The room was smaller than he had expected, given the proportions of the rest of the hall. Tudor ceiling beams ran overhead, dark with age, and a stone fireplace held a modest fire that was fighting a losing battle against the drafts. The mantelpiece was crowded with porcelain figurines of shepherdesses, their painted smiles incongruously cheerful amid the general air of decline. Threadbare settees flanked the hearth, a Turkish carpet had surrendered most of its color to time, and the leaded-glass windows admitted a gray, watery light that made the whole scene look like a painting left too long in the rain.
But it was not the room that arrested him. It was its occupants.
Four young women sat upon the long settee nearest the fire, arranged in a row with their hands folded and their spines held so rigidly straight that Alistair was reminded, with a sharp and unwelcome pang, of the new workers at the mill on their first morning. Desperate to please, terrified of putting a foot wrong, uncertain whether the man in charge would prove kind or cruel.
They closely resembled his younger sister with their thick silver-blonde hair and symmetrical features, their lashes so pale as to appear they had naught framing their striking blue-green eyes. Alistair felt the undesired tug of familiarity followed by a rush of protectiveness as he took in how much they looked like his Charlotte, whom he and his mother had comforted as a young girl when their father had left this world.
All four Oxley daughters, ranging from schoolgirls to mid-twenties, were attired in the color of mourning; their black bombazine brought that period of distress back to mind as if ithad just happened the day before rather than the fifteen years that separated him from that time.
Something cold settled behind his sternum. It was not pity. Alistair did not trade in pity. It was the hard, clear-eyed recognition of neglect made manifest in the careful stillness of four young bodies trained to take up as little space as possible.
Before he could address them, a voice cut across the room like the crack of a whip.
“You are a ginger.” The old woman’s lined lips curled in disdain as she clacked her walking cane against the floorboards to emphasize the harshness of her declaration.
Alistair’s jaw firmed. So this was his grandmother. The woman who had supported the disinheritance of her own son for daring to break from tradition.
He had no trouble at all dismissing their familial connection. No feelings to squash. She was a charmless aristocrat, an entitled embodiment of all that was wrong with high society and their disconnection from the everyday affairs of ordinary people.
“Indeed. It must be my inferior Scottish blood,” he agreed with a cold smile.
She pursed her mouth in resentment, the fine lines of her advanced age accentuated by the expression. Apparently, Her Grace did not appreciate that he had preempted her effort to insult him.
On the settee, the eldest cousin’s mouth had fallen open. The second was staring at him with an expression of barely concealed wonder, as though she had just witnessed a conjuring trick she could not explain. The youngest, the twins, were exchanging a glance of such naked astonishment that Alistair might have laughed under different circumstances.
He did not laugh. He caught and held the old woman’s gaze with a firmness born of thirty-five years in the company of men who respected directness and despised pretension. MargaretOxley was not the first person to look down her nose at him. She would not be the last. And she would find, as they all did, that Alistair Fraser-Oxley did not flinch.
“You will find that I will be a recurring disappointment, Your Grace. I have no intention of altering it.”
The dowager’s iron-gray hair was pinned beneath a widow’s cap of starched white, and her pale blue eyes, the same shade as those of the four girls on the settee, were sharp as cut glass. She sat in a high-backed chair positioned to command the room, a position she had clearly occupied so long that no one else would have dared claim it. Her walking stick, a lacquered affair with a silver handle, rested against the arm of the chair like a scepter laid aside between edicts.
“You are impertinent,” she declared.
“I am direct.” Alistair clasped his hands behind his back. “A trait that I understand may be unfamiliar in this household, but which I intend to exercise liberally during my visit. I am not here to exchange pleasantries, Your Grace. I am here to assess the condition of the estate and make the necessary arrangements for its management, after which I shall return to my business in Irwyn.”
The dowager’s nostrils flared. It was a minute dilation that conveyed more contempt than most people could manage with an entire tirade. “Yourbusiness,” she repeated, investing the word with the profound horror the aristocracy reserved for commerce. “You speak of trade as though it were a virtue.”
“It is.”
A faint stir passed through the room. Not audible, more a collective exhalation, a faint release of held breath from the direction of the settee. Alistair did not look at his cousins. He did not need to. He could feel the weight of their attention like sunlight on the back of his neck, and he understood, with a grimcertainty that settled into his bones, that no one had spoken to Margaret Oxley in this fashion for a very long time.
The old woman turned her glacial gaze upon the girls. “Sit up straight, all of you. You look like scullery maids gaping at a circus. Have I taught you nothing of deportment?”
Four spines, already rigid, somehow found additional vertebrae to straighten. The eldest pressed her lips together so tightly they went white, and the smaller of the twins dropped her gaze to her lap with a swiftness that spoke of long habit.
Alistair ground his teeth. He had seen this before, not in drawing rooms but on the mill floors of competitors, how a worker’s shoulders hunched when an overseer passed. The body learning faster than the mind that punishment followed visibility. He had spent years ensuring such a breed of fear never infected his operation. He did not care for finding it here, dressed in bombazine and seated on a threadbare settee.
He swallowed the sharp retort that wanted out and turned intentionally away from the dowager. There would be time enough to deal with the old dragon. For now, there was someone else in the room he had not yet acknowledged.
There was the widow, the dowager duchess. She was standing by the window, sunlight creating a halo around her honey-blonde hair, and her expression was serene as if she were the subject of a portrait waiting for the artist to dab his paint brush. Her gray eyes reminded him of a gentle summer rain breaking the heat of the day with the soft patter of rain. The widow Oxley did not heat his blood. She cooled it. And it was an unexpectedly soothing sensation for a man accustomed to be moving quickly, who never had rest from his thoughts and plans for his future.
She was dressed in a simple black mourning gown with a crepe fichu at the neck that spoke of sensibility rather than vanity. Her bearing was composed, her hands clasped beforeher with a stillness that he suspected was hard-won rather than natural. She was young. Younger than he had expected, certainly no more than five-and-twenty, and the realization that his uncle had married a woman barely older than his own eldest daughter sat poorly in Alistair’s stomach. The pins in her hair glinted where the pale sunlight caught them, and for one entirely unwelcome moment, he imagined pulling them free, one by one, to watch the silk of it fall.
Confound it.
He pulled his gaze away from the widow Oxley with rather more effort than the task should have required and turned to his cousins with what he hoped was an expression of calm authority.
“Now, then.” He softened his voice, because the souls behind the four pairs of blue-green eyes watching him with varying degrees of trepidation deserved it. “I have been remiss. I know your faces but not your names, and that will not do. Will you introduce yourselves?”
