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

Chapter 27

May brought the roses.

Josephine had spent the spring watching the south wall the way a farmer watches a field — every morning out of the kitchen door before the maid was up, examining the shoots her mother’s rose had put out along the stone. Two shoots in March. Four by April. And in the last week of May, the first buds opened: small, deep-pink, heavily scented, exactly the shape she remembered from childhood.

She cut the first one and put it in the green glass inkwell on the study mantel, because she could not think of anything else to do with a flower that important.

Raymond came down that morning and looked at it for a long time.

“Your mother’s rose.”

“What is left of it.”

“It is a good rose.” He touched a petal. “It is better than a good rose. It is the rose. There is nothing else like it in the county — I asked Hollis and he asked the man at the nursery in the town, and they both said they had never seen this variety. It is your mother’s.”

“Which means there is no one left who knows its name,” Josephine said. “My mother knew. My father probably knew. I never asked.”

“Then call it something.”

She thought about it.

“Rosa Foster,” she said. “It is not a real name for a rose. But it is a real name for a house.”

That summer was the busiest of her life.

Foster Hall had eleven souls on the land and five in the house by August. The widow from the next valley, Mrs. Crane, had a son who could handle a plow and turned out to know more about drainage than anyone on the estate, and Josephine hired him to reroute the ditch in the north field. Reuben the old man proved to be an excellent hand with sheep and had brought six of his own ewes with him, which he kept in the orchard and which Josephine had not known about until Dennis pointed at the orchard and said, “Are those yours?” and she had gone out and found Reuben tending his flock as though he had owned that land for years.

“They’re mine,” Reuben said, defensively.

“They are in my orchard.”

“They’re preventing a fire. Dry grass in an orchard is a hazard.” He squinted at her. “I’m doing you a favor.”

“Of course you are,” said Josephine, and let him stay.

By September there were twelve ewes.

Evangeline’s letter arrived in October.

It was a short one, and it came in an envelope with no crest — the plain envelope of a woman who did not want anyone to know she had written, which Josephine understood immediately.

Miss Foster,

(I am told you are Mrs. Hawthorne now, but I knew you as Miss Foster and I am not sentimental enough to change.)

I burned it. You should know that. I burned it in the grate at my aunt’s house in August, and I watched it burn all the way down to ash, which took less time than I expected, and was less satisfying than I had hoped, and left me with the uncomfortable conclusion that I had spent a year collecting a weapon I did not have the nerve to use.

I am writing because my father has found me a husband, a man of forty-two with a house in Kent and a seat in the House and no interest in anything except his hounds, and I have said yes, because he is kind and dull and I will be able to run my own household and never speak to my aunt again. I do not love him. I have decided that this is not the worst thing that can happen to a woman.

You will be pleased to hear that I am not going to write anything to anybody about you, ever. This was not a decision I made for your sake. It was a decision I made because you stood in that lane in August and told me you were not frightened of me, and I have thought about that every week since, and I have come to the conclusion that I am a great deal more impressed by you than I am by anyone I am likely to meet in Kent.

Do not write back. I would not know what to do with a letter from you. — E.C.

Josephine read it twice and then folded it and put it in the fire.

She watched it burn all the way down, exactly as Evangeline had.