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

Chapter 29

Spring came again, and with it something Josephine had been carrying for a month without naming.

She understood it first in the middle of March, on a morning when the smell of bacon from the kitchen sent her out of the room with her hand over her mouth. She stood in the yard in the cold air with her heart going too fast, and thought about all the mornings in the last three weeks, and did the arithmetic twice, and then walked slowly back to the house and sat down at the study desk and did not tell anyone anything.

She told Raymond four days later, in the evening, when the house had gone quiet.

He was reading. She sat down on the arm of his chair, which she had taken to doing, and said, “I am going to have a child.”

Raymond Hawthorne went absolutely still.

Then he set the book down on the table, very carefully, as though it were made of glass, and looked up at her.

“Say that again.”

“I am going to have a child. In October, near enough.”

He looked at her for a long moment, and Josephine watched something move across his face that she had never seen there before — not cold, not careful, not controlled. Something raw and young and frightened, the face of a boy whose mother died when he was nine.

“October,” he said.

“Yes.”

“The same month we married.”

“Very nearly. It is a full year.” She took his hand. “You do not have to look like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like the roof has fallen in.”

Raymond looked at their joined hands.

“I do not know how to do this,” he said. “I did not have a mother past my ninth year, and my father did not speak of her, and I have never once in my life held a baby. I have bought horses and votes and a miller’s contract, and I could not tell you the first thing about a cradle.”

“You have four months to learn,” said Josephine. “And I know nothing either. I had a brother and he died at fourteen and I do not know what babies do. We will find out together, which is how we have done everything else, and it has worked reasonably well.”

Raymond was quiet.

“Are you frightened?” he asked.

“Terrified,” Josephine said. “But I have been terrified before, and it turned out that the way through was to get up early and work.” She leaned her head against his. “We will need to fix the third room in the east wing. It has the window that faces the roses.”

“It is full of hay.”

“Then we will move the hay.”

The news traveled through both houses in a week.

Millie cried, of course. Edith said, “Well, finally,” in a tone that suggested she had been waiting for this since October and had been close to saying something for months. Dennis brought up a box from the Hawthorne stables containing a small wooden horse — badly whittled, made by one of the grooms, clearly years old — and said, “This was in the tack room,” and did not explain further and did not wait for thanks.

Mrs. Osborne, who had come to Foster Hall on a matter of linens, was informed on the doorstep, and stood there with her hands folded, and said, “A cradle will need to be ordered in July if it is to be finished in time. I will attend to it,” and turned and walked back to her carriage, and Josephine understood that this was the most effusive expression of joy that woman would ever produce.

Reuben, informed while she was out looking at the ewes, said, “Hm,” and then, later that week, she came out to the orchard and found a small wooden gate had been built at the end of the lane where the orchard met the road — stout, well-hung, with a latch she could work one-handed.

“It’s for the sheep,” said Reuben, when she asked.

“There are no sheep in the lane.”

“There will be,” said Reuben, and went back to work.

That summer, Josephine wrote the account of her own life.

She had not intended to. But in July, with the child growing and the heat making the afternoons slow, she sat down at the study desk with the green glass inkwell and a fresh ledger, and she wrote down the whole thing: Foster Hall, the sale, the scissors, the walk, the paddock, the collars adjusted, the letter, all of it. Plain, the way she had written the confession — no dramatics, no groveling, nothing that could be used against anybody.

She wrote it for the child.

You will be born in October, in this house, to a woman who was sold by her uncle and a man who never smiled. This is what happened to both of us before you existed. I am writing it down because I do not want you to hear it from somebody else, mangled, in a county town ten or twenty years from now. I want you to have the actual account, in my hand, so that you know exactly what you are descended from.

You are descended from a father who cut his own mother’s roses back from a collapsing wall to see whether they would grow. They grew. I have written that down too, because it is the same kind of fact as the rest of it, and I want you to learn both kinds at once.

She finished it in August, and tied it with string, and put it in the desk drawer in the study.

Raymond read it one evening that autumn, sitting in the chair by the fire, and when he finished he sat for a long time without saying anything.

“It is good,” he said at last. “It is honest. There is nothing in it that flatters me.”

“There is nothing in it to flatter,” said Josephine. “You bought a miller’s contract and did not speak to me for two weeks after I told you the truth.”

“I did not speak to you in the corridor—”

“You did not speak to me for two weeks, Raymond.”

“I was thinking.”

“You were sulking.”

Raymond Hawthorne, Duke of Hawthorne, owner of four thousand acres and one of the great houses of the county, looked at his wife across the firelight and said, with immense dignity, “I was not sulking.”

And Josephine laughed so hard the baby kicked.