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

Chapter 28

In November, Josephine went back to Hawthorne.

She had not been inside the house since the morning she had been relieved of her duties in the manor and sent back to the stables. Every time she had visited the estate since — which was often, because Dennis and Edith and Millie were there, and because Raymond still had business to conduct, and because life between the two houses had grown a thousand small threads that neither household wanted to cut — she had stopped at the stables or the kitchen door and had not gone further.

This time she walked up to the front door in daylight.

“That is the wrong door,” Raymond said, from beside her.

“It is my own house’s sister,” said Josephine. “I am going to use the front one.”

She knocked. Francis opened it, and did not look at all surprised.

“Miss Foster. I beg your pardon — Mrs. Hawthorne.”

“Mrs. Osborne will have your head for that.”

“Mrs. Osborne has been lecturing the new under-housekeeper on the correct folding of tablecloths since Tuesday. She has no attention left for me.” He stepped back. “Come in.”

Josephine walked into the entry hall.

It looked the same as it had the day Arthur Foster had come to demand her — the same marble, the same portraits, the same grey ancestors in their gilt frames. But something had changed, and it took her a moment to identify it.

There were flowers.

Two vases of white roses on the side tables beside the stairs, and a bowl of winter greenery on the entrance chest, and above the fireplace in the drawing room, visible through the open door, a small arrangement of dried seed pods that Edith had made and hung without being asked.

“They are from the south wall,” Francis said. “His Grace had cuttings brought over from Foster Hall in September. He said the house was too bare. Mrs. Osborne has not yet forgiven him for the decision, but she has not removed the flowers either.”

Josephine stood in the entry hall of the house where she had spent four months as a boy named Joseph, and looked at her mother’s roses in the vases, and had to press her lips together.

“Show me the study,” she said.

The study was unchanged except that the two piles of correspondence were now squared differently, and the pen was a different pen, and there was a small watercolor sketch pinned to the wall by the window — a rough painting of a house with a garden on the south wall, done by the undertenant’s eldest daughter, who had been practicing with a set of paints Josephine had given her.

“That is Foster Hall,” said Josephine.

“The girl did it from memory,” said Raymond, who had come up behind her. “She has never seen the house.”

“She has seen it.” Josephine looked at the sketch. “That is the lane, and that is the gate, and that is the wall with the roses. She has walked past it. She has eyes.” She turned. “You pinned it up.”

“It improved the wall.”

“You are becoming dangerously sentimental.”

“I am aware,” said Raymond. “It is a known fault and I have decided not to correct it.”

She laughed, and then she walked through the house because she wanted to.

She went up the grand staircase and along the corridor to the room at the end, and stood in the doorway of the Duke’s private chamber, and looked at the four-poster bed with the dark curtains and the desk before the window and the marble mantle.

There was one difference.

On the desk, in a small frame, was a folded page — cream paper, twice creased.

I am not Joseph Whitehead. My name is Josephine Foster…

She stood in the doorway and looked at her own confession, framed, on the desk of the coldest man in the county.

Raymond was behind her.

“You kept it.”

“It is the only letter anyone has ever written me that mattered,” he said. “I am not going to burn it.”

“That is a very strange thing to keep.”

“It is a very strange thing to have been given.” He paused. “Also, it is proof that you came to me of your own accord. I wanted it where I could look at it.”

Josephine turned and looked at him.

“You have been in this room alone for twenty years,” she said, “and there is nothing in it but a frame and a desk and a confession.”

“There is now,” said Raymond. “And there is a house in the lane with a garden on the south wall, and a wife in it, and twelve ewes that belong to a man named Reuben.” He looked at her. “That is all I have ever had, and it is a great deal more than I expected.”