Chapter 8

Chapter 8

The announcement didn't go over like a whisper but like a shout heard throughout the countryside – and, Josephine imagined, even further beyond.

She hadn't been to town like her parents had, but she heard well enough all the congratulations that poured through, thanks to the announcement in the local paper. Her mother had been tickled by the number of invitations and mail she had received since just the other morning, and her father had remained grinning from ear to ear.

Josephine, however, tried to ignore it.

At least until Caroline arrived in a swirl of skirts and excitement so palpable that Josephine could almost feel it emanating off her friend in visceral waves.

"No ‘I've set my cap for him, Caroline'! No ‘Mayhaps I ought to tell my very closest confidant in this world that I've off and found myself engaged'! Not a single word from you, Josephine St Vincent, but I have to hear, from Eileen Dewsbury no less, of not only your being engaged! But your being engaged to the duke!"

"I hardly set my cap on him," Josephine sniffed. Half-amused at the terminology used and half-irritated that Caroline might actually think she was capable of having hidden such a thing.

Caroline's eyes shone, her lips twitching as she slid into the chair across from Josephine, her hands smoothing down her skirts as she grinned widely at her friend. "Oh, you know what I meant," she huffed. "How could you keep such a thing a secret?"

"By not having known it was going to happen," Josephine answered honestly with a shrug. She understood how difficult to believe that might be. Caroline had only just told her of the duke's plan to marry the very day that her father had mentioned the letter. And everything after that had moved so very quickly.

Caroline narrowed her eyes as she looked Josephine up and down as if trying to decide whether her words could be trusted. Whatever expression Josephine wore was apparently believable enough, though, as Caroline quickly leaned back with a heavy sigh. "Still," she fussed through her laughter. "You did get engaged. And had it announced! And still didn't tell me!"

Those were all very well and true, Josephine didn't have any argument for those particular points. She found herself smiling back at Caroline, the excitement that bled from her friend almost contagious.

"Why worry about seeking you out when I knew you'd come and find me the moment that the news broke?" Josephine's lips twitched with her teasing despite her own muddled emotions about her predicament.

"You're rotten," Caroline accused fondly. "Oh! To be engaged to a duke. To the duke, at that. Lord, Josephine, but he's so terribly handsome! I don't think I'd manage to string two sentences together if I had to look at him while doing so!"

Lovely. That was how Josephine remembered finding him at first glance. Heaven help her, but she felt flushed all over again recalling it … and the charged moments that had passed between them after.

Josephine shifted, her dress suddenly uncomfortably tight, the fabric prickling against her flushed skin as she tried to disguise the blush that seized her.

Caroline's giggles grew all the more prominent. "Is he even more handsome up close?" she whispered, her eyes widening as she pointedly stared at Josephine's all-too-visceral reaction.

"He's fine," Josephine said primly, fighting the urge to wave herself and make matters worse. "He's very cordial." And her attraction to him needn't figure into it in the least. Plenty a physique had suffered the fading of time that it hardly needed to be her first concern.

"Josephine!" Caroline chided, leaning forward with a pleading look.

Clearly, she wanted all the bawdy details as if Josephine's arrangement were some terrible romantic, lurid affair.

"Well, he is," Josephine defended. "He was exceptionally polite, and yes, he was very handsome. I'm hardly concerned with how easy on the eyes he will be, Caroline. As you well know, I have a great many other pressing matters to consider first."

"Matters that his dukedom all but solve for you," Caroline breathed. "Don't you see? You get to marry him and solve all your family's financial troubles in one fell swoop. How are you not positively radiating with joy right now?"

Josephine's exhale was small and quick, her stomach fluttering with nerves she'd been fighting to suppress ever since leaving ‘his dukedom'.

"I am happy," she said after a moment of consideration. "Of course, I'm happy. I won't have to worry about my family's estate falling into poverty or how I'll provide for my mother and father as they age. And after meeting the duke, I'm certain he won't mind or begrudge me any of that either."

Josephine just needed to be practical. Those butterflies in her stomach were silly, fanciful things she needed to learn to ignore. And the heat that suffused her entire body at the mere thought of the duke and the way his eyes had penetrated her own? It needed to be forgotten.

Caroline eyed her sceptically but, for once, didn't call Josephine on her elusiveness concerning the entire matter. Instead, she pinched her lips, her eyes only slightly narrowed before she sighed, switching subjects with an ease that Josephine envied.

"I doubt he'll begrudge you anything, Josephine, pretty as you are. I really oughtn't have been in the least surprised when I saw the announcement. If you'd ever gone to London to be introduced into society, you'd've surely been married long before now."

It was a kind sentiment, one that Josephine dismissed as soon as she heard it, but she offered Caroline a heartfelt look of thanks all the same. Her prospects in marriage imagined or not, weren't her most pressing concern.

Damn the memory of his body standing so close to her own and the way it still made her feel all this time later.

"What do you know of the duke, Caroline?" Josephine asked, her voice dropping. She knew she had no fear of being overheard in her own home, but she still felt the need to speak softer.

Caroline gave her a shrewd, half-amused look as if Josephine had just betrayed some secret by asking.

Lord help her, but Caroline probably assumed her doing so was an admission of interest.

And wasn't it, in a way?

"Only what anyone knows, I'm sure," Caroline sighed, looking somewhat disappointed in herself to have to admit as much. "He's very rich, very private, and purportedly very lonely up there in that great large estate of his. Although, rumour has it that before his wife was murdered, that wasn't the case."

Josephine was nodding blindly along, already half-checked out to try and think who might know more when Caroline's words fully registered.

"Murdered?" Her voice rose an octave, her wandering eyes jerking back to Caroline as she felt the pit of her stomach drop somewhere near her feet.

Caroline's prettily manicured brows rose on her forehead, her lips pursing in an entirely different manner as she leant forward, dropping her voice as Josephine had before. "Yes, murdered! Don't tell me you didn't know?"

"Of course, I didn't know! I didn't pay any mind to any of the news. I knew she had died, obviously, but I assumed it had been some ill-timed sickness that had consumed her or some fatal accident on the grounds. I never imagined …" Josephine trailed off, those butterflies in her stomach churning in a far more sickly manner as she grasped the full meaning behind Caroline's choice of words.

"Well, of course, no one imagined it," Caroline said with a snort. "That was the scandal of it all; she was so beloved. No one would have ever considered such a thing befalling her, but the evidence was all there. The servants came down from the estate whispering about it. And I heard from Mr Bruckshire that the authorities were investigating it for ages."

"If she was so beloved, who could have killed her?" Josephine winced at how callous her question sounded, but the words had left her lips before she could think better of them.

"That's the rub, isn't it?" Caroline fluttered her hands as if she couldn't decide which gesture to use. "Everyone loved the late duchess. There were rumours for a good while that it was the Duke himself–"

Josephine shot her a look that had Caroline quickly cut off mid-sentence. She hadn't meant to. It was just such a preposterous notion to her that he could have killed a woman he so greatly loved.

Although … How did she know that he had actually loved her? And was it really so preposterous after all? She hardly knew the man. She couldn't actually speak to his character with any real authority.

But the thought of such a monster inspiring what he had in her…

"He was cleared of all such charges," Caroline continued carefully after a brief moment of hesitation. "The authorities were sure he had no part in the foul deed. It's only the gossip and those with an obsession with the macabre that still say any differently."

Josephine looked away from her friend, trying to gather her thoughts and compose herself in the same breath. Her world felt like it was teetering on the edge of something, some sick see-saw that she fluctuated on. "But no one was ever arrested for her murder?"

Caroline sighed, shaking her head – a movement Josephine had to catch in her peripheral as her frown deepened, and she stared out the window across from her.

"I don't even have any theories on who could have done it." Caroline's nose scrunched with the admission. "And I've given it quite a bit of thought already, though I'm happy to give it more now. There's just so little to go on."

Josephine nodded, her heart caught in her throat as her eyebrows furrowed.

"Josephine? You look a little … pale. You aren't worried that the authorities got it wrong, and the duke did it, are you?"

Josephine jolted at Caroline's question, her eyes jerking back to her friend as she instinctively shook her head. Despite how much that very likely should have been her main concern, it hadn't been.

"I was just wondering what could have driven a person to do such a thing," she admitted after a brief pause. "Because if she was so well-liked, then clearly it wasn't on account of who she was that such a fate befell her. Which only leaves so many other motives." Motives Josephine didn't want to consider despite how her brain kept forcing them to the forefront of her thoughts.

"You're worried that you might be in danger what with you being the next duchess," Caroline gasped, her eyes going wide.

Josephine nodded, that sick feeling filling her once more.

"It's a silly fear." Josephine laughed, though the sound fell just short of being genuine. "There's nothing to say that there's anything behind such a concern at all."

Caroline fidgeted, her lips thinning out as she shrugged. "There's nothing to say there isn't either, though," she muttered.

Josephine had never despised her friend's honesty more than she did at that moment.

The words hung heavily between them, souring the air.

"I wouldn't even know where to start looking into it all." Josephine sighed. "I've been so out of society for so long …"

"And you can't ask the duke himself?" Caroline stated it plainly, phrased as a question despite how her voice didn't rise at the end like it ought to have to be one. It was almost more of a statement saved only just at the last second.

Josephine's lip twitched at the absurdity of the idea.

"Could you imagine? ‘I know we've only met once, Your Grace, but would you mind terribly walking me through what happened to your late wife? And, while we're talking about it, you didn't happen to murder her yourself, did you?'" Her laugh was quick on the tail of her words, though more choked than she meant it to be.

Caroline just looked appalled at the very idea.

"I can ask around," she said with a shrug. "No one will think anything of me asking questions. It isn't so very out of the ordinary after all," she teased.

"We're likely just making a mountain out of a molehill," Josephine returned, trying to make herself believe the words as she spoke them.

"Very likely." Caroline laughed.

Though neither girl quite met one another's eyes with their reassurances.

For another long, awkward moment, neither spoke, both lost in thought as the too-serious nature of their conversation lingered over them.

"I think you've concocted all of this to make me feel better about not having succeeded in catching the duke's eye myself!" Caroline burst out after a few minutes, offering Josephine one of her trademark bright smiles and tossing her hair over one shoulder as if to toss the grim mood they'd caused behind her with it.

Josephine laughed despite her still churning stomach.

"That might be the most absurd notion you've had yet," she said with a chuckle. "He's such an intense man. I'm not sure what there is to envy me outside of the title and estate. Well, that and–" She stopped suddenly; her mouth had run away too far with her. Her entire face filled with heat, her teeth snapping to a close as she swallowed the words that had been about to tumble out.

"I knew it!" Caroline cackled, leaning forward eagerly once more. "Don't stop now, Josephine; you were just about to get to the juicy details, I know it!"

"I was not." Josephine sniffed. "Really, Caroline …"

"Do not really me! You're redder than my father after a night at the gentlemen's club! You like him!"

"I hardly know him!" Josephine protested quickly.

"Well, then you find him attractive," Caroline countered.

Josephine felt her blush deepen, the noise she made in the back of her throat almost a squeak.

"He's an attractive man," she admitted, her voice going tinny. "I never said that he wasn't."

Caroline's laughter grew.

"There's a difference between attractive and attraction," she teased bawdily. "Oh, don't glare at me so fiercely! It only looks funnier as red as you are." Her giggles were infectious. "Come now, Josephine, you can tell me."

No, she couldn't. Josephine barely knew the words for herself. That was the problem.

But facing her friend's inquisition about the duke and her apparent attraction for him was far more preferable than the conversation they'd been having before. And Josephine was desperate to put that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach behind her.

Even if, amidst their laughter and teasing, she kept thinking back to the slew of questions that had come with Caroline's revelation.

Murder.

Even just the word sat heavy in her thoughts, repeated over and over despite her best efforts.