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

Chapter 14

Evangeline Cross departed three days later in a carriage that splashed mud across the entire front drive, and the house exhaled.

The servants’ hall grew lighter in her absence. Millie sang while she worked again. Edith’s tongue sharpened back to its usual edge, which was how Josephine knew the housekeeper’s maid had been holding her breath for two weeks. Even Mrs. Osborne seemed to move through the corridors with less rigidity, as though a measuring instrument had been removed from the house.

But Josephine did not exhale.

Because she had learned, over four months and a winter, that a secret in someone’s sleeve does not go away when the sleeve leaves the room. It simply travels. It waits. And Evangeline Cross was not a woman who forgot a debt.

Three days after the carriage departed, Francis came to the stables.

He came on foot, through the mud, which he never did — Francis conducted estate business from his office, and the stable yard was beneath the dignity of his shoes. He stood in the doorway of the tack room and looked at Josephine with an expression she could not read at all.

“His Grace wants you to know that Lady Evangeline’s letters have been opened.”

Josephine’s blood went cold. “Opened, sir?”

“Every piece of correspondence she sends from London will pass through the household before it leaves.” Francis said it as though he were discussing the grain accounts. “His Grace has instructed that all mail arriving for or from any member of this household be reviewed by me. Quietly.”

“That is—” Josephine stopped. “That is not lawful, sir. Not properly.”

“No,” Francis agreed. “It is not.” He turned to go, and paused. “He also instructed that the west wing corridor be walked twice nightly. And that the road gates be manned before dawn instead of after.” He looked back at her. “I have served this man twenty-two years, and he has never once concerned himself with who comes and goes on the south road. Something has changed. I am not asking what.”

He walked back through the mud toward the house.

Josephine stood in the tack room with a bridle in her hands and understood, with a slow and terrible warmth, exactly what had happened.

Raymond Hawthorne had read her confession.

And he had not punished her.

He had gone to war.

That evening she was mucking out the far stall when she heard boots on the cobbles behind her, and she turned and there he was — the Duke of Hawthorne, in plain clothes, standing in the doorway of his own stables like a man who had forgotten he was not supposed to be there.

Dennis, two stalls down, quietly put down his fork and found a reason to be at the other end of the yard.

“Your Grace.”

“Joseph.” Raymond glanced around the stable — at the straw, the buckets, the low beams blackened by decades of lantern smoke. “This is where you sleep.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Show me.”

She showed him. The cot in the back room with its straw mattress. The hook where her coat hung. The shelf where she kept her brother’s watch and the small tin of salve Millie had given her for her cracked hands. He stood in that little room for a long moment and looked at all of it, and something in his face went tight.

“Four months.”

“Four months, Your Grace.”

“I had a man bring you bread and cheese in December,” he said. “I told him to say Edith sent it. He never told you, did he.”

Josephine stared at him.

“That was you?”

“It was nothing.”

“It was not nothing.” Her voice came out rough. “I thought I was imagining it. There was a week where the food was better and I thought — I thought I was going mad.”

Raymond looked at the floor.

“I did not know why I did it,” he said. “At the time. I told myself it was sensible. That a servant who is fed works better.” He paused. “It was not that.”

“Then what was it?”

He did not answer.

They walked out into the yard together, into the wet dark, and stood under the eaves while the rain came down in sheets across the paddock.

“Your uncle,” Raymond said. “Arthur Foster. When did you last see him?”

“The night I left. November.”

“Has he made inquiries after you?”

“I do not know, Your Grace. I have not written to anyone.”

“He will have made inquiries.” Raymond’s voice was flat. “A man who sells a niece for money does not simply let an asset disappear. He will have sent men to the ports first — that is where they always look. Then the roads. Then the towns. It has been six months. He will not have stopped.”

Josephine’s stomach turned. “You think he is looking for me.”

“I think he has a contract with a miller, and no bride.” Raymond looked out at the rain. “And I think that when he finds you, he will come here.”

“Then I should go.” The words came out before she had decided them. “Before he does. If I leave now—”

“No.”

She stopped.

“No,” Raymond said again. “You will not leave this estate.”

“Your Grace, if he comes—”

“Let him come.”

The rain hammered the roof. Somewhere in the dark a horse moved in its stall and blew out a long breath.

Josephine looked up at the man beside her — at the wet hair and the scar and the grey eyes fixed on the middle distance like a general looking at a map — and felt something break loose in her chest that had been wedged there since November.

“Why?” she whispered. “Why would you do this for me? I lied to you. I lived in your house under a false name. I am nothing to you. I am a servant, Your Grace, and worse than that, I am a servant who is not even what she says she is.”

Raymond turned and looked at her.

“You are not nothing to me,” he said.

And then he walked away into the rain, and left her standing under the eaves with her heart going like a trapped bird.