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

Chapter 11

Adrian read the complaint standing in the middle of his wife’s bedchamber with his back to the window and his face entirely without expression, and he read it slowly, all the way through, and then he turned back to the first page and began again. Vivienne watched him do it and understood that this was not comprehension. This was a man taking the measure of his opponent’s work the way a duelist looks down the barrel of another man’s gun.

“Thirty thousand pounds,” he said at last.

“Which you would pay without noticing.”

“I would pay three hundred thousand without noticing.” He laid the paper flat on the writing desk and put his palm on it. “That is not what this is for.”

“No,” Vivienne said. “It is the recognizance to keep the peace that does the work. And the petition to the Lords.”

“Which will be read out in the House on Thursday morning, in the presence of everybody who matters, and which will say to every man in Westminster that the Duke of Thornbury is under a complaint in King’s Bench and under a petition for examination by committee — while the Corn Bill is in committee.” Adrian’s jaw was set. “If that petition is tabled, I lose the vote. Castlereagh will not be seen to be advised by a man whose conduct is examined. The Bill dies. Montague makes sixty thousand pounds and gets me at the same time, in one motion, and he will do it with the Crown’s own courts.”

“He has thought of everything.”

“He has thought of one thing too many.”

Adrian looked up, and his eyes had that banked-coal quality again. “He assumes you are the silence, Vivienne. He has spent a year watching the Duke of Thornbury’s duchess stand in drawing rooms saying nothing. His entire plan depends on you being exactly what everyone in this city has decided you are — the porcelain doll who will do anything rather than have her name said out loud in a courtroom.”

Vivienne took the paper, turned it over, and looked at the fourth paragraph again with her own eyes instead of her memory.

“Then he has made an error,” she said, “and it is an error of the first magnitude, and it is the only error he has ever made. And there is a grievance in it that a man like him has not noticed, because he has never once had to think about it — which is that he cannot use the truth about what happened in that room at Wrenfield House without using the truth about what happened in that room at Wrenfield House.”

Adrian’s eyebrows moved a quarter inch.

“If his petition goes to the Lords,” she said, “it will require the House to inquire into a report of an assault on the Duchess of Thornbury. Which means the bruise on my face becomes a matter of record — and I have already decided, for reasons that were entirely my own until half an hour ago, that I am not going to hide it tonight at Richmond.”

The room went very quiet.

“Vivienne —”

“I am not finished. There is a second thing, and this is the part I need you to see before noon.” She put the complaint down and pulled Reynolds’ four copied pages out of her sleeve, where she had been holding them since breakfast the way a card player holds a card. “The ledgers at Threadneedle Street are not the only copy of the ledgers at Threadneedle Street.”

Adrian’s head came up.

“Montague has been careful for four years,” she said, “and a careful man does not move his only set of books into his mistress’s cellar eleven days before he means to use them. He moves them out of the place they have always been, because he has decided that place is becoming unsafe. The crates in the cellar in Threadneedle Street were carried there by men who came at night through the mews — you told me that, Reynolds’ report said so — and men who carry three crates out of a house in the dark are men who have carried them out of a house, Adrian. Out of which house?”

Adrian was already reaching for his coat.

“The counting house at Wapping,” he said.

“The counting house at Wapping is on the river. It has a warehouse on the ground floor, and the ledger room is on the first floor, at the east end, because the man who keeps those books likes the morning light.” Vivienne was speaking fast and level. “I know that because Lady Montague once complained, at her own table, in front of eleven people, that her husband was obliged to go down to Wapping every Thursday morning at six o’clock to sit in an east room with the ledgers because he could not read them by lamp. She said it in the tone of a woman making conversation about a husband’s little habits. Nobody in that room will remember she said it. I have never once in my life forgotten anything I have heard at a table.”

Reynolds arrived, out of breath, in his hat.

“Wapping,” Adrian said to him. “The Montague counting house. Ground floor, warehouse; first floor; ledger room at the east end, morning light. I want to know whether there are papers still there, and I want to know it from outside the building and not by opening it, and I want to know within the hour.”

“Your Grace.” Reynolds was gone.

Vivienne sat down on the end of her own bed and found that her hands were shaking, very slightly, and that this was not fear. It was the same tremble that ran through a horse at the start of a gallop when the ground is good and the rest of the field is behind it.

“He will have moved them,” she said. “I am almost certain. And if he has, we cannot go in. We cannot break a second lock. A second trespass and no court in England will look at us at all.”

“We cannot break it,” Adrian said.

He came and sat down beside her on the bed — on the bed, in her bedchamber, which he had not entered in a year — and he put his hands on his knees and looked at the wall opposite, and Vivienne watched her husband think with the whole of his enormous, patient, terrible mind.

“No,” he said after a while. “But the plaintiff has alleged that a duke conspired with his own household to steal private papers. If that allegation is to be tested in a court of law, then the court will want to know what it was that was allegedly stolen, and whether such a thing existed, and whether it was a private paper at all.”

Vivienne turned to look at him.

“Adrian.”

“Under the law of evidence,” he said, “a document whose existence is denied cannot be authenticated by a party who obtained it unlawfully. But the plaintiff in this complaint has sworn to the Court that the Duke of Thornbury conspired to obtain the plaintiff’s private records. He has, in writing, on the roll, admitted before the tribunal that the records exist and that they are his.” He turned to her, and the smile that came onto his face then was something she had never seen before on a human being and would not forget for the rest of her life. “He has just told the King’s Bench that there is a set of books with his name on it, and he has told the King’s Bench that he is terrified of anyone reading them. There are forty men in this government who would pay to know what is in a book that Rupert Montague will go to court to keep shut.”

Vivienne stared at him.

“You are going to make him testify,” she said slowly, “about his own ledgers, in public, in Westminster.”

“I am going to make him explain,” Adrian said, “why a complaint about trespass requires a prayer to the House of Lords, and why a man who claims his private commercial papers have been stolen filed his complaint four hours after they were lost and not four days, and why the alleged injury to his trade is described in a clause that cannot be read aloud in court without naming the Duke of Thornbury’s bruise.”

“Which means —”

“Which means that when we enter Richmond House tonight,” Adrian said, “we will not be going as a man accused of anything. We will be going as a man who has been publicly sued by the host, and who has come, with his wife, to answer the accusation at the host’s own table, in front of the host’s own guests, before the complaint is even heard.”

The clock on the mantel struck eleven.

Vivienne stood up, crossed to her own wardrobe, and threw the doors open.

“Then I have an afternoon’s work to do,” she said, “and I will need Nan, and I will need the jeweller in Bond Street, and I will need every one of your sixteen watchers, Adrian, because there is one more thing I am going to do tonight and it is the only thing in the whole of this business that I am afraid of.”

“What is it?”

She turned, one hand on the doors of the wardrobe, and looked at her husband.

“I am going to need to be seen somewhere between four and six o’clock this afternoon, at a public place, doing something so entirely ordinary and so entirely charming that by dinner the whole of Mayfair will know that the Duchess of Thornbury was in Bond Street laughing, in the daylight, with her husband’s arm in hers and her bruise showing, and that she was not afraid.”

Adrian looked at her for a long moment.

“How do you intend to pull that off,” he said.

Vivienne drew out the gown — the deep crimson one, the one she had bought three months ago and never once dared to wear, the one that would make her look like a flame in a room full of men in black — and laid it across the bed.

“I am going to go and buy a hat,” she said.