekind that meantI am choosing this, not simplyI am here. His grip tightened once, firm and certain, and did not release.
“Yes,” she said. “Together.”
Outside the windows, the moors continued in their ancient indifference, as they had before any of this and would long after. The house stood in its eight hundred years of stone and did not acknowledge that anything in the world had been altered or reordered.
But it had been. In the way things alter when people make decisions they mean entirely, not with proclamations, not with ceremony or announcement, but simply and quietly and without reservation, with the weight of choices that are also surrenders, freely made.
Josephine through the diamond-paned windows at the pale sky.
Fortune’s Hall,she thought.
He might be right. With a feeling she was only beginning to understand the full dimensions of, she hoped he was. She intended, as sincerely as he did, to find out.
CHAPTER 19
The house had settled into its evening quiet by the time the last of the candles in the drawing room were extinguished. The girls had been ushered to their rooms by Clara, with her soft capability and the understanding that the day had been long enough for everyone. Before departing, she had looked at Josephine across the threshold with an expression that communicated everything and required nothing spoken aloud. The fires in the corridors had burned low. The moors, dark beyond every window, gave no quarter to the lingering light.
Josephine stood at the window of the duchess’s sitting room in the traveling gown she had been married in, the plain gold band warm against her finger. She had been standing there for some minutes, not thinking, not not thinking. The day had accumulated in her in layers, and she was allowing it to settle, the way sediment does when the water finally stops moving.
She heard him in the corridor before she saw him. Not the heavy steps she had spent a year dreading, but the placid, deliberate footfall of a man who moved through space as though he had considered it and decided it was his to cross. He paused at the open door, and she turned.
