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

Chapter 25

The first winter at Foster Hall was the coldest in nine years, and Josephine loved every day of it.

She had thought, in the abstract, that she would feel the cold worse in the house than she had in the stables. She had spent four months sleeping on straw in a shed with no glass in the upper window, and her body had learned a kind of blunt endurance that she had assumed would desert her the moment she had sheets. But it did not. The cold came down in December and she met it with three blankets and a fire in the study grate every morning and her old stable boots on her feet whenever she went out to the yard, and she found that she did not mind it at all.

What she had not anticipated was how much she would love the ordinary work.

Raymond had, at first, been baffled by this.

“You are the mistress of this house,” he said one morning in December, standing in the doorway of the scullery with his eyebrows raised, watching her scrub a pan. “There is a maid.”

“There is a maid,” Josephine agreed. “She is sixteen years old and she is terrified of me because Edith shouted at her for two days straight, and if I hand her every pot in the house she will think I am testing her.”

“Are you not?”

“No. I am doing the washing up.” She rinsed the pan. “I spent four months hauling water in a bucket across a frozen yard for horses that did not know I existed. This is a great deal easier and I do not mind it. You may go and be a duke somewhere else.”

Raymond went. When he came back an hour later, he was carrying a second apron, and he dried the dishes while she washed them, and they argued the entire time about whether the tenant rents had been set too low and whether the boundary fence on the north field needed replacing first or second, and Josephine had never been so happy in her life.

The one thing she had not expected was that he would want to know the whole story.

He asked, and he asked carefully, and he did not ask all of it at once. He waited for the evenings when she was sitting in the study with a book she was not reading and the fire at the right height, and then he would ask one question and let her answer it.

She told him about cutting her hair. He had asked about that once before, in the study at Hawthorne, and she had told him the bare shape of it. This time she told him the whole of it: the smell of the dining room, the sound of the glasses, the way she had listened at the top of the stairs for a full hour before she did anything at all, because she had wanted to be certain — wanted to be absolutely certain — that there was no version of the next week in which she could stay.

“I listened for an hour,” she said. “I thought, if one person comes up the stairs, if one person comes and tells me it was a mistake, I will stay. And nobody came.”

Raymond did not say anything.

“Sometimes I am angry about that,” Josephine said. “Not at you. At the house. At everyone who was in that house who knew what was happening and said nothing. There were twelve servants. Some of them must have known.” She looked at the fire. “But I do not think about it much anymore.”

“You are allowed to think about it.”

“I know. But it does not help me to be in this room.” She gestured at the study, the mantel, the green glass inkwell, the window with the roses beyond. “This room is more useful.”

In January, a letter came.

It was addressed to Mrs. Raymond Hawthorne, which was the first piece of post she had ever received under a married name, and she found she had to sit down for a moment before opening it, because she had never once in her life expected to see those words.

It was from Lady Margaret Wilton.

She read it twice. Then she took it to Raymond in the study and put it on the desk in front of him.

He looked at the signature and his whole face closed.

“Margaret.”

“She writes to congratulate us. She says she heard the news from a friend in the county, and she wishes me every happiness.” Josephine sat down across from him. “She says she has been married eight years to a man in Devonshire. She says she has three children. And she says — I will not read this part aloud because it was clearly written for you — that she hopes you are happy, and that she has thought of you often over the years, and that she wishes she had had the courage to tell you the truth before she ran.”

Raymond looked at the letter without touching it.

“The truth.”

“Sh all I read it?”

“No.” He said it quietly. “When she broke the engagement, she told her father that I had released her. It was the account everyone heard. Some said she could not bear my coldness, others that I found her with the cavalry officer.” He looked up. “None of those was true.”

“What was true?”

“She wrote to me three days before she left,” Raymond said. “A letter. She told me she was leaving, and she asked me not to come after her, and she asked me to let the world believe she had jilted me, because if it were known that the daughter of Lord Wilton had run away of her own free will with a man of no fortune, her sisters would never marry.” He paused. “I burned the letter. I kept the account she gave the world. I have a reputation for having been betrayed, and I have let it stand.”

Josephine stared at him.

“All these years.”

“Fifteen.” Raymond’s voice was even. “I never corrected it. It was easier to be the man who was betrayed than the man who was asked.” He picked up the letter at last, and looked at the signature, and set it down again. “She is thanking me for something I did a long time ago. It was not a kindness. I simply did not know what else to do with it.”

Josephine reached across the desk and put her hand over his.

“You did the only thing that was available to you,” she said. “You were twenty-two years old, your father had just died, and a woman you had promised to marry wrote and asked you to be the villain of her story. You let her have it.” She squeezed his hand. “That is not nothing, Raymond. That is a kind of quiet generosity nobody will ever know about.”

Raymond looked at her hand on his for a long moment.

“Write to her,” he said. “Tell her I am happy. Tell her the roses came back.”