He looked across the room to where his uncle’s widow still stood by the window, her gray eyes watching him with an expression he could not quite decipher. Assessment, certainly, but laced with something else. Hope, perhaps. Or the careful,guarded cousin of hope that belonged to a woman who had learned not to trust it.
Their gazes held for a beat longer than propriety recommended, and Alistair felt again that curious cooling sensation, as though the forge of his thoughts had been met with a soft, persistent rain. It was disconcerting. He was not a man who was easily gentled.
He looked away first, because looking at the widow Oxley was proving to be an inconvenience of the highest order, and returned his attention to the notebook in his hand.
He was going to have to stay longer than a week. The thought hit him with the dull weight of certainty. Franklin would manage the preliminary discussions with Hollingford & Goss. Benedict and Gregory could oversee the mill floors. The contract would hold. It had to hold. Because if it did not, three hundred livelihoods in Irwyn hung in the balance, and Alistair did not have the luxury of attending to his conscience in Yorkshire while his people suffered for his absence.
And yet.
He had looked into the faces of four girls who bore his family’s blood and his sister’s features, and he could not, in any conscience that his mother would recognize, simply walk away.
Confound it all to blazes.
CHAPTER 3
The dowager’s walking stick struck the floor three times in rapid succession, a percussive command that the household had long since learned to interpret as a summons, a dismissal, or a declaration of war, depending on the angle of the old woman’s chin.
“Girls,” Margaret Oxley said, and the single word carried the temperature of a January frost. “You will remove yourselves. I wish to speak with His Grace privately. Josephine, you may go with them.”
The four sisters turned in unison, a choreography of obedience so practiced it had become instinctive. Josephine caught the minute flex of muscle when Seraphina’s jaw tightened, the swallowed protest, but the eldest moved toward the door without argument, her sisters falling into line behind her like ducklings in black bombazine. They had learned, all of them, that resistance in the dowager’s presence was a currency best spent sparingly.
Josephine did not move.
It was a small act of defiance, and her body punished her for it immediately with a hot surge of panic that began in her chest and radiated outward to her fingertips, which she pressedagainst the fabric of her skirt to still their trembling. She had learned over the course of a year in this house that courage was not the absence of fear but rather the grim, teeth-clenched decision to act in spite of it. And so she remained by the window, with her spine straight and her hands hidden in the folds of her mourning gown, and willed her voice to emerge even.
“With respect, Your Grace, I believe I shall stay.”
The silence that followed was the peculiar variety that precedes a storm. Heavy, pressurized, and tasting faintly of copper. Margaret Oxley’s pale blue eyes, already cold, hardened to something geological. The walking stick tilted forward an inch, as though the old woman were considering whether to wield it as a weapon.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said I shall stay.” Josephine swallowed, but kept her chin level. “I am, as you have often reminded me, the Dowager Duchess of Oxley. I have as much right to be present for discussions concerning the estate and the welfare of the family as any other member of this household. Indeed,” she added, and here the steadfastness of her own voice surprised her, “as there are two dowager duchesses in residence, it seems rather fitting that both should be included.”
At the now-open door, the girls had frozen. Seraphina’s hand hovered on the handle, her blue-green eyes wide, emotions swirling in their depths. Arabella’s porcelain poise cracked just enough to reveal the startled woman beneath. Even the twins, pressed close together in the corridor, were peering back into the room with expressions of astonished fascination, as though Josephine had just performed a feat of acrobatics rather than spoken a few sentences.
Margaret’s mouth opened. Josephine braced herself for the verbal assault that would follow, but before the old woman could speak, a deep voice intervened.
“The duchess is quite right.”
Alistair Fraser-Oxley had not raised his voice. He had not needed to. The words landed in the room with the flat, absolute authority of a cornerstone being set, and Josephine felt something loosen behind her ribs, a knot she had not known she was carrying, released by the simple, extraordinary act of being supported.
He was standing near the fireplace, his arms folded across his broad chest in a posture that managed to be both casual and immovable. His stormy blue eyes moved from the dowager to Josephine and held there, for the span of a breath, with a flicker of warmth and approval that vanished almost as quickly as it appeared.
“She has every right to be present,” he continued, turning back to Margaret. “Moreover, as the late duke’s widow, she is likely to possess information that will be useful to me. Her Grace stays.”
Josephine schooled her features into the serene mask she had spent a year perfecting, though behind it her heart was hammering. She thought of the secret she carried, the one that pressed against the walls of her dignity every hour of every day, and how swiftly everything would unravel if Margaret ever discovered it. The old woman missed nothing. She cataloged every misstep, hoarded every suspicion. Josephine could not afford to draw her scrutiny, and yet here she was, standing her ground in full view of the dragon’s pale blue gaze.
Do it anyway. You cannot protect them if you are invisible.
She glanced toward the door and gave the smallest nod. Seraphina hesitated a moment longer, her sharp gaze flicking between the dowager and the new duke with the wariness of a chess player assessing the board, then ushered her sisters into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind them.
The latch clicked, and the three of them were alone.
Margaret wasted no time. She settled her walking stick against the arm of her chair with the deliberateness of a general planting a standard and fixed Alistair with a stare that had, over the decades, reduced stronger constitutions than Josephine’s to stammering compliance.
“Very well, then, since we are apparently conducting a committee rather than a private audience, let us address the matter directly.” The old woman’s voice was thin and nasal, pitched to carry reprimand the way a church bell carries doom. “You are now the Duke of Oxley. I trust you understand what that entails.”
“I have some notion,” Alistair said. Josephine caught the faintest thread of dry humor in his tone, a note so understated that Margaret, whose appreciation for irony had evidently atrophied decades ago, missed it entirely.
