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

Chapter 21

They did not marry that month, or the next.

Josephine insisted on the delay, and Raymond, to the surprise of everyone who had ever known him, agreed without argument. She wanted Foster Hall standing and roofed before she stood at an altar, and she wanted the tenants back, and she wanted the garden along the south wall dug out and replanted before the frost came — because she had decided that she would not go into a new life carrying a ruin behind her like an unpaid debt.

“If I am to be your wife,” she told him, “I want to be a woman with property and income, not a woman with a story.”

“You will marry me as whatever you are.”

“That is very generous of you. I am not asking for generous.”

And he had smiled again — twice in one month, which Dennis swore was a county record — and signed the papers that transferred the roof repairs to Foster Hall out of the estate account as a loan with interest, and told her he expected the first payment in the spring, and she told him she would send it by the cart, and he said that would be entirely satisfactory.

The work was slow and unglamorous.

The roof took six weeks. The masons worked from dawn to dusk and Josephine stood in the lane on most of those days with her sleeves rolled and her old stable boots on, because she had decided that if men were going to rebuild her house she was at least going to see the rafters go up. The foreman, a dour man named Hollis, found this peculiar at first, and then stopped finding it peculiar, and then began waiting for her in the mornings to go over the day’s work before the crew arrived.

“You’d have made a decent clerk of works, miss,” he said one afternoon, wiping his hands on his trousers.

“I made a decent stable hand for four months,” she said, and he did not laugh, because he had heard the story by then, the way the whole county had heard the story — much embellished, mostly wrong, and entirely unkillable.

The south wall was the hard part. The roses and the brambles had grown into each other, so that the good wood could not be cut away without cutting the old growth too. Josephine made them take it slowly. She had the men cut back the brambles a foot at a time and tie up whatever looked alive, and at the end of the second week they found a length of the old climbing rose still going, tough and grey and stubborn, putting out three new shoots along the wall.

“Pope’s rose,” said the foreman. “Somebody planted that a long time ago.”

“My mother,” Josephine said.

“Then she planted it well. That’ll come back.”

Raymond came down once a week, and always with a reason — the water rights, the boundary fences, some document that needed her signature — and always stayed longer than the reason.

She learned things about him during those afternoons that no one else in England knew.

That he had hated the large dining room since he was a boy, because his father had used it for meetings where he was not allowed to speak. That he had taught himself to ride at six because his father had said a boy who could not sit a horse would not inherit. That his mother had died of a fever when he was nine and that his father had not spoken her name in the eight years that remained to him.

“That is why the chamber is bare,” Josephine said, understanding at last. “There is not one thing in it from your childhood.”

“There was not one thing in the house from my childhood,” Raymond said. “My father cleared it out. He said a man should not be sentimental about objects.”

“And you believed him?”

“I did for twenty years.” He looked at the half-finished wall, at the roses tied up along the stone. “It is slower to stop believing a thing than to start.”

Dennis came out to Foster Hall one afternoon in June with a cart of feed and a message, and stood in the lane looking at the house with his cap in his hands.

“Bigger than I thought,” he said.

“It is not as big as it looks. It is only all the holes that make it look large.”

Dennis laughed — his rough, rare laugh — and then he looked at her, standing there in her work dress with her hands dirty and her hair growing out past her ears.

“You look well, Joseph.”

She had heard her name from him ten thousand times, but it sounded different now, said out loud in the open air of the lane, with no need to keep anything down.

“I am well,” she said. “How are the mares?”

“Bay mare’s foaling in three weeks. The Duke’s taken to riding Arabus out past the south field and coming round by the lane here on the way home. Three times this week.” Dennis put his cap back on. “There’s not a man on the estate who doesn’t know what that means.”

“There is nothing to know.”

“There’s everything to know, and the whole county knows it, and that’s why I came out here instead of Edith.” He grinned. “Edith said she’d have given you a proper telling-off if she came. She said you’re dragging your feet.”

“I am rebuilding a house.”

“You’re stalling,” said Dennis, and drove the cart away.

That evening Raymond asked her, over dinner in the half-furnished drawing room at Foster Hall, with two chairs and a table and a single candle, why she was still living at Hawthorne when her own house was nearly habitable.

“Because the roof is not on.”

“It will be on by September.”

“Yes.”

“Josephine.”

She set down her fork and looked at him across the little table, in the light of a single candle, in a room that had been empty four months before.

“I am not stalling,” she said. “I am deciding. There is a difference.” She reached up and touched the brooch at her collar. “All my life, every important thing in my life was decided by a man. My father decided we would lose the house. My uncle decided I would be sold. The magistrate would have decided I was property. Even you decided to keep me on the estate without asking me anything.” She met his eyes. “I am not saying no to you. I am saying I want you to ask me, and I want the asking to happen when I am standing in my own house, on my own feet, in my own name. And then I want to say yes because it is what I choose, and not because it is what happened to me.”

Raymond looked at her for a long moment.

“Then I will ask you,” he said, “in September. In this room. And you will answer whatever you like, and I will accept it either way.”

“Yes,” said Josephine.

“That is a yes to the plan.”

“That is a yes to the plan.”

He nodded, and picked up his fork again, and they ate in the candlelight while the masons’ ladders leaned against the wall outside, and neither of them looked away from the other for very long.