When she had first arrived as Jerome Oxley’s bride, she had imagined the marriage would be tolerable. Her husband had presented himself as a distinguished gentleman of the old school, weathered but dignified, who wished for companionship and an heir.
The reality had proved to be altogether different, and the discovery of it had come too late. But she had stayed. She had stayed for the girls, because they had no one else. And she had stayed because she had no money, no carriage, and nowhere else to go.
At the landing, Clara paused and drew a breath that was almost a shudder.
“I suppose I shall have to alert Hobbs,” she said. The name fell from her lips like a dropped stone. “So he can inform Her Grace of the duke’s arrival.”
They both swallowed.
Hobbs, the butler, had served the Oxley family since the reign of the eighth duke and had long since calcified into an extension of the dowager’s will. He was dry and disapproving, thin as a rail and twice as rigid, and possessed of a talent forappearing in doorways at precisely the wrong moment, his pale eyes recording every misstep for later reporting.
Josephine had learned within a fortnight of her arrival that nothing occurred in Fortunestone Hall without Hobbs’s knowledge, and nothing reached the dowager’s ear that Hobbs did not carry there himself. He was not cruel in the way of men who raised their voices. He was cruel in the way of men who remembered everything and forgave nothing.
“Well,” Josephine said, drawing herself up, “it will certainly reveal quickly whether Alistair Fraser-Oxley is up to the task of standing up to dragons.”
Clara’s eyes widened. “You are going to call her a dragon to his face?”
“Of course not. I am going to be the very picture of grace and propriety.” Josephine smoothed her skirts and lifted her chin. “But between us, Clara, if this man cannot hold his own against Margaret Oxley, he is of no use to anyone in this household.”
With that, she set off down the corridor toward the main staircase, her bearing serene, her heart hammering so loudly she was quite certain Clara must hear it.
Below, somewhere in the bowels of the great hall, a door thudded.
The new duke had arrived.
And from the distant reaches of the north wing, faint but unmistakable, came the rhythmic clack of a walking stick against stone floors.
The dowager was on the move.
Josephine’s stomach turned to ice, but she kept walking, kept breathing, kept her face relaxed. She had survived a year in this house. She had survived a marriage that had been nothing like the one she was promised. She had survived things she could not yet speak of, and the weight of what she carried for all of them had not broken her.
She would survive this, too.
She had to.
CHAPTER 2
The butler materialized from the dim interior of the entrance hall with the silent specificity of one who had spent decades perfecting the art of the unannounced arrival. He was tall, gaunt, and possessed of a face so thoroughly drained of warmth, it might have been carved from the same gray stone as the manor itself. His pale eyes swept over Alistair with a flicker of assessment, calculating, Alistair suspected, not the measure of a duke but the measure of a threat.
“Your Grace,” he intoned. The words were correct. The tone was not. It carried the barest edge of something that sounded less like deference and more like an indictment. “Hobbs, Your Grace. The family awaits you in the drawing room. If you will follow me.”
Alistair did not care for the man on sight, which was not a judgment he often made so swiftly. He prided himself on giving people time to reveal their characters before forming conclusions. But there was something about the butler’s bearing, the rigid spine, the faintly contemptuous set of his mouth, that put Alistair in mind of a gatekeeper who had decided, long before his arrival, that the new master was not welcome.
“Beckwith,” Alistair said, turning to his estate manager who stood a pace behind, hat in hand, taking in the crumbling grandeur of the entrance hall with the expression of a surgeon surveying a patient. “Get yourself settled and find the estate office. We will meet this evening to discuss your initial observations.”
Beckwith inclined his head and departed without ceremony, which left Alistair to follow the cadaverous butler through a succession of corridors that smelled of damp plaster, beeswax, and the certain brand of antiquity that came from centuries of accumulated dust, grief, and poor ventilation. The floorboards groaned beneath his boots. Tapestries hung in faded silence along one wall, their hunting scenes so darkened by age that the stags appeared to be fleeing into shadow. Portraits of dead Oxleys peered down from the walls with expressions of collective disapproval, as though the entire lineage had foreseen this moment and found it wanting.
Alistair noted the cracks in the plaster, the slight bow in a ceiling beam, the places where the paneling had warped from damp. His notebook hand itched. He had been in the building mere minutes, and already the repair list threatened to outgrow its binding.
Charming.
He was already preparing the letter to Franklin in his head.
The estate is worse than anticipated. The butler appears to be an automaton. The portraits are hostile. Expect my return within the week.
Hobbs paused before a set of double doors at the end of a paneled gallery. The wood was dark oak, carved with the Oxley crest that Alistair recognized from the solicitor’s correspondence, a griffin rampant above a motto he did not bother to translate. Hobbs rapped twice with a bony knuckle andpushed them open without waiting for a response. “His Grace, the Duke of Oxley,” he announced and stepped aside.
Alistair crossed the threshold into the family drawing room and stopped.
