He Struck Her at the Ball, Never Knowing Her Husband the Duke Stood Watching From the Doorway

Chapter 10

He was not a gentleman.

That was the first thing Vivienne saw from the turn of the stairs, and it told her more than any name would have. The man in the hall of Thornbury House wore a good coat that did not fit him and had been bought, not made, and his boots were the boots of somebody who spent his days on stone and never on leather. He carried a leather satchel under one arm and he held his hat like a man who knew exactly how much a hat was worth and did not intend to lose it.

Two footmen stood between him and the stairs, and they had the particular wooden stillness of men who had been told a thing and were not sure they had been told the right thing.

“Your Grace,” the man said, and bowed — not a servant’s bow, not a gentleman’s bow, but the practical compression of a man who does business and knows the value of manners.

“You are at my door before eleven,” Vivienne said, coming down the last four steps with her hand on the rail. “Who are you?”

“Mr. Lambert, Your Grace. Attorney. Of Threadneedle Street.”

She did not let anything move in her face.

“Threadneedle Street is a long street, Mr. Lambert.”

“It is.” He looked up at her. He had small, steady, intelligent eyes, and he had been in the presence of powerful people before and had learned that they were mostly just people with better coats. “I am instructed by a client whose name I am not at liberty to disclose. I am here on a matter of business, and I am here at this hour because my client requires an answer before noon.”

“Before noon.” Vivienne came off the bottom step. Behind her, at the top of the stairs, she was aware of Nan, and of a footman, and of the exact geometry of a large house full of people who were all now listening. “And what business does your client have with the Duchess of Thornbury?”

“Not with the Duchess,” Mr. Lambert said.

He opened the satchel.

“With the Duke.”

Vivienne’s whole body went cold, and she understood in a single falling instant exactly how badly they had misjudged the man on the other side of this table.

Because she had spent the last four hours preparing to be the one attacked. She had looked at her own bruised face in the glass all morning and thought: He will come for me. He will send a man to threaten me into silence, or to spread a story, or to buy my silence, and I will refuse him in front of witnesses, and tomorrow I will walk into Richmond House with Montague’s own man’s refusal stitched into my cheek.

She had not considered — not once, not for a moment — that the man with the ledgers might decide that the wife was not the target at all.

The attorney drew a folded document out of the satchel and held it flat in both hands like a serving dish.

“A complaint laid this morning in the Court of King’s Bench,” he said. “Brought by my client against Arthur Adrian Hale, sixth Duke of Thornbury, and entered on the roll at nine o’clock. I am instructed to serve it upon the defendant, and I am instructed additionally, by the same client, to inform His Grace that the complaint may be withdrawn in its entirety before noon on Thursday if certain — courtesies — are extended.”

The hall of Thornbury House was very tall and very quiet, and the marble floor had been laid by a man who wanted the acoustics of a cathedral.

“Read it,” Vivienne said.

“Your Grace —”

“Read it, Mr. Lambert.”

He read it.

It was four paragraphs long and it was the most dangerous piece of paper Vivienne had ever heard aloud. The complaint alleged that the Duke of Thornbury had, in the course of a private dispute concerning the affairs of the Corn Bill, conspired with agents in his employ to obtain by theft and by unlawful entry the private commercial records of the plaintiff; that he had suborned servants; that he had used the machinery of his household — a household maintained at the public expense of a peer of the realm — to conduct a private campaign of espionage against a member of the House of Commons; and that his conduct constituted a conspiracy to injure the plaintiff in his trade and estate, for which the plaintiff sought damages of thirty thousand pounds.

And then the fourth paragraph.

“The plaintiff further alleges that the said Duke, being a man of notoriously violent temper and having on the evening of the eleventh instant committed a violent assault upon the person of the Viscount Rotherby in the house of the Earl of Wrenfield, is a person whose conduct is a danger to the peace of the realm; and the plaintiff will move the court for an order requiring the said Duke to enter into a recognizance to keep the peace, and will further petition the House of Lords for the appointment of a committee to examine the said Duke’s fitness to advise the Crown.”

Vivienne stood in her own hall with her hand still on the newel post and the whole of it came together in her mind like a lock turning.

He knows. Of course he knew. Reynolds had opened a cellar in Threadneedle Street and there had been a man watching, and now — within four hours of the intrusion — Montague had not sent a thug and had not sent a bribe and had not spread a rumour, because Montague was not a fool, and fools did not hold the Tory leadership in their dining room.

Montague had gone straight to the thing that could actually kill them.

Not the gunpowder. Not the ledgers. The theft of the ledgers.

Because it did not matter, in a court of law, what was written in those books. A duke who had obtained a private citizen’s papers through a sixteen-year-old maid and an unlocked cellar and a clerk with a small tool in his pocket was a duke who had committed trespass, larceny, and unlawful conspiracy — and Montague knew the Prince Regent, and Montague knew the Cabinet, and a man who could no longer be trusted to keep his hands out of other men’s counting houses could not be trusted with a seat on the Privy Council either way.

It was elegant. It was beautiful, in the way a dueling pistol is beautiful.

“Show me the eleventh instant,” Vivienne said, and her own voice sounded very far away to her. “The clause about the Viscount Rotherby.”

“It is there, Your Grace.”

“Lord Rotherby was struck by no one,” Vivienne said. “Lord Rotherby was placed against a wall by the throat after he struck the Duchess of Thornbury across the face in a locked room at Wrenfield House last night. There were no witnesses to his being struck. There were, however, two footmen who saw the Duke leave the north gallery, one of whom has been paid —”

She stopped.

“Which is precisely what the plaintiff wishes me to say in a public place,” she finished quietly. “Mr. Lambert, your client has been extremely careful with his wording. He has written a complaint that accuses my husband of assaulting a viscount, knowing perfectly well that the truth of what happened in that room can only be told by me — and that the telling of it would put my name into a courtroom, where it would be read aloud, and printed, and discussed, and where I would have to describe under oath how a man put his hands on me in the dark.”

Mr. Lambert did not smile. To his credit, he did not look away either.

“My client is a careful man,” he said.

“My client,” Vivienne said, “has evidently been well informed of yours.”

She walked past him to the small table by the door, where she took up the silver bell and rang it once, and when a footman stepped forward she said, without any expression at all, “Ask my husband to come down. And fetch Mr. Reynolds.”

Then she turned back to the attorney and stood looking at him across the width of her own hall.

“You are asked for an answer before noon,” she said. “You will have one before noon. In the meantime, you will wait in the blue parlour, and you will not be announced to anybody, and if you have been told to leave a copy of that document in this house, you may hand it to me now.”

“With respect, Your Grace, it is to be served on the Duke.”

“You may serve it on my husband when he comes down. I have not asked to be served. I have asked for the paper.” She held out her hand. “Mr. Lambert, you have known for a week that I was going to be the ruin of somebody’s evening. Do not insult me by pretending that you have no copy to spare.”

The attorney looked at her for a moment, and then — without any visible change in his professional manner at all — he drew a second, folded copy out of the satchel and put it in her hand, and she thought she saw, at the very corner of his mouth, something extremely small and very well suppressed.

“Your Grace is direct,” he said.

“Your Grace has been a decorative ornament for one year and has recently been rewired,” Vivienne said. “Blue parlour is on the left.”

She was already reading as she went up the stairs.