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

Chapter 19

The brooch came to her in a small linen parcel three days later, carried up from the study by Mrs. Osborne, who delivered it with the expression of a woman determined not to have any opinion about it whatsoever.

“The Duke instructed that this be given into your hands directly,” she said. “He also instructed that you are to be given a room in the east wing, as of today.”

Josephine looked at her.

“In the house, Mrs. Osborne?”

“In the house, Miss Foster.” The housekeeper said the name without flinching. “His Grace has instructed that you are no longer to be lodged in the stables, and that you are to be addressed by your proper name and title. He has also instructed that I am to provide you with suitable clothing, and that the tailor is to attend on Thursday next.” A pause. “I have served in this house for nineteen years and I have never once received an instruction of this kind. I am not, at present, certain what to make of it.”

“Neither am I,” Josephine admitted.

Mrs. Osborne’s mouth twitched — the closest thing to a smile that face had ever produced. “Then we are agreed,” she said, and left.

The east wing room was larger than any room Josephine had ever slept in, with a window that looked over the paddock she had spent four months mucking.

She stood at that window for a long time.

Below her in the yard, Dennis was leading the bay mare out to the water trough. He did not look up. He did not know she was standing in the window of the house, watching him, and if he had known he would have found it funny in his dry way — the stable hand in the master’s wing, six months after arriving with blistered feet and a stolen name.

She looked at the little silver bird in her palm. Wings folded. Garnet eye. Worn smooth by years of being held.

Then she put it on. And she looked at herself in the glass — a woman in a plain grey dress with short dark hair and a silver bird at her collar — and she did not recognize herself at all.

Josephine Foster, she thought. You are wearing your own name and a dead woman’s brooch. Do not make a mess of it.

He did not court her like a duchess, and this was a mercy.

He did not send flowers. He did not write poetry. He did not appear in the drawing room with a violin or a formal declaration, and he did not ask for her hand at dinner with the footmen standing at the sideboard.

What he did instead was far more dangerous. He began to talk to her.

It started in the study. He asked her to bring the household accounts, which was Mrs. Osborne’s job, and she understood that it was not the accounts he wanted. He asked her to read a letter from a tenant farmer and tell him what she thought of it. He asked her a question about the horses, and then a question about her father, and then — carefully, the way a man steps onto ice — a question about Foster Hall in the years before it fell.

She answered. And then she found herself answering things he had not asked.

She told him about the garden. About how her mother had kept roses along the south wall and the smell of them in June filled the whole house. She told him about the little library where her father had read aloud in the evenings, and the way his voice slowed when he was tired. She told him about Thomas — how he had been the bold one, and how he had climbed the oak by the gate and fallen out of it twice and never broken anything but his pride.

Raymond listened the way she had never been listened to.

He asked questions. Not polite ones — real ones. He remembered things she had said weeks before. He noticed when she winced at the memory of her uncle. And when she got to the part about the scissors, he did not speak for a long time, and she could feel his anger in the room like heat off a stove: not aimed at her, but aimed at the whole world that had made such a thing necessary.

“Your uncle,” he said at last, “will not be visiting this county again.”

“I know.”

“I mean it.”

“I know, Your Grace.”

“Raymond.”

She looked up.

“My name,” he said, “is Raymond.”

Edith walked in on her standing at the window in her new grey dress and stopped dead in the doorway.

“Well,” she said. “Look at you.”

“I did not ask for any of this.”

“That’s the only reason it’s worth anything.” Edith came in and looked her up and down with the critical eye of a woman who had spent twenty years dressing people who did not notice her. “Turn around.”

Josephine turned.

“Hm. Good. The tailor’s got your shoulders right, that’s the main thing.” Edith sat down on the edge of the bed, uninvited, and crossed her arms. “So. Are you going to marry him, then?”

Josephine’s face went hot. “Nobody has said anything about marriage.”

“Nobody has said anything about marriage,” Edith repeated, in a tone of profound disbelief. “I walked past the study door yesterday and heard him ask you whether you preferred Yorkshire or Derbyshire, and you told him Yorkshire because it rains less, and he wrote it down.”

“That proves nothing.”

“It proves he’s planning where to keep you.” Edith stood. “Listen, Josephine. I’ve watched you muck out horses for four months and I watched you refuse that uncle of yours to his face in the front hall. You’re not a fool about anything except this. So I’ll say one thing and then I’ll go.” She pointed a finger. “Take it. Whatever he offers. Not the house and not the money — take the wanting. You’ve been telling yourself for months that you don’t deserve to be wanted, and you’re wrong, and the only person who still believes it is you.”

She left.

Josephine stood in the window and watched her cross the yard, and then she sat down on the edge of the bed in her new grey dress and did not cry, quite, but came very close.

That evening, she came down to the drawing room before dinner, and Raymond was already there, standing at the window with a glass of wine he was not drinking.

“You are wearing it,” he said.

“The brooch?”

“The brooch.”

She touched the little bird at her collar. “I decided it did not belong in a drawer.”

He did not say anything. But something in his face eased — the tension of a man who had been braced, all week, for her to hand it back — and he turned back to the window.

“Yorkshire,” he said.

“What?”

“You said Yorkshire. Because it rains less. There is a property there — small, near the moors, with a garden on the south wall.” He paused. “Not for you. For the roses. It has good soil for roses.”

Josephine found that she had to look down at her hands.

“Rose soil,” she said. “That is very romantic, Your Grace.”

“Raymond.”

“Raymond.”

He turned and looked at her across the length of the room, and for the first time since the night she had met him, in a frozen paddock in December, Raymond Hawthorne very nearly smiled.