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

Chapter 15

The first person to know was Millie, and Millie found out because Millie always found out.

It happened three days after the Duke’s visit to the stables, in the kitchen, over a bowl of turnips and a broken bowl Josephine had dropped while carrying it. She had knelt to gather the shards, and her collar had come loose, and the binding beneath had shifted — and Millie, who was standing right there with her hands full of turnip peelings, went absolutely still.

Nobody in that kitchen said anything for a long, ugly moment.

Then Millie crouched down and began picking up the pieces alongside her, and said, quietly, “That’s why you never eat with the men in the summer.”

Josephine did not look up.

“Yes,” she said.

“Right.” Millie dropped a shard into her apron. “Well. I did wonder why you spoke like a parson and mucked like a farmhand.”

She stood and carried the shards to the bin, and when she came back she put a second helping of bread on Josephine’s plate without being asked, and did not say another word about it.

Edith worked it out a day later, from a single remark Millie let slip — and Edith, being Edith, went straight to Josephine in the corridor and said, “So. Are you her or are you him?” and Josephine said, “Her,” and Edith said, “Good. Men are exhausting,” and that was the whole of that conversation.

Francis knew, of course. He had known the moment the Duke instructed him to walk the west corridor twice nightly. He never acknowledged it. He simply began letting Josephine use the steward’s office to write, because it was warm and clean and the Duke had told him to see that the stable hand was comfortable, and Francis had decided that a young person in a bad spot deserved a chair.

Dennis had known for weeks.

Dennis, in his way, was the worst and best of them. The day after her confession, he brought her a smaller fork and a pair of work gloves cut down to fit her hands, and said, “Nobody notices anything about a stable hand except his work. Do your work and be dull, and you’ll be fine.” He had not mentioned the word woman since. He simply stopped calling her lad, and started calling her Joseph, and that was that.

The servants of Hawthorne Estate closed around her like a wall of warmth.

No one in the house above knew.

And every day, Josephine carried that wall with her like a coat.

But the wall did not extend beyond the gates.

At the end of March, a stranger came to the estate.

He arrived on horseback in the middle of the afternoon and asked, at the servant’s door, whether any new hands had been taken on in the last six months. Francis received him in the office, poured him a cup of tea, and told him, with perfect calm, that the estate did not discuss the composition of its staff with strangers.

The man wrote something in a pocketbook. Then he rode away toward the south.

Josephine watched him go from the stable doorway, and her hands went cold on the pitchfork.

“Your uncle’s man?” Dennis asked.

“Yes.”

“He didn’t see you.”

“No.” But her voice was thin. “He didn’t need to. He found out the estate took on hands over the winter. That’s enough.”

Francis came down to the stables that evening, which he never did twice in one month, let alone twice in one week.

“There will be more of them,” he said. “I have written to His Grace’s man of law in the county town. He advises that we refuse any further questioning and direct all inquiries to him. This is legal, and it is within my authority to say.” He looked at Josephine steadily. “His Grace is not in residence tonight — he has gone to Harrowfield.”

Harrowfield.

The word landed in Josephine’s stomach like a stone.

“Harrowfield, sir?”

“He left at noon with two grooms and did not say why.” Francis’s face gave nothing away. “He took a ledger with him.”

Raymond Hawthorne returned after dark.

Josephine heard the horses come into the yard, and she put down her work and stood in the stable doorway and watched him dismount. He was mud to the knees. His coat was soaked through. He handed his reins to the groom without a word and walked across the yard toward her, and there was something in his stride she had never seen before — not the measured certainty of a man in control, but something harder and hotter underneath it.

“Your Grace.”

“Not here.” He glanced around the yard, and then he looked at her, and there was a tightness in his face that she had only ever seen once, when he suggested Lady Margaret Wilton’s name.

He walked past her into the tack room.

She followed.

The tack room was dark except for the lantern. Raymond closed the door behind them and stood with his back to it, and the light threw his face into hard shapes.

“I went to Harrowfield,” he said.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“I had a conversation with Mr. Collingwood.”

Josephine’s heart stopped.

“Your Grace—”

“He is not a kind man.” Raymond said it without emotion. “He was under the impression that he had purchased a bride, and that the bride had been lost, and that he had been cheated by Arthur Foster, and he was preparing to sue.” He paused. “He is no longer preparing to sue.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him the truth.” Raymond looked at her. “That the girl he purchased did not consent and had never consented, and that there is no lawful marriage without consent, and that if he ever attempted to enforce such a contract in a court, he would be laughed out of it. And then I paid him back the money he gave your uncle in advance.”

Josephine put a hand on the stall rail to steady herself.

“You paid him.”

“Eleven hundred pounds.” He said it the way another man might say a few shillings. “It is nothing.”

“That is—” She could not find words. “Your Grace, that is a fortune. That is more than I could earn in ten lifetimes.”

“I am aware.”

“Why?”

Raymond stepped away from the door and toward her, and the lantern light caught the scar through his eyebrow and the lines that had not been there a year ago.

“Because Arthur Foster sold his brother’s daughter,” he said, “and no one stopped him. And I am not no one.”

He stopped a foot from her.

“He will not be able to use the courts,” he said. “But he will try something else. He has no other weapon left besides rumor and law, and rumor is cheap.” His jaw tightened. “Which means he will come here himself. And when he does, I want you to be ready.”

Josephine looked up at him through the lantern light.

“Ready for what, Your Grace?”

“For the moment,” said the Duke, “when everyone in this county will know exactly who you are.”

And outside, in the dark, beyond the walls of the estate, the road from the south carried the sound of approaching hooves.