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

Chapter 19

The Grand Ball at Almack’s was held on the last Tuesday of May, and Vivienne had not been inside those rooms since her first season.

It was the hardest room in England to enter and the simplest room in England to be destroyed in. Almack’s admitted no one; its patronesses decided by a nod at the top of the stairs who would be received and who would be told, with perfect courtesy, that there was no room. Three years earlier, Vivienne Ravenscroft had walked up those stairs on her father’s arm with her heart in her mouth and had been received on the strength of a name that was already going bankrupt. She had been twenty-one, and pretty, and terrified, and she had thought that being received was the same thing as being safe.

She knew better now.

They came late, deliberately, and they came in a plain black carriage with no crest, because Adrian had said that a man who arrives in a carriage without a crest is either nobody or so far above the room that he does not need to announce himself, and there was not a soul in Almack’s who would think the Duke of Thornbury was nobody.

The stairs were the same stairs. The same crush of plumes and scarlet and feverish pink silk. The same wet London rain coming in with every opening door. The same smell of crushed flowers and beeswax and French perfume over the whole of it like a varnish.

But the silence was new.

It came up the stairs ahead of her, room by room — a hush that started at the doors of the great ballroom and went out through the antechambers and down to the foot of the staircase, the way a wind goes across a field. By the time Vivienne reached the top step on her husband’s arm, the orchestra had faltered, recovered, and faltered again, and half the room had turned around.

She was wearing the deep crimson again. She had decided that three weeks earlier and had not changed her mind since. The bruise on her cheekbone was almost gone — a faint yellowish shadow under the powder that no one who was not looking for it would ever see — and she had had Nan put no powder on it at all.

And around her throat, over the crimson silk, sat the Thornbury diamonds.

There had been an argument about that. It had lasted eleven minutes and Adrian had lost it, which was the first argument of their marriage and the beginning of the discovery, on both sides, that they were going to have a great many of them and that neither of them was going to enjoy losing.

“You cannot wear them,” he had said. “Not to that room. They will think you are displaying the trophy of what he tried to take.”

“Then they will think it,” Vivienne had said. “I am tired, Adrian, of what they will think. I have given a year of my life to what they will think and it bought me a locked room and a debtor’s hand across my face. I am going to walk into Almack’s wearing the thing he tried to steal off my throat, and I am going to stand in the middle of the room in it and drink ratafia, and by the time the supper is served there will not be a woman in England who does not know that the diamonds stayed where they were put.”

He had looked at her for a long moment.

“You know,” he had said, “that I have never once been able to win an argument with you.”

“You have never once tried properly. You keep losing on purpose because you are pleased with me.”

“That,” Adrian had said, “is also true,” and had not denied it.

So she wore them.

And she stood at the top of the stairs of Almack’s in the deep crimson with the diamonds on and the vanishing mark of a man’s hand on her cheek, and she looked out across the greatest room in London, and waited to see who would move first.

Lady Sarah Jersey moved first.

The most powerful patroness of Almack’s, the woman who decided at a glance which of the six hundred families of England would be permitted to be seen and which would not, was standing at the head of the room in her customary position by the great fireplace with four other patronesses around her and a circle of the most fashionable men in the room standing attendance on her. She had been one of the women who had coined the phrase the Duke’s beautiful, discarded porcelain doll. She had said it in Vivienne’s hearing once, at Wrenfield House, in a tone of such kindly, smiling, entirely deliberate cruelty that Vivienne had gone home and not slept for two nights.

Lady Jersey turned away from the man she was speaking to and looked straight down the length of the room at the Duchess of Thornbury.

Vivienne did not move.

She stood at her husband’s arm at the top of the stairs with her chin level and her hands still, and she looked back at the most feared woman in London across sixty feet of polished floor, and did not smile, and did not curtsey, and did not look away — because there was one thing she had learned in a locked room at Wrenfield House and one thing only, and it was this: that a woman who looks away first has already agreed with the verdict.

For three full seconds it hung there, and half of London watched it, and the orchestra played on into that enormous silence like a man whistling in a graveyard.

And then Lady Jersey curtseyed.

It was a small curtsey. It was exactly half an inch deeper than it needed to be, and it lasted half a second longer than it should have, and it was done in front of four patronesses and eleven of the most fashionable men in England, and not one person in that room would ever afterwards be able to say with any confidence whether it had happened at all.

Vivienne inclined her head one quarter of an inch in return, and turned, and walked down into the room on her husband’s arm, and the room swallowed them whole.

At supper she danced with her husband for the first time in their marriage.

He was a bad dancer. That was another thing she had not known about him and now knew, along with the fact that he could not sit still when she was reading in the evenings, and that he took his coffee with three lumps of sugar in a house where the servants had been told for a year that he took none, and that when he was thinking hard about a difficult problem he walked the long gallery end to end at a pace that made the footmen dizzy. He was a bad dancer, and he improved not at all over the course of the waltz, and Vivienne — standing in the middle of Almack’s in her crimson with the diamonds at her throat and her husband’s hand in the small of her back — laughed out loud in front of six hundred people.

“What,” Adrian said, deeply suspicious.

“Nothing.”

“Vivienne.”

“You are a very warlike man, my lord, and you cannot count to three.”

“I can count to three perfectly well. I have been counting to three for four years in that House and winning votes with it.” He turned her, and trod on the tail of her gown. “The trouble is that I have never before had to count to three while looking at you.”

Vivienne went pink to the roots of her hair and did not recover for the rest of the waltz, and was extremely glad that the room had gone back to looking at her with something other than pity.

Percival Greave hanged himself in the lodging house in Market Lane on the fourth of June, 1815.

Vivienne learned it from Reynolds, who came up from the City at eleven o’clock in the morning with a face like a man carrying something careful, and who told her in the small room on the second floor with the door shut, and then stood there and waited to be dismissed and was not.

He had been found by the landlady. He had left a note, which Reynolds had read and copied and had not brought with him, and which said nothing at all except that his affairs were in the hands of his solicitor and that his sister was to be told nothing that was not necessary.

“He had no coat,” Reynolds said. “He had sold it four days before. He had three shillings and a pistol that had been pawned and redeemed twice.”

Vivienne sat down on the edge of the writing desk and looked at the wall for a while.

She had known, in the abstract, what Adrian had done when he had said I will own you. She had not until that moment understood what it meant to buy a man’s whole ruin and then stand at the end of the chain with a key in your hand. It had not been Adrian who had refused to open the door. Adrian had left the business exactly as he said he would — bought out the debts, taken the estate in settlement, sent the sister’s dowry back to Bath. He had not hounded the man. He had simply stopped, and left Percival Greave in a room with nothing, which was the thing Percy had already done to himself three years before the Duke of Thornbury ever made a bargain with his father.

“He was not a good man,” Vivienne said.

“No, Your Grace.”

“But he was twenty-nine years old, and he was not a bad man, he was a weak one, and the world is a very bad place to be weak in.” She stood up. “Is the sister told?”

“His Grace’s man went to Bath yesterday. She has the money. She did not know where her brother was, and had not known for two years, and she was —” Reynolds paused, looking for a word. “She was more ashamed of the two years than of the end.”

Vivienne looked at the fire.

“Mr. Reynolds,” she said. “When the Duke sold up the house in Ravensworth, did he keep the contents?”

“The furniture, Your Grace. And the plate. It was delivered to a warehouse we hold at Southwark. The Duke instructed that none of it be sold, in case —” the clerk hesitated — “in case you should ever wish to know where it went.”

For the second time in three months, Vivienne Hale stood still in her own house with her whole chest full of something she had no words for and a husband elsewhere in the building doing something dull and administrative.

“Then I want the box of letters,” she said. “The letters from the sister in Bath. There will be a bundle of them, in the sale inventory, from the solicitor’s file — every letter she wrote to her brother in the last four years. I want them brought here, and I want them put in the small room at Alder House, the one with the window over the yard, and I want nothing done with them at all.”

“Your Grace?”

“Mr. Reynolds, when this business began I was a woman who had spent a year being told that she did not matter, and there was a man in the middle of it who was told the same thing all his life and believed it, and he died in an unfurnished room with three shillings in his pocket.” She turned and looked at him levelly. “I do not need to forgive him. He put a hand across my face and I will carry that for the rest of my life. But I will not be the second person to tell his sister that her family does not matter, and I will not have her letters burned because she might not want them read. Somebody in that family should have something left. That is all.”

Reynolds put his hat on.

“Very good, Your Grace,” he said, and went out, and Vivienne stood in the small room on the second floor for a while longer in the grey morning light before she went down to find her husband and tell him that she was going to be busy for the rest of the day and that she would like him to be downstairs at six.