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

Chapter 17

The carriage was waiting at the bottom of the steps with the lamps lit and the horses stamping, and Adrian gave the coachman an address in Grosvenor Square and then, halfway up the door, changed his mind.

“Threadneedle Street,” he said.

“Adrian —”

“There are two things I can do tonight and only one of them is any use.” He swung himself in and sat down hard. “I can go home and put sixteen men on the question of who took those books, and I will get the answer in four days, and by then it will be too late to be worth having. Or I can go and ask the only person in England who has been standing in the same room as that man for twenty years.”

Vivienne looked at him across the dark of the carriage as it lurched out onto the black gravel.

“You mean to wake Lady Montague.”

“I mean to be sitting in her drawing room when she comes down to breakfast,” Adrian said. “She is not asleep. She will not be asleep for a week.”

Richmond House from the drive was a lit theatre. Richmond House from the mews behind it, at one o’clock in the morning, was a working building — lamps in the kitchens, a scullery fire still banked, a boy carrying coal, three servants in the yard taking the last of the silver in from the dining room on a tray. And at the back of it, on the second floor above the morning room, one window still burning.

Adrian sent a note up with a footman who took an extraordinary amount of money not to be seen taking it.

The answer came down eleven minutes later, in a hand that trembled.

The green door in the walled garden. Ten minutes.

Lady Rupert Montague was waiting for them at the green door in a plain woollen wrapper with her hair in a plait down her back and a shawl pulled around her shoulders, and she was fifty years old and had been crying, and she looked at the two of them standing in her garden at one in the morning with none of the fuss or the elaborate courtesies of the dinner table four hours earlier.

“You have broken him,” she said.

“I have given him a way out,” Adrian said. “He is drinking brandy in his study and he will be in Bath by the end of May, and he will keep his seat, and his son will keep his ship, and he will die in his own bed at seventy. I have broken nothing that was not already cracked.”

Lady Montague looked at him for a long moment.

“Come inside,” she said. “There is no fire in the garden.”

The room she took them into was the one room in that great gilded house that had been hers — a small sitting room on the third floor, at the back, with a low ceiling and a worn carpet and a good fire, and a sewing table, and three hundred books on two walls. It was the room of a woman who had been married to a public man for twenty-eight years and had long ago stopped expecting to be met anywhere but at the top of the stairs.

“Sit,” she said. “I will not offer you anything at one in the morning.”

“We have not come to be offered anything,” Vivienne said. “We have come because my husband has spent four hours tonight arranging your husband’s future and there is one matter that neither of us has been able to account for, and I would rather ask you directly than set sixteen men to find out.”

Lady Montague sat down in the chair by the fire and looked into it.

“The books,” she said.

“The books.”

The older woman was silent for a while.

“I have been married to Rupert Montague since I was nineteen years old,” she said at last. “I have borne him four children and buried one of them, and I have sat at his table for twenty-eight years while he assembled the careers of eleven men and destroyed the careers of four, and in the whole of that time — in the whole of it — nobody has ever once asked me a question about anything that mattered. Not one person. Not him, not his guests, not the wives, not the great men who come here to smoke cigars and decide the price of bread.” She looked up. “Do you know that I was the one who kept his books until I was thirty-two?”

Vivienne sat forward.

“Before the Wapping counting house,” Lady Montague said. “Before Reed. There were nine years when the entire financial position of that man rested on a ledger that I wrote up myself, at this table, every Thursday night, while he was in the House and I was here with an infant in a cradle. I can read his accounts the way a parson reads the Bible, Your Grace. I know what every column means, and I have known since 1803 what he has been doing at that warehouse.”

The fire cracked.

“Eleven days ago,” she said, “I went down to Wapping with the carriage while my husband was at his club. I told Reed I had come for the household accounts and he let me in because I have been coming to that building since before he was born. I took the four red volumes out of the east room and left four linen ledgers in their place, and I brought them here.” She lifted her chin. “And when I heard yesterday morning that a clerk of the Duke of Thornbury’s had been inside the house in Threadneedle Street, I understood exactly what my husband had been doing, and I understood that he had begun to lose, and I sat in this chair all of last night and looked at the fire and considered what a woman is to do with twenty years of a man’s crimes.”

Adrian’s voice was very careful.

“Where are they?”

“Not here,” Lady Montague said. “I am not a fool and I have been watching that man’s agents for a fortnight. They are in the parish chest of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, behind the vestry wall, where the cloth is kept, and the curate is my second cousin and he believes they are the accounts of a charitable trust.” She folded her hands. “I will give them to you tonight, Your Grace, on one condition.”

“Name it.”

“My son Thomas is eighteen years old and he is a midshipman on the Eurydice in the Mediterranean, and he does not know what his father is, and he never will. He will inherit this house and the estate in Kent and he will take his seat in the House, and he will be the fourth Montague to sit there in a hundred years.” She looked up at Adrian with those exhausted, immaculate, entirely unafraid pale eyes. “I do not care what becomes of my husband. He has been a stranger in this house since before the war. I care about the boy, and about the name, and about the fact that a Montague should not be known in history as the man who sold powder to the French. Take the books, do what you like with them, and let the scandal fall on him and not on the name. That is the condition. If you cannot keep it, walk out of this room now and I will burn them in that grate before you are off the gravel.”

Adrian Hale stood up.

He looked down at the wife of the man who had paid a debtor to put a hand across his own wife’s face, and Vivienne watched her husband’s expression, and she could not read a single thing in it at all.

“Lady Montague,” he said. “Your son will never hear it from me, and he will never hear it from my wife, and the only men who will ever know the whole of what your husband did will be the two of you and the two of us. You have my word on it, and I do not give my word often, and I have never once broken it.”

The older woman stood.

“Then let us go and get the books,” she said. “It is a long drive to Aldgate.”

They were in the carriage until half past three in the morning, going east through the sleeping city and back again, and Vivienne sat with four red leather volumes on her knees and did not open them.

At the church, in the vestry, by lamp-light, with a curate in his nightshirt looking on and very much wishing he were not, Lady Montague had gone behind the panelled wall with the key on her own chain and lifted them out of a deal box among the altar linen, and handed them to Adrian one by one, and there had been no ceremony in it at all.

Then she had turned to Vivienne in the doorway of that cold little room and said, “Your Grace. When your house at Wapping is open — the refuge. I heard what my husband said. I have a niece who was turned out of her husband’s house in 1811 with nothing but a trunk, and she lives with me now, and I have never been able to do anything for her, and I am fifty years old and I have never once been able to do anything for anybody.” She had put out her hand. “Write to me. I will come and scrub floors if that is what is wanted.”

Vivienne had shaken it.

Now, in the dark of the carriage going west, with the four books on her lap and her husband’s shoulder warm against her own, she said, “You are going to destroy him in the morning.”

“I am going to destroy the book,” Adrian said. “The man has been dealt with. There is nothing in those four volumes that will make him any more ruined than he already is, and your new house at Wapping is going to want a roof on it and the duty is going to want paying, and there is a clause in his own agreement — the third sheet, the one I gave him at the desk — that obliges him to fund the conversion out of the monies named in the second column.” He paused. “He signed it because he thought it was a way of paying his fine. It is a way of paying for the refuge’s first year.”

Vivienne turned her head against his coat.

“You are a very frightening man,” she said.

“Yes,” Adrian said, without apology. “I am. And as of last night I am no longer a frightening man who is alone in a room with a locked door. Which is, I believe, the entire difference between us and them.”

He took her hand in the dark.

“Sleep,” he said. “We have a great deal to do in the morning.”