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

Chapter 14

Lady Rupert Montague was a small, immaculate, exhausted woman of fifty with pale blue eyes and hands that never stopped moving, and she talked about lace for the first course and about her son in the Navy for the second, and Vivienne listened to every word with the whole of her attention, because she had learned at fifteen that a woman who is listened to will tell you everything.

“—— and so of course I said to him, Rupert, I said, if you must go down to Wapping at six in the morning, then go, but do not expect me to pretend it is a pleasure.” Lady Montague turned a fork over in her fingers and put it down. “Half past five he leaves the house on a Thursday. Every Thursday of the world, for two years. And comes back at nine with ink on his cuffs and says the road was bad.”

“The road to Wapping is always bad,” Vivienne said, sympathetically, and took a sip of claret, and did not look at the head of the table.

“Is it? I have no idea. I have never once been.”

Vivienne felt the whole architecture of the evening settle into place.

Across the table, between the silver epergne and a great arrangement of hothouse flowers, she could see her husband.

Adrian was seated at Lord Castlereagh’s right hand, two places down from the head, and he was doing what he had done for four years in the House: he was listening. He had a glass in his hand that he had not once raised to his lips, and his head was very slightly inclined, and there was nothing in his face at all. Castlereagh, the leader of the House, a hollow-eyed man who looked as if he had not slept properly since 1812, was talking to him with the animation of somebody who is very glad to be talking to a person who understands what he is saying.

“— that the Bill dies if it goes to a division this month,” Castlereagh was saying. “I have told the Regent, I have told the Treasury, and I shall tell you, Thornbury, that the arithmetic in the Commons is worse than anybody will admit.”

“Then do not divide this month,” Adrian said.

“The party expects it.”

“The party expects a great many things it does not get. The country needs cheap bread more than the party needs a defeat.” He said it without heat, without any emphasis at all, in the same tone in which he had told Vivienne that her hair had been coming down in the mist. “Rupert does not want the Bill to fail, Castlereagh. He wants it to be withdrawn — withdrawn by you, before a division, so that the Crown is seen to have conceded under pressure from the landed interest and the moral capital sits in his pocket.”

Castlereagh set down his glass.

“You think so.”

“I am certain of it. He has money on it.”

At the head of the table, forty feet away, Lord Rupert Montague was telling a story about a horse and laughing and eating a great deal of venison, and Vivienne — watching him over the rim of her wine — saw him glance down the table at Adrian for a quarter of a second and then away.

“The man is not a fool,” Castlereagh said slowly. “He has been in this house for twenty years.”

“Men of twenty years’ standing are precisely the men who make this error,” Adrian said. “They believe that because they have never been caught, they have never been capable of being caught.”

Vivienne looked away and cut her venison and turned back to Lady Montague and asked, with the exact quality of innocent curiosity that the drawing rooms of London had spent a year training into her, whether the lace on her sleeve was English.

They left the table at half past ten, and the ladies went through into the drawing room, and Vivienne sat down on a sofa by the fire, and knew — with the total certainty of a woman who had been doing this since she was seventeen — that the next twenty minutes would decide the whole of the evening.

Because the men would stay behind with the port and the cigars, and they would talk about the Corn Bill, and they would talk about Lord Rupert Montague’s complaint in the King’s Bench, because the whole of the government had heard about it by now, and it would be said in that dining room, among men with glasses in their hands, that the Duke of Thornbury had been sued in open court by his own host, and somebody would ask him to answer for it, and he would either have an answer or he would not.

And Vivienne could not be in that room. No woman could. That was the rule, and the rule was the whole of the trap, and it was precisely the trap that had kept her decorative and silent for a year.

She sat with a cup of tea in her hands and looked around the drawing room, and she felt, for the first time that evening, a flicker of genuine fear.

If he fails in there, everything I did this afternoon is worse than nothing.

“Your Grace.”

She looked up.

The woman who had come to sit on the end of the sofa was perhaps forty, and she was not one of the ornaments. Vivienne had been watching her all evening — a tall, plain, well-dressed woman with grey in her hair and a habit of looking at people a second longer than anyone else in the room — and she now knew, from Lady Montague’s own remarks over the soup, exactly who she was.

“Lady Constance Ferrers.”

“You know me.”

“Your husband is a Lord of the Admiralty.” Vivienne set down her cup. “And you have been looking at my face all evening with more interest than anybody else in the room, and less appetite, which I take as a compliment.”

Lady Constance Ferrers’ mouth moved.

“I have been looking at your face,” she said quietly, “because my niece was struck by her husband in the year 1811 and told nobody for eleven months, and because I have spent the whole of this dinner watching the wife of the Duke of Thornbury sit at a table of thirty people with a handprint on her cheek, wearing crimson, and not be ruined by it.” She paused. “I would like to know how you did it.”

Vivienne looked at her.

She had a dozen answers ready — the polished, careful, socially correct answers she had rehearsed in the carriage. She did not use any of them.

“I was struck last night,” she said, “in a locked room, by a man who was paid to do it, because someone wished to use me to hurt my husband. And I have spent the whole of today deciding that if I were going to be used, then I would be used by myself, and by nobody else, ever again.” She picked up her tea. “That is how. There is no trick in it. There is only the decision, and the decision is very hard, and it takes about four hours, and I would be glad to sit with you and your niece one afternoon next week and tell you both the whole of it.”

Lady Constance Ferrers was silent for a moment.

Then she said, “The Bill,” and her voice had gone very level. “My husband has been in the House for thirty years and he has voted against Thornbury’s grain measures three times. If I ask him to abstain, he will want to know why.”

“Will you ask him?”

“I might,” Lady Constance said, “if I thought it would be useful.” She looked across the room toward the door to the dining room. “Mrs. Arbuthnot is sitting by the window and she is the closest friend Lady Jersey has in England. Mrs. Arbuthnot has been looking at your face all evening as well. If you were to go and speak to her before the men come in —”

Vivienne was already standing.

She got four minutes with Mrs. Arbuthnot, and she spent them on nothing at all.

That was the discipline of it. She sat down, admired the view of the river, asked after the health of a mutual acquaintance, and mentioned — without emphasis, as a piece of gossip that had amused her — that she had been in Bond Street that afternoon and had bought an amber hat and had paid a scandalous price for it. And then she listened for three minutes while Mrs. Arbuthnot talked about the Duchess of Devonshire’s ball the following week.

At no point did she mention her own face. At no point did she explain anything. She simply sat beside the woman with a bruise on her cheekbone in the light of the fire for four full minutes and allowed her to look at it, and to be comfortable with it, and to ask no questions, and to be made a party — silently, without a word being spoken — to the fact that nobody had said anything at all.

Women like Mrs. Arbuthnot wrote letters about silences.

At eleven o’clock the double doors opened and the men came back in, and Vivienne rose to her feet with her heart going far too fast, and looked for her husband’s face, and found it.

Adrian came through the doorway in the middle of a group of four men. He was not smiling, because he never smiled, but there was a quality to the way the four men were standing around him that had not been there at dinner. Two of them were nodding at something. One of them — old Lord Carr, who owned half of Lincolnshire and had voted against every reform of his life — had a hand on Adrian’s sleeve.

And Lord Rupert Montague was standing four feet behind him, alone, holding a glass of port he had forgotten to drink.

He was laughing. His mouth was open and he was laughing, because he was the host and a man in his own drawing room must be at his ease.

But he had heard something in that dining room, over the cigars, and Vivienne knew it — she could see it in the small neat hands, in the way he had turned half away from the room and was looking at his own fire.

Then the eyes of Lord Rupert Montague came up and found her across the crowd.

And they rested on her bruise for a long, long moment, and Vivienne — standing in the middle of his wife’s drawing room in a crimson gown with a cup of tea in her hand — looked straight back at him, and did not smile, and did not look away, and held it until he did.

That was the moment the room changed.

Because Lord Rupert Montague had spent the whole of that dinner watching thirty of the most powerful men in England look at the Duchess of Thornbury’s face. And every one of them had looked at the Duke’s arm. And in the last half hour, with the cigars going round, something had gone down that table which he had not heard, and every man in that room had heard it, and he had not.

He set down his glass.

“Thornbury,” he said, in a voice pitched to the whole room. “My dear fellow. A word before you go.”