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

Chapter 20

May came, and with it the kind of weather that made the estate look like a painting someone had forgotten to finish.

Josephine had been in the house six weeks. She had her own room and her own name and a tailor who came on Thursdays. She had learned the household accounts, and the estate books, and the names of the tenants in three villages, because Raymond had begun leaving them on her desk without comment and she had begun reading them and asking questions, and he had begun answering.

The servants had stopped staring. Edith and Millie treated her exactly as before, which she counted as the greatest kindness anyone had ever done her. Dennis brought her a set of account ledgers from the stables and told her the feed figures were wrong, and it took her half a day to find the error, and he had nodded without surprise.

But there was one thing left.

“I want to see it,” she said one morning.

Raymond looked up from his paper. “See what?”

“Foster Hall.”

The room went quiet.

“It has been empty for four years,” he said.

“I know.”

“The roof—”

“You have told me about the roof twice, Your Grace, and I have understood both times.” She kept her voice steady. “I want to see it. It is my father’s house. I have not seen it since I was eighteen years old and it was still my home. And if I am going to decide what to do with it, I should know what is actually there.”

Raymond was silent for a moment. Then he folded the paper.

“We will go Thursday.”

They rode in a closed carriage, for which Josephine was grateful, because by the time the road turned past the crossroads she was shaking and did not want him to see it.

The carriage stopped at the end of a long, rutted lane. The gates were rusted open. The lodge at the gate had lost its door.

She got out and stood in the lane and looked at Foster Hall for the first time in seven years.

It was smaller than she remembered. That was the first thing. The house had never been grand — not by Hawthorne standards, not by anyone’s standards — but it had been warm and full, and the garden along the south wall had been full of roses, and the windows had been bright in the evening. Now the hedges had gone wild and draped themselves over the path. The roses were brambles; the south wall was half collapsed; the second-floor windows were boarded.

The front door stood open, swollen in its frame, and the hallway beyond it glowed with grey light.

She walked in.

The floors had been stripped. The furniture was gone. There was a smell of wet plaster and old rot and something faintly animal underneath, and the paper was peeling in long curls from every wall. But the stairs were still the stairs — the same curve, the same newel post with the chip in it where Thomas had crashed into it with a sled one winter. And the window at the landing was still there, the one with the small diamond panes.

She stood in the middle of the hallway with her hand on the banister and cried.

She did not have to hide it, which was strange. Raymond stood behind her, near the door, and did not say anything, and did not tell her it was all right, and did not touch her. He simply stood there, present and solid, like a wall that had decided not to go anywhere. And after a while she stopped, and wiped her face with the back of her hand, and turned around.

“I want it back,” she said.

“Then you will have it back.”

“It will cost a fortune.”

“Yes.”

“I cannot let you pay for it.”

“You may.” He said it before she finished. “Not as a gift. As a loan, from the estate, at the rate the bank would charge. You will repay it out of the rents, if you ever get rents, and if you do not, I will be the poorer and you will not be the debtor, because I will have written the paper myself and no court will enforce it.”

She looked at him.

“That is an extremely bad loan,” she said. “You are a very bad businessman.”

“I am a very poorly disguised one,” Raymond agreed. “It is a known failing.”

And she laughed — the first real laugh in months, a bright startled sound in that ruined hallway — and he looked at her as though she had handed him something he had not known he wanted.

Down the hallway, past the empty drawing room, there was one door left.

Her father’s study.

She pushed it open.

Everything was gone except one thing: the fireplace, and the mantel above it, and on the mantel, faint and pale, a mark in the dust where something had stood for years — a long rectangle, the size of a book, and beside it a small round ring, the size of the base of an inkstand.

“His book was there,” she said. “The one he read aloud. And his inkwell — the green glass one, with the chip out of the rim.” She touched the mark. “I used to fill it for him when I was small. He would let me hold the pen and make a mess and he never once told me not to, he just wiped the ink off my hands and said it would come off or it would not, but the important thing was that I had tried.”

Raymond came and stood beside her and looked at the mantel.

“I will have the study restored first,” he said.

“That is very specific.”

“It is the only room you have told me about that made you smile.”

She looked at him, and he looked back, and the ruined hallway of Foster Hall held its breath around them.

“Raymond.”

“Yes.”

“There is one thing I have not told you.” Her voice was steady, though her hands were not. “I have been afraid of you since the first day I saw you. Not because you were cruel, but because you noticed me, and I could not afford to be noticed. And then you kept noticing, and it was worse, and then you noticed everything — and it was the best thing that had happened to me in seven years.”

He did not move.

“I am not a duchess,” she said. “I am a woman with a piece of property that has no roof and a scandal in her uncle’s name and a brooch she is wearing that belongs to your mother.”

“You are Josephine Foster,” he said, “of Foster Hall, and you built a fire in my study every morning for two months, and you looked an uncle who sold you in the eye and told him no, and I have not been able to stop thinking about you since December, and I do not intend to try.”

The room was very quiet.

“What are you asking me?” she said.

“I am asking you to have dinner with me tonight,” said Raymond. “And tomorrow. And for the rest of your life. And if you say no, I will walk you to the carriage and we will go home in silence and I will never raise it again.”

Josephine Foster stood in the ruin of her father’s study, wearing a dead woman’s brooch and her own name, and did not have to think about it at all.

“Yes,” she said.

And Raymond Hawthorne, who had never smiled, smiled.