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

Chapter 24

They married in October, at the small parish church at the crossroads between the two estates, and it was the least grand wedding in the history of the county.

There was no announcement in the London papers. There was no breakfast for two hundred in a tent on the lawn. There was no bishop brought up specially from the cathedral, no choir, no flowers imported at absurd expense from a hothouse in the south. Raymond Hawthorne had asked Josephine once, in September, whether she wanted any of it, and she had said no, and he had said, “Good,” and that had been the whole conversation.

What there was, instead, was this:

The church at eleven in the morning, with the last of the Michaelmas daisies still standing along the churchyard wall and the yew trees dropping their first yellow needles onto the path. Twenty-two people in the pews. Dennis in a clean coat with his hands folded in front of him and his jaw working like a man trying not to cry. Millie weeping openly from the third row, from the moment she sat down, without any shame at all. Edith next to her, dry-eyed and grimly pleased, having decided that this was the correct outcome and that everyone should know she had said so in March.

Francis in the back row, upright and formal, with a parcel on the seat beside him that turned out later to be a set of household account books that had belonged to Josephine’s father, which he had found in the estate office and kept for four years without quite knowing why.

The tenants of Foster Hall filled two pews between them. Reuben the old man sat in the front and watched the whole ceremony with an expression of deep suspicion, as though expecting the Duke to change his mind halfway through.

And in the front row on the left, in a plain grey dress she had chosen herself and a silver bird brooch at her collar, stood Josephine Foster, twenty-two years old, of Foster Hall, no one’s ward, no one’s property, no one’s horse at auction.

The vicar — a nervous man of about sixty who had clearly been rehearsing this for a week and was still not certain he would get through it — began.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God…”

Josephine looked at Raymond.

He was in a dark coat, plain, without ornament. He was standing very straight. He was not smiling, because he did not do that in front of other people, but she knew him well enough now to read the small things: the set of his shoulders, which was lower than she had ever seen it; the way he was looking at her and not at the vicar; the faint tremor in the hand that was not holding hers yet.

He is nervous, she thought.

Raymond Hawthorne, who had faced a hostile county board at twenty-two and buried his father without changing expression and ridden through a snowstorm to pay a miller eleven hundred pounds without once raising his voice, was standing at the altar, nervous.

She almost laughed.

“Josephine,” said the vicar, “wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband?”

“I will.”

“Raymond, wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife?”

“I will.”

And when the ring went on her finger — a plain gold band, no stones, chosen because she had asked for no stones — Josephine Foster looked down at her own hand and saw her mother’s hands and her father’s hands and seven years of ruin and four months of straw and a night in November when she had cut off her own hair with a pair of kitchen scissors, all of it ending, all of it finally paid out, in a small gold circle on the third finger of her left hand.

“Those whom God hath joined together,” said the vicar, “let no man put asunder.”

Afterward there was a meal in the hall at Foster Hall — not a banquet, just a long table with two joints of beef and a great deal of bread and a barrel of ale that Dennis had arranged, and the twenty-two guests sat down together and ate and drank and talked over each other, and nobody made any speeches at all.

Edith served, because she refused to sit down and be served in a house she had not yet organized to her satisfaction.

At some point in the afternoon, Dennis stood up with his cup and everyone went quiet.

“I’ve worked for His Grace fifteen years,” he said. “And I’ve been told to keep my mouth shut about most things, and I generally do.” He raised the cup. “But I’ll say this. In fifteen years I never once saw him keep a thing he didn’t want, and I never once saw him want a thing he didn’t keep. So when he kept our Joseph out of a snowstorm and put her in a room in his own house, I knew how it was going to end.” He drank. “Congratulations to the both of you. And Joseph — I hope you’ll still come down to the stables. The mares miss you.”

Everyone laughed. Josephine’s eyes stung.

Millie cried harder.

And Raymond Hawthorne stood at the head of the table in his own wife’s house and looked down the length of it at the whole strange company — a housekeeper, a steward, two housemaids, a head stable hand, six tenant families, and one very suspicious old man named Reuben — and did something no one in that room had ever seen him do.

He raised his cup, and he smiled at all of them, in daylight, without hiding it.

That night, when everyone had gone and the house was quiet for the first time as a married house, Josephine sat on the edge of the bed in the room that had once been her parents’ and listened to the wind in the roses on the south wall.

Raymond came and sat down beside her, not close, waiting to see whether she wanted him close.

“Your hands are cold,” he said.

“It is October.”

“You are nervous.”

“I am married,” said Josephine. “It is the first time in my life I have been anything of the kind, and I have been thinking about it all day, and I have just now realized that I do not know the first thing about being a wife, because the only examples I ever had were unhappy ones.”

Raymond was quiet for a moment.

“I do not know the first thing about being a husband either,” he said. “The only example I had was a man who stopped speaking my mother’s name.” He looked at his own hands. “We will have to make it up as we go.”

Josephine laughed, and leaned against his shoulder, and he put his arm around her, and they sat in the dark of the room while the October wind worked through the rose bushes outside, and neither of them said anything else for a long while, because there was nothing left that needed saying.