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

Chapter 13

Richmond House sat on rising ground above the river with a drive of black gravel and a screen of old limes, and every window of it was lit by the time their carriage came up the avenue at half past seven.

They had come early. Deliberately, insultingly early — before the first of the Cabinet had arrived, before the host had finished dressing.

The footman at the door looked at the Duke of Thornbury’s card and then at the Duke of Thornbury and then, with admirable discipline, showed them into the long drawing room on the first floor where a fire had been lit and where nobody at all was standing.

The room was all gilt and Adam ceilings and great swags of drapery, and it was entirely empty, and Vivienne walked into the middle of it in her crimson gown and stood on the Turkestan carpet with her husband’s arm under her hand and thought: This is the last minute before the argument starts.

“Where will he be?” she said.

“Above stairs still. He will hear we have arrived within ninety seconds of us entering the room.”

“I want the fireplace.”

“Then have the fireplace.”

They crossed to the great marble chimney piece at the far end of the room, which was the only place from which the double doors to the dining room, the double doors from the hall, and the windows could all be watched at once. Adrian stood with his back to the fire and Vivienne stood at his right hand, and there they waited.

The door opened four minutes later.

“Harrington —”

Lord Rupert Montague stopped three steps into his own drawing room with his hands still raised from the final adjustment of his cravat, and looked at the two of them.

Vivienne had built a picture of him in her mind and she had got it wrong in a way that she found herself enjoying. She had expected a bull — a red-faced, snorting, overbearing man of the sort who shouts at servants. What came through the door was a soft, wide, carefully upholstered monument to the pleasures of the table: a great pale face, two chins arranged one above the other with the precision of a man who had been dressed by a highly-paid valet, small neat hands, and eyes that were not stupid at all. He had spent forty years watching men across dinner tables and he was very good at it, and Vivienne watched him take in, in the space of two breaths, that the Duke of Thornbury was standing in his drawing room with his wife on his arm and that the wife had a bruise on her face and was not wearing so much as a veil.

“Harrington,” he said again, and the surprise in it was genuine and he recovered from the surprise in about the time it takes to blink. “This is — I confess, my dear fellow, I did not expect you. My man will have lost your reply.”

“I sent no reply,” Adrian said. “I thought it better to come in person. I have been served with a complaint this morning, Rupert, and I could think of no better place to discuss it than the house of the man who served me.”

The silence in that great gilt room lasted a full three seconds.

And then Lord Rupert Montague did something Vivienne had not expected at all and would think about for the rest of her life: he laughed.

It was not a frightened laugh. He put his head back on his many chins and laughed like a man at his own club who has just heard a good story at another man’s expense, and he came forward across the carpet and took both of Adrian’s hands in his.

“God, but I have missed you,” he said. “Four years of watching you cut Castlereagh’s arguments to pieces at a distance and never once being able to get you out to Richmond. And now here you are, in person, on the very day.” He turned to Vivienne and made her an elaborate bow with the genuine warmth of a host who means it. “And the Duchess of Thornbury, whose beauty the whole town has been talking nonsense about for a year. Your Grace, you are worth the noise.”

“Lord Montague,” Vivienne said, and gave him her hand, and let her eyes go to her husband’s the way a wife does — that small domestic flick of the glance that says am I to like him? — and watched Montague register it exactly as she intended, as a woman showing off the fact that she and her Duke were one body that night.

He registered it. She saw him register it. And she saw him decide — she watched him make the decision, in real time, behind those neat clever eyes — that whatever was in the letter from his attorney this morning, whatever his man had told him about the cellar and the maid and the Wapping counting house, there would be time tonight to see how the land lay before he moved.

That was the moment she knew they were going to win.

Because the one thing Rupert Montague had not accounted for, in four years of careful watching, was that his opponent’s wife might be a player.

“We dine at eight,” he said genially. “Castlereagh is coming, and Harbottle, and old Lord Carr — the usual set. You will answer for yourself and your charming wife at my table and I shall be glad of it. Tell me, Harrington, do you hunt at all these days? I have a stand of coverts at Cobham that would —”

And Vivienne let them talk about coverts, and stood with her husband’s arm under her hand and her bruise facing the door, and waited for the rest of the government to walk in and look at her.

They came in ones and twos over the next twenty minutes, and every one of them did the same thing.

They came in talking. They stopped talking when they saw her. Their eyes went to her left cheek and stayed there for the length of one heartbeat, and then — being English gentlemen of the highest order, which meant being men who would rather die than make a scene at dinner — they met her gaze and bowed and asked after her with a courtesy so immaculate that it was nearly a kindness.

She had expected embarrassment. She had prepared for contempt.

She had not prepared for the fact that by the time the fourth of them arrived, she could feel the room beginning to turn.

“Your Grace,” said Viscount Harbottle, twenty-six, handsome, ambitious, and the man the whole of London knew was being groomed for the next vacancy at the Board of Trade — “Your Grace, I was at Wrenfield House last night. I did not see you leave.”

“No,” Vivienne said pleasantly. “I did not leave.”

The young viscount went the colour of a beetroot and did not recover for the rest of the evening, and Vivienne — who had not intended any cruelty and had discovered, with a small cold shock, that she was not one hundred percent sorry — watched his distress land in the room and watched two other men notice it, and understood in that moment that the story she had walked into Richmond House wearing was already doing its work.

Nobody had told them anything. That was the beauty of it. She had come into the room with a bruise and a husband and no explanation, and thirty men of the government had spent the last hour constructing forty possible explanations, of which exactly none was the Duke of Thornbury’s wife was struck by a debtor in a room in a house where nobody was there to protect her, and every one of them was worse for somebody at that table than for her.

At eight o’clock they went in to dinner.

And Lord Rupert Montague, host and careful man, put the Duke and Duchess of Thornbury on either side of his own wife — the two places of highest honour in the room, side by side, both facing the head of the table — and Vivienne sat down to a dinner of venison and claret with the wife of her enemy on her right and the third most dangerous man in England on her left, and smiled, and ate.