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

Chapter 23

September came the way September always came in that part of the country — slowly, then all at once, with the light turning gold in the afternoons and the mornings smelling of wet leaves.

The roof was finished on the fourth.

Josephine stood in the lane and watched the last of the scaffolding come down, and when the foreman Hollis shook her hand and said, “She’ll keep you dry for fifty years, miss, if you keep the gutters clear,” she had to look away for a moment and pretend to be examining the roofline.

Her house.

The windows on the second floor were glazed. The front door hung straight in its frame. The floors had been laid in the drawing room and the library and — this had been her one indulgence — the study, where the men had rebuilt the mantel to the original pattern and found a green glass inkwell in a shop in the county town that was the same shape as the one her father had kept.

It had no chip in the rim.

She had bought it anyway and set it on the mantel, and the mark in the dust was covered now, and that was the correct thing for a mark in the dust to be.

The tenants came back in the last week of September.

There were six families by then. A widow from the next valley with two sons. A married couple whose previous landlord had raised their rent twice in one year. An old man named Reuben who had known Josephine’s father and who stood in the yard and looked at the house for a long time and said, “Well. It’s better than it was,” which Josephine understood to be the highest praise he had ever given anything.

She gave them leases at rates she could defend — she had gone through the estate books from three neighboring properties and set the rents in the middle, and when Raymond had seen the figures he had said nothing at all, which she had learned to interpret as approval.

By the end of September, Foster Hall had eleven people living on its land and rent coming in at Michaelmas, and Josephine had sat down at the desk in the study she had rebuilt and written her first account in her own hand, in her own name, under the heading Foster Hall, Michaelmas, 18—.

Edith came out for a week to help set the household to rights.

She arrived with two trunks, entirely unwarranted, and spent the first day standing in the hallway with her hands on her hips saying, “No. No, this will not do,” and the second day rearranging the kitchen and shouting at the tradesmen, and by the third day the house had sheets on all the beds and a working scullery and a kitchen maid who followed Edith around with the reverent terror of a novice nun.

“You should have been a housekeeper,” Josephine told her.

“I should have been a general,” said Edith. “Now sit down and stop hovering, you’re making the girl nervous.”

They had tea in the drawing room on the fourth evening, the two of them, with the windows open and the smell of new plaster still faintly in the air, and Edith looked around the room and then looked at Josephine and said, quite abruptly:

“Are you going to marry him or not?”

“Edith.”

“I’m asking as a friend, not as a housemaid, so you can answer as a friend.”

Josephine turned her cup in her hands.

“He is coming on Sunday,” she said. “To ask.”

“And you’re going to say yes.”

“I am going to say yes.”

“Good.” Edith stood and gathered the cups. “Then I’m going back to Hawthorne in the morning before Mrs. Osborne sends someone after me, and I’ll tell Millie, because Millie will cry and I’d like to see it.”

“Edith.”

Edith stopped in the doorway.

“Thank you,” Josephine said. “For the bread. In December. You brought me bread in the stables for four months and pretended you were just passing through.”

Edith looked at the floor.

“You were thin,” she said. “And you had bad hands. Someone had to feed you.” She went out into the hall, and then her voice came back, sharp as ever. “And don’t you dare tell anyone I said that.”

Sunday arrived with the first real cold of autumn in the air.

Raymond came up the lane on Arabus, and Josephine watched him from the study window — watched him dismount and hand the reins to a boy, and stop in the yard to look up at the finished roof. Then he straightened his coat and came in through the front door, which he had never once done, because before Sunday there had never been a front door that closed.

She met him in the hall.

“You rode Arabus.”

“I did.”

“He has never been in this lane before. You said last month he does not take strange roads.”

“That was last month.” Raymond looked at her. “May I come into the study?”

She led him.

The study smelled of wood and new paper and the faint sweet smell of the roses coming in through the window, because the south wall had flowered, and it was the first week of October, and the whole lane smelled of roses out of season.

Raymond looked at the mantel.

“Green glass.”

“From the shop in the county town. It is not the same one.”

“It is the right shape.”

They stood together in front of the mantel for a moment, and then Raymond turned to her, and he did not get down on one knee, which she was grateful for, and he did not make a speech, which she was also grateful for.

“Josephine Foster,” he said. “I am not a warm man. I have been told that all my life, and it is mostly true. I am careful, and I am not good with words in front of other people, and I do not know how to say things the way a man is expected to say them.” He paused. “But I have spent nine months watching you and I know what I want. I want to eat dinner with you in this room for thirty years. I want to argue with you about the rent figures. I want to hear you say the name of your mother when the roses come up, every October. I want to be known by somebody, the way you know me — the way you knew me when you were a stable boy and you looked at me like you could see the whole of what was underneath, and were not frightened of it, and did not look away.”

He took a breath.

“Will you marry me?”

Josephine Foster stood in her father’s study, in her own house, with her mother’s roses at the window and her own name on the accounts and a silver bird at her collar, and she answered the question she had been walking toward for a year.

“Yes,” she said. “I will.”

And Raymond Hawthorne, who had never smiled, smiled, and reached for her hand, and held it in the grey October light — and outside, in the lane, the roses on the south wall moved in the wind like something remembered finally coming home.