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

Chapter 16

“Generous,” Lord Rupert Montague repeated. He said it the way a man says a word in a foreign language he has heard but never had to use himself.

“Generous,” Adrian said, “by the standards of what you have done.”

He drew a folded sheet from his breast pocket and laid it on the desk beside the ledger.

“You will withdraw the complaint in King’s Bench before ten o’clock tomorrow morning. You will instruct your man Lambert to enter the discontinuance personally, and you will furnish me with a copy of the entry on the roll by noon. There will be no petition to the House of Lords. There will be no recognizance to keep the peace, and there will be no committee, and there will be no examination of my conduct in front of the Cabinet.”

“And if I decline?”

“Then at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, four pages of your ledger, an affidavit from the Viscount Rotherby, and a statement from a clerk in your own counting house will be laid before the Crown prosecutors.” Adrian’s voice did not change at all. “I told you what follows. I will not repeat it, because you are not a stupid man and I have no wish to be theatrical in your own house.”

Montague looked at the ledger on his desk. He put two fingers on the corner of it, and turned it a little, so that the cracked red spine faced him.

“What else,” he said.

“You will withdraw from the chair of the party’s finance committee, on grounds of health, before the end of the month. You will not speak in the debate on the Corn Bill. You will not vote in the division. You will absent yourself from the House entirely from the second week of May and you will be in Bath, where the waters are extremely good for a man of your constitution.”

Montague’s mouth twisted. “You are asking me to leave my own party in the middle of the fight.”

“I am asking you to leave the country in the middle of the fight,” Adrian said, “and I have not finished.”

He took out a second sheet.

“There are eleven hundred and forty-two pounds of unpaid duty on goods landed at Wapping in the last eighteen months, and a further three thousand nine hundred owing on the four shipments in this ledger that are marked in the second column. You will settle the whole of that with the Customs House out of your own funds — not the party’s, not the estate’s, your own — and you will do it quietly, and if a single clerk at the Custom House ever speaks of it, I will know where the words came from.”

“Five thousand pounds.”

“You have sixty thousand a year, Rupert. You have spent four years persuading yourself that this is a game and that the men on the other side are pieces. Five thousand pounds is what it costs to discover that you were wrong.” Adrian laid the sheet down. “And you will sign a document, drawn this evening by my attorney, transferring to the Duchess of Thornbury the freehold of the counting house and warehouse at Wapping, with all its contents, and assigning to her the whole of the accounts receivable held against the four shipments named in the second column of your book.”

That, at last, made Montague look up.

“The Duchess.”

“Yes.”

“That building is worth nine thousand pounds.”

“It is worth nothing whatever to you, since you will never be permitted to keep a ledger in it again without my knowing.” Adrian paused. “It is worth a great deal to my wife, who has spent the last three years in the drawing rooms of this city being treated as furniture and who has — as of twenty-four hours ago — formed the intention of doing something about the conditions under which women in this country are permitted to be ruined.”

Vivienne, standing at the end of the desk with her hands folded in front of her, felt her own breath stop in her chest.

Adrian did not look at her.

“She will not take a penny of it for herself,” he said. “She will convert the warehouse at Wapping into a house of refuge for women of this city who have been turned out of a household with nothing — women who have been struck, or dismissed, or abandoned, or widowed without a settlement, and who have no roof and no recourse and no one in the world to speak for them. She has had the whole of the afternoon to think about it.” A pause. “She has had rather longer than that.”

Montague’s pale eyes went to Vivienne.

He looked at her for a long moment — at the bruise, and the crimson gown, and the flat, level, unembarrassed way she was standing in front of his desk at midnight with her hands folded.

“You have made a remarkable marriage, Thornbury,” he said.

“Yes,” Adrian said. “I have.”

Montague picked up the pen.

He signed the first sheet, and the second, and then he drew a third piece of paper towards him and wrote four lines in a broad, careless, expensive hand, and blotted it, and pushed it across the table.

“What is that?” Adrian said.

“An instruction to my man of business to execute the conveyance in the morning.” Montague capped the ink. “The Duchess will want to look at the warehouses before she decides what to do with them. She should not be made to wait on solicitors.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at the two of them and let out a long breath, and Vivienne saw, incredibly, the ghost of the geniality come back into his great soft face. “Damn you, Harrington. I have hated you for four years and I have never once managed to make you look at me.”

“You have never once been worth looking at,” Adrian said. “You were worth looking at this week. It will not happen again.”

And Lord Rupert Montague laughed — a real one, the same laugh he had given at the drawing-room door, but with all the floor gone out from under it — and poured three brandies with his own hands, and gave one to each of them, and raised his own.

“To the Duchess of Thornbury,” he said, “who I begin to think is the most dangerous person in this house.”

Vivienne took the glass.

“Lord Montague,” she said, “you have no idea.”

She drank it, all of it, standing up, and set the glass down empty on the desk, and it was the most deliberately unladylike thing she had ever done in her life.

They left Richmond at a quarter past midnight.

The last of the carriages had gone; the gravel drive was empty and wet, and the river beyond the lime trees was a black band with one yellow light moving on it, some barge going up towards Brentford with the tide. Vivienne walked out of Richmond House on her husband’s arm and did not say anything at all until the front door closed behind them and they were alone on the steps in the dark.

Then she stopped and stood still and put her free hand flat against the stone balustrade because her legs had gone entirely unreliable.

“Adrian.”

“I have you.”

“I am going to sit down on these steps,” she said, “in a crimson gown, at the door of Lord Rupert Montague’s house, and I am not going to be able to stand up for a minute, and you are going to have to allow it.”

“Then I shall sit down beside you.”

And he did. The Duke of Thornbury, sixth of his line, Keeper of the Privy Seal, hero of Badajoz, sat down on the wet stone steps of his enemy’s porch in his evening coat with his wife beside him and his elbows on his knees, and they sat there under the portico in the dark with the lamps burning and the rain dripping off the eaves, and neither of them spoke for a while.

“The refuge,” Vivienne said at last.

“Yes.”

“You did that without asking me.”

“I did that because you had not yet said it aloud,” Adrian said, “and I have spent a year not listening to you, and I have no intention of beginning again tonight. If it is not what you want, we will undo it in the morning. There are forty other things a building at Wapping could be.”

Vivienne looked out at the wet drive and the dark river beyond.

“I want it,” she said. “I have wanted something like it since I was nineteen years old and watched my father’s steward take the collection plate out of my mother’s hands at the door of a church because we could not afford to be seen giving it.” She turned her head. “Adrian, I want to say something to you and I want to say it before we get into that carriage, because if I wait I shall spend the whole drive rehearsing it and ruin it.”

“Then say it.”

“You are going to think it is a small thing.”

“I am not.”

“This morning,” Vivienne said, “when you went out of my bedchamber, you stopped in the doorway. And you turned round and you looked back at me. And you said —” she had to stop for a second — “you said, I will be downstairs. Two words, in an ordinary voice, about an ordinary thing. And I stood in the middle of that room for I do not know how long, because I had lived in that house for a year and I had never once been told where you were going to be. Not once. And it is such a small thing, Adrian. It is such a ridiculous, trivial, small thing to be the thing that undoes me.”

She heard him breathe out.

“It is not small,” he said.

“It is. It is the smallest thing in the world.”

“It is not small,” Adrian said again, “because for a year I gave you the largest things in the world instead — the diamonds, the house, the box at the opera — and I gave them to you exactly the way a man pays a tax, and you took them all without complaint, and you never once asked me for anything, and I let myself believe that this meant the arrangement was working.” He turned and looked at her. “I told you last night in the carriage that I was a coward. I did not know, when I said it, how much of a coward I was. I did not know that the measure of it was not Spain and it was not Badajoz. It was that I could not say to my own wife, I will be downstairs.”

Vivienne put her hand on his face.

The bruise on her cheek had gone hard and hot and there was a long day’s worth of exhaustion sitting in her bones, and the rain was coming down soft on the gravel, and Adrian turned his face into her palm the way he had done in the carriage and closed his eyes.

“You came home,” she said.

“I told you I will always come home for you.”

“Then come home,” Vivienne said, “and let it be the last time you ever have to.”

And Adrian Hale put his arm around his wife on the steps of Lord Rupert Montague’s house at a quarter past midnight on the twelfth of April, 1815, and she turned her face up to his, and he kissed her.

Not with duty. Not with the polite, careful, contractual affection of a marriage settlement.

He kissed her with a year and a half of hunger in it, and with the whole of the afternoon in Bond Street and the whole of the two rooms at Wrenfield House and every one of the three hundred and sixty silent days, and Vivienne — who had married him at twenty-one for her father’s debts and had spent a year learning to be a beautiful piece of furniture in the greatest house in London — kissed the Duke of Thornbury back on the wet steps of Richmond House and did not care who saw it, because there was nobody left in England who she needed to be careful in front of.

Behind them, somewhere in the dark of the drive, a coachman cleared his throat with tremendous discretion.

They both began to laugh.

“There is one more thing,” Vivienne said, when she could speak.

“Of course there is.”

“The ledgers.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and it stung the cut at the corner of her mouth. “The books in the cellar at Threadneedle Street. The copy Reynolds made — the original was not there, Adrian. I said so before dinner and Reynolds’ man confirmed it at six o’clock. The crates in the cellar were empty books. Ledgers of a linen venture, exactly as Lady Fiona thought. Real accounts. Nothing in them at all.”

Adrian went very still on the step.

“Then the four pages,” he said slowly.

“The four pages are genuine. Reynolds copied them from the books in the cellar, and they are true — the second column, the four shipments, the duty owed. I gave you the truth.” She turned to him in the lamplight. “But the rest of those books, Adrian — the whole of the set, the twenty years of it that Montague has been keeping at Wapping — was not in that cellar. It was taken out eleven days ago by somebody who has not come forward, and we have just signed an agreement with the only man in England who knows whose hands it is in.”

Adrian looked at her for a long moment.

“Somebody has Montague’s ledgers,” he said.

“Somebody has Montague’s ledgers,” Vivienne agreed. “And whoever it is has been sitting on them for eleven days, waiting to see how this evening ended — because the value of a book like that, Adrian, is that it is worth nothing at all until you know exactly who is losing.”

He stood up.

“The carriage,” he said.