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

Chapter 18

At ten o’clock on the morning of Wednesday the thirteenth of April, in the Court of King’s Bench at Westminster, Mr. Lambert of Threadneedle Street, attorney at law, entered a discontinuance of the action brought by his client against Arthur Adrian Hale, sixth Duke of Thornbury.

The clerk wrote it in the roll in a small fair hand and made two copies.

By eleven o’clock, the news was in the lobby of the House.

By noon, it was in three of the five clubs on St James’s Street.

By four in the afternoon it was being told at a card table in Mayfair as a matter of great amusement, in the following form: that Lord Rupert Montague, having publicly sued the Duke of Thornbury for trespass and assault in the matter of a scandal at Wrenfield House, had the previous evening entertained the Duke and his wife at his own dinner table, and that by the next morning he had withdrawn the whole of it, and that he was — so ran the report from a footman who had been in the room — going to Bath.

Nobody at that card table knew why. That was the part that made it delicious.

They knew four unrelated facts and no way to put them together. The Duchess of Thornbury had been seen in Bond Street on Tuesday afternoon with the Duke’s arm under hers, buying hats, and had a bruise on her face and had made no attempt to hide it. The Duke had ridden four hundred miles from Edinburgh in three days and come straight into Wrenfield House in his travelling clothes in the middle of the season’s greatest ball. The Viscount Rotherby, who had been drunk and insulting on the night in question, had not been seen anywhere in London since. And Lord Rupert Montague, who had been lining up his whole career against the Corn Bill for four years, had suddenly and unaccountably discovered that the waters at Bath were good for his constitution.

By Wednesday night, London had constructed a story out of those four facts, and the story was not the true one, and every single version of it was worse for the men who had made the arrangement.

Vivienne heard three of the versions herself within the week. In the first, she had been grossly insulted by Lord Rotherby at Wrenfield House and the Duke had horsewhipped him and Montague had been obliged to withdraw his suit to avoid being named in the divorce pleadings. In the second, the Duke had fought a duel in France with an unnamed Frenchman over the Duchess’s honour and the bruise was shrapnel. In the third — and this was the one that reached the newspapers, in the vaguest possible terms, under the heading The Duke of Thornbury’s Return to Society — the Duchess had been abducted.

All three were rubbish. Not one of them harmed her.

That was the thing about a story that nobody can verify: the public does not abandon it, they merely stop requiring it to be true.

On the Thursday, Vivienne received eleven visitors.

On the Friday, twenty-six.

By the second week of May, the Duchess of Thornbury’s Thursday drawing room was the most crowded room in London, and they were not all coming to see the bruise, because the bruise was gone. They were coming because of a sentence that had got into circulation and could not be got out again.

The sentence was this: She walked into that house with a handprint on her face and came out of it with a warehouse.

Nobody in London knew what it meant. Everybody in London wanted to.

The warehouse was real. She and Adrian had gone down to Wapping on the Saturday morning in a plain carriage with no crest, and they had stood in the yard behind a four-storey brick building on the river side and looked up at it while a man in an apron explained to them that the ground floor held four thousand square feet of dry storage, that the first floor had the counting room at the east end and two further rooms and a strong room, that there was a coal cellar and a well, and that the whole of it was held on a lease with eighteen years to run.

“The lease is not yours,” Vivienne said.

“The freehold is mine,” Adrian said. “I bought the freehold on Wednesday morning, from the ground landlord, through Reynolds, in the name of a trust called Ravenscroft — which is not my name, and not your father’s name, and not a name that any clerk in London will connect with either of us.”

They stood there for a while in the cold and the river-smell and the cry of the gulls.

“I will need a matron,” Vivienne said. “A woman of experience, who has run a household or a hospital, and who has never once in her life been asked for her opinion. I will need a physician willing to come out at night. I will need a solicitor — and before you offer me yours, no, I want a woman. There is one, a Mrs. Clara Deverell, who has been an attorney’s clerk since she was fourteen and has never been permitted to take a case of her own, and I want her, and I want her at a salary that would embarrass her.”

“A woman attorney.”

“There are four of them in England and I know where all four are,” Vivienne said. “Adrian, I have spent three years in drawing rooms listening to women whom the world would describe as nothing at all, and every one of those rooms was full of information that no man in London ever bothered to collect. You have sixteen men watching seven households. I have two hundred women watching every household in the city.” She turned to him. “On the day that I open that building, I want it run by the only people in this country who are invisible enough to see what is happening. Do you understand what I am building?”

Her husband, standing in the yard at Wapping in his plain greatcoat with the gulls going over, looked at her for a long moment.

“Yes,” he said. “I understand exactly what you are building. And I am rather glad you are on my side.”

The refuge at Wapping opened its doors on the first of September, 1815, at nine o’clock in the morning, under a name that Vivienne had chosen herself and would not allow anybody to change.

It was not called the Thornbury Refuge and it was not called the Duchess’s Asylum and it was not named for any man at all, living or dead.

It was called Alder House.

There was a brass plate beside the door with no title on it and no patron and no crest, and on the first day, eight women came to it.

The first was nineteen years old, brought by her own mother, and had a broken collarbone and a two-month-old child and a husband in Clerkenwell who had put her out of the house in a nightgown. The second had been a lady’s maid in a great house in Belgravia for eleven years and had been dismissed without a character on the word of a footman. The third was the wife of a printer in Southwark who had been sold up for his debts and had been left with three children and no settlement. The fourth was Lady Constance Ferrers’ niece, who arrived in a rented hack with one trunk and stayed for seven months and afterwards became Alder House’s first paid matron.

By Christmas there had been fifty-one.

By the following May there were four hundred and six, and Alder House had a second house, and an office in the City where Mrs. Deverell had won nine cases in the consistory courts and had been asked to speak, three times, before a committee of the House of Commons.

The Duke of Thornbury signed the cheques, and said nothing in public, and said a great deal in private to the four men in the Cabinet who were prepared to listen.

And Vivienne Hale, Duchess of Thornbury, discovered something in the first three months of that autumn that surprised nobody who had ever watched her ride a horse: that she was not, in fact, a woman of the drawing room at all. She was a woman of warehouses and ledgers and the consistory courts, and she had simply been standing in the wrong rooms for a year.