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

Chapter 12

They went out at half past four, and Vivienne wore the bruise the way other women wear pearls.

Bond Street at that hour was a river of the fashionable world at its most idle: carriages drawn up along the kerb, ladies walking in pairs with their hands tucked into muffs against the spring damp, gentlemen standing at the booksellers’ windows pretending to read and actually watching. Nan had done her work well. The hair was dressed high and severe, drawn back hard from the temples so that there was nothing between the eye of the beholder and the deep purple-green bloom across her left cheekbone. No powder. No veil. No bonnet, until they reached the shop, for a bonnet was exactly the sort of thing a woman hides behind.

And down her left arm, all the way from the carriage to the door of the milliner’s, walked the Duke of Thornbury in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the week, in the middle of Bond Street, where he had not been seen in daylight in his wife’s company in a year.

Vivienne felt the street notice them.

She felt it in the way a woman feels a change in the weather — the small drop in the pitch of conversation four yards ahead, the way two ladies turned to look into a shop window at precisely the moment Vivienne passed it, the way a group of gentlemen on the far pavement stopped mid-sentence and then, very deliberately, resumed a different subject. She felt the eyes arrive on her face and she felt them find the bruise and she felt them stay there for a beat too long and then slide away with the immense, embarrassed, entirely transparent courtesy of the English upper class.

Good, she thought. Look. I have not come out here to be looked past.

She stopped deliberately at the bookseller’s window, so that she and Adrian were standing still in the light for a full half-minute.

“There are eleven people watching us,” she murmured, smiling at a display of sermons she had no intention of reading.

“Fourteen.”

“Say something to me.”

“Such as?”

“Anything. Say it as though you are in love with me.”

Adrian turned his head and looked down at her, and Vivienne — who had spent a year being looked at by this man with impeccable courtesy and no warmth at all — discovered that she had been entirely unprepared for what it would be like to be looked at by him with warmth.

“Your hair,” he said, quietly enough that only she could hear, “was coming down, and you were laughing, and the bonnet was hanging off the back of your neck, and the mist was on the water, and I have not stopped thinking about it for a year and a half.”

Vivienne’s breath went out of her.

“Adrian.”

“I am not performing,” he said. “I am answering the question you asked.”

“Then say something else,” she said, and had to look away from him at the display of sermons because her eyes had gone hot and her cheeks had gone hot and she was suddenly, absurdly, twenty-one years old in a hunting field, “because if you say anything else in that voice I am going to stand in the middle of Bond Street and weep, and that is precisely the wrong kind of scandal for four o’clock in the afternoon.”

The Duke of Thornbury, publicly and deliberately, took his wife’s bruised face in his hand.

He did it out there in the open, in front of fourteen witnesses, in front of three carriages and a crossing-sweeper and a lady coming out of the linen shop with a parcel under each arm. He turned her face up toward him with the enormous gentleness of a man handling something that had cost him everything to find, and he looked at the bruise for a long moment, and then he let her go.

“Let them see the hand that made it does not matter any more than the face that bears it,” he said. “You are correct. It cannot be hidden. So it will be introduced.”

And Vivienne understood, standing on that pavement with the whole street politely pretending not to watch, that she had won more than a political position in the last two minutes. She had won a partner.

“Come,” she said. “The hat.”

The milliner’s shop was called Amandine’s and it was the most expensive hat shop in London, which was its own kind of armour.

Vivienne walked in with her husband and the proprietor came out from behind a glass case with her hands folded and her eyes doing in one second what the whole of Bond Street had been doing for a quarter of an hour.

“Your Grace. Your Grace.” Two curtseys, one for each of them. “We have the bonnets you ordered on Tuesday, and the blue silk is nearly finished —”

“I have not come for the blue silk,” Vivienne said. “I have come because my face is ruined for a fortnight and I require something that will make a room look at me anyway.”

Madame Amandine — who was French, and who had been through the Revolution and the Terror and two husbands and had no interest whatsoever in the sensibilities of the English — looked at the bruise on the Duchess of Thornbury’s cheekbone with an entirely professional frankness and then said, “You need the amber, Your Grace. And you need it with a black ribbon, not a green, and you need to be seen trying it on in the window.”

Adrian, standing behind his wife, made a small sound that was very nearly a laugh.

“Madame,” he said, “you are wasted on hats.”

“I am wasted on England, Your Grace, but I make the best of it.” She snapped her fingers and a girl came out of the back with three boxes. “The amber, Élodie. And bring the tall mirror out to the front of the shop.”

Vivienne sat down in the chair by the window — the chair deliberately placed in the bay of the shop where the whole of Bond Street could see into it — and let a hat be put on her head.

She made them take twenty minutes over it.

She made them take the amber and then the grey and then the amber again, and she laughed at the grey, and she turned her head this way and that with the light coming in on the bruise and the brim casting a shadow that did nothing whatever to hide it, and she sent Adrian out to the carriage and back for her fan, and she argued with Madame Amandine in a voice pitched to carry to the doorway about the precise shade of ribbon, and while she did it she watched the shop window and counted.

Nine ladies. Four gentlemen. Two of the ladies were the kind who wrote letters. One of them she knew for certain was a correspondent of Lady Jersey’s, because she had seen the woman’s hand at the top of three separate gossip sheets in the last year.

At the end of half an hour Vivienne bought the amber hat, overpaid for it in a manner so careless that it would be reported, thanked Madame Amandine in French — the good French, the French she had learned from a governess in a house her father had sold four years ago — and walked out into Bond Street on her husband’s arm with the bruise showing and a new hat on her head.

By six o’clock, Vivienne estimated, four letters had been written. By eight, they would be delivered. By nine, Lady Jersey would have read two of them at her own dinner table, and the Duchess of Thornbury’s face would be discussed in eleven drawing rooms before the fish was taken away.

And every single person who discussed it would be discussing the fact that the Duke had been there.

That was the part that mattered. She had gone out to be seen, and she had been seen — and she had been seen with the arm of the most socially remote man in London under her hand, in the middle of the afternoon, on a Tuesday, taking an hour over a hat.

Let them put it together, she thought. Let every one of them put it together tonight while they are eating their soup. The Doll walked out with her Duke. And the Doll is not what we thought the Doll was.

In the carriage going home she took off the amber hat and sat holding it in her lap and found that her hands were shaking again.

“Well?” Adrian said.

“Four letters, at least.”

“That is not what I asked.”

Vivienne looked at him.

“I am frightened,” she said. “I am frightened of that dinner. Not of him. Of the room — of walking in there and having thirty men look at my face and decide, in the first three seconds, what I am. I have done it a thousand times as a wallflower. I have never once done it as the thing they are supposed to be afraid of.”

Adrian did not tell her not to be frightened. She loved him for that, immediately and permanently. He simply reached over in the dark of the carriage and took her hand — the first deliberate taking of her hand in a year of marriage, and she felt it down to the bone — and he held it, and looked out of the window, and said, “Then we shall arrive first, and stand together by the fireplace, and let them all come in and find us already there.”