SHE PRETENDED TO BE A “BOY” FOR 7 MONTHS TO AVOID AN ARRANGED MARRIAGE—UNTIL THE DUKE FOUND OUT…

Chapter 11

Returning to the stables felt like being returned to a body she had borrowed.

The cot was the same straw mattress. The stalls were the same stalls. The smell of hay and horse and cold leather was exactly as she had left it two months before. But Josephine was not the same woman who had walked out of this room in the dark, and the difference sat in her chest like a swallowed stone.

Dennis said nothing for the first three days.

He gave her work and let her do it. He did not ask why she had come back, or what she had done inside that house, or why Francis had looked at her the way a man looks at a horse that has suddenly gone lame in one leg — puzzling, and worth watching. He simply handed her the pitchfork and nodded toward the stalls and let the rhythm of labor do the only healing the stables knew how to offer.

On the fourth day, over a bowl of stew, he finally spoke.

“Whatever happened in there,” he said, “you’re still breathing. That’s more than most get.”

Josephine stared into her bowl. “He should have thrown me out.”

“He should have. He didn’t. That tells you something.” Dennis wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “His Grace doesn’t keep people he’s done with. He pays them off and sends them on. He’s kept you. On the estate, under his roof, on his payroll.”

“Because he wants to watch me.”

“Maybe.” Dennis stood and took his bowl to the pot. “Or maybe because he doesn’t know what else to do with you. Men like that, they’ve never had to want something they couldn’t order into place.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen him buy horses like that. Beautiful horses. Difficult horses. He doesn’t break them. He waits.”

February bled into March, and March came with rain.

The estate settled into its thaw — mud in the yard, water running off the roofs in sheets, the smell of wet earth rising from ground that had been frozen stiff for months. Josephine mucked stalls and hauled water and groomed the mares and did not go near the house.

But the house came to her.

It started with small things.

A groom appeared one morning with a message: His Grace would ride later than usual; the paddock need not be swept at dawn. Four days later, the same groom brought word that the bay mare had gone lame in the left foreleg and the matter was to be attended by Dennis personally. On the sixth day, the message was simply: His Grace inquires whether the new hand from the manor is settling adequately.

Josephine stood in the stable yard with mud to her ankles and the words he asked about me ringing in her ears like a bell.

“He’s keeping track,” Dennis said quietly, when the groom had gone.

“He’s keeping watch.”

“Same thing,” said Dennis, and went back to work.

Then, on a wet grey evening in the second week of March, Josephine was in the tack room at the end of the day, oiling the last of the bridles, when the door opened behind her.

She did not turn around. She did not need to. She had known that tread for months — had learned it in the corridors and the stairwells and in the dark before dawn, and she would have known it in her sleep.

“Your Grace.”

“You are still here.”

She turned.

Raymond Hawthorne stood in the doorway of the tack room in his riding coat, rain gleaming on his shoulders, wet hair pushed back from his forehead. The scar through his eyebrow stood out white against his skin. He looked tired in a way she had never seen him look, and the sight of it made something in her chest turn over.

“Where else would I be?”

“You could have run.” He did not come in. He stood on the threshold like a man who was not certain of his welcome. “You had four months of practice. You would have been gone before dawn.”

“I thought about it.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Josephine set down the bridle. “Because running is what I did when there was nothing left. And there is something left here. Dennis. Millie. Edith.” She paused. “You.”

The word sat between them, small and enormous.

Raymond’s jaw worked.

“You lied to me.”

“I did.”

“For four months.”

“I did.”

“Why should I believe a single word that comes out of your mouth now?”

And Josephine — who had spent her whole life learning what to say, who had survived on lies the way a swimmer survives on breath — answered with the truth, because there was nothing else left that could possibly matter.

“Because I could have kept lying. Lady Evangeline had already found me out, and the easiest path was to do exactly what she asked and keep my secret. I chose to tell you instead. Not because I was caught. Because I did not want to be something untrue to you anymore.”

The rain drummed on the stable roof.

Raymond looked at her for a long moment, and she could not read him — could not find the cold, could not find the anger, could not find anything she recognized.

“You will remain in the stables,” he said at last.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“You will not enter the house.”

“No, Your Grace.”

“And you will not,” he said, and stopped, and started again in a different place, “you will not leave this estate without my knowledge.”

Josephine’s breath caught.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

He nodded once, and turned, and was gone into the rain.

And Josephine stood in the tack room with her hands shaking and her heart loud in her ears, and understood at last what Dennis had meant about difficult horses.

Raymond Hawthorne did not know what to do with her.

So he had done the only thing a man of his sort could do.

He had kept her.