A silence fell, so thick with hesitation that Alistair could almost hear it creak. The girls glanced toward their grandmother, whose expression had arranged itself into a mask of frigid disapproval, and then they glanced toward the window, where the widow stood. It was a small movement, four heads turning in near unison, but it spoke volumes. The widow gave the faintest inclination of her head, barely more than a dip of the chin, but the effect was immediate. The eldest straightened her shoulders and lifted her gaze to meet his.
Interesting.
So the girls looked to the young widow for permission, not to their grandmother. That told him rather a great deal about the invisible architecture of this household. Who protected and who menaced.
The young women rose as one.
“I am Seraphina.” The eldest curtsied. Her voice was low and clear, with a controlled tension that he recognized as the sound of someone choosing each word with great care. She was four-and-twenty, if his information was correct, and her face had the fine-boned Oxley structure sharpened by something fiercer. Intelligence, perhaps, or anger held on a very short leash. Her blue-green eyes met his without wavering, which told him she possessed more steel than even her rigid posture suggested. She was afraid, yes. But she was also, he sensed, furious. “The eldest. Welcome to Fortunestone Hall, Your Grace.”
“Thank you, Seraphina.” He inclined his head. “Tell me, what occupies your time here?”
A fractional pause. Another glance toward the widow. “We read. We sew. We … practice the pianoforte.” The words came out like items recited from a list, dutiful and colorless.
Alistair waited, but nothing further was offered. He turned to the second sister, who had been watching the exchange with the carefully neutral expression of a seasoned diplomat observing negotiations. She was perhaps two-and-twenty, her fair hair arranged with a neatness that bordered on the structural, a pearl pin holding everything neatly in place. Where Seraphina radiated a kind of banked fire, this one was porcelain. Cool, collected, and, he suspected, harder to read. The sort of woman who revealed nothing until she chose to, and who chose to very rarely.
“Arabella,” she offered before he could ask, dropping into a perfect curtsy. “I play the pianoforte rather better than Seraphina does, though she will not admit it.” A ghost of a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth, so brief he might have imagined it. “And I paint. Watercolors, mostly. Landscapes and botanicals.”
“And do you paint what you see from these windows or from memory?”
The question was deliberate, and he watched its effect with the same attention he gave to the testing of a new loom mechanism. Arabella’s mask of propriety did not crack, but something behind her eyes shifted. A flinch so subtle it was almost invisible. “From the windows, Your Grace. We do not … venture far.”
No. I rather thought not.
He turned to the twins, who stood side by side at the far end of the settee, their shoulders nearly touching. They were not yet eighteen, he judged, still hovering in that uncertain territory between girlhood and womanhood, and their proximity to each other had the aspect of a fortification. Two against the world, or at least against this household. The one on the left was smaller, finer-boned, with large pale eyes that watched him from beneath a fringe of silvery lashes with the wary attentiveness of a creature accustomed to being overlooked. The one on the right was softer, rounder of feature, with the dreamy expression of someone whose thoughts were perpetually elsewhere, a trait Alistair associated with his more creative machinists, the ones who solved problems by staring into the middle distance until the answer presented itself.
“Juliet,” said the quiet one, barely above a whisper. Her gaze dropped to the floor almost immediately, as though the act of speaking her own name had exhausted her reserves of courage.
“And I am Genevieve,” said the dreamy one, with slightly more volume and a great deal more eagerness. “We are twins, though not identical. I read novels. All manner of them, but Gothic novels especially … Mrs. Radcliffe and Miss Edgeworth and anyone who writes about castles and ghosts and—” She caught sight of her grandmother’s expression and fell silent, the bright spark of enthusiasm extinguished as though someone had blown out a candle.
Alistair’s hands curled into fists behind his back. The girl’s reaction had been so immediate, so instinctive, commanded by a single glance from the old woman. It told him everything he needed to know about the daily texture of life in this house, and none of it was tolerable.
“No need to censor yourself on my account, Genevieve,” he said, keeping his voice level and warm. “I find that people who read widely tend to think more clearly. It is not an interest to be discouraged.” He turned to Juliet. “And you? What are your interests beyond the extraordinary talent of being the quieter of a pair of twins?”
The faintest color crept into Juliet’s pale cheeks. She opened her mouth, closed it, and then, with the air of someone taking a running leap off a very high wall, said, “Numbers.”
“Numbers,” Alistair repeated.
“Mathematics. Puzzles. I … I enjoy accounts and ledgers.” She said this last part so quietly that it might have been a confession of murder, her eyes darting toward her grandmother with visible dread.
The dowager’s walking stick struck the floor. “Ledgers are not a suitable occupation for a young lady of breeding. I have told her so repeatedly.”
Alistair looked at Juliet. Juliet looked at the floor. The girl’s small hands were knotted together so tightly that her knuckles had gone white, and in that moment, she reminded him of Charlotte at twelve years old, hunched over their father’s books in the mill office, whispering the figures to herself while the adults discussed business.
“On the contrary,” Alistair said, addressing the dowager without turning to look at her. “A head for numbers is an asset in any situation. I employ several women in my mill whose facility with accounts is superior to most gentlemen I have encountered incommerce.” He allowed the full weight of the word to landupon the old woman’s sensibilities. “You should be proud of her, Your Grace.”
He could not see Margaret Oxley’s face, but the rigid silence from her corner of the room was eloquent enough. Over by the settee, Juliet’s grip on her own fingers loosened by a fraction, and when she looked up, her pale eyes held the ghost of something that might, given sufficient nourishment, grow into pride.
Alistair pulled the small notebook from his coat pocket and added a new entry beneathroof,gatehouse, andfencing:
The girls.
He underlined it twice.
The list was growing at an alarming rate, and every addition to it represented another anchor chaining him to this place when he needed to be in London, at the negotiating table with Hollingford & Goss, and at the mill.
Charlotte, his own sister, was a creature of motion and opinion, of loud laughter and louder arguments, who strode through the mill as though she owned half of it. She had been raised to occupy space. These four girls, with their pale lashes lowered and their voices modulated to a whisper, had been taught to disappear. The contrast was so stark, it bordered on the obscene.
The estate’s decay could be cataloged and delegated. The roof could be repaired by tradesmen, the fences by laborers, the accounts by Beckwith. But four young women who flinched at the sound of their grandmother’s walking stick could not be mended with a ledger entry and a bank draft.
