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

Chapter 20

It was August, and raining on the Thames, when Vivienne finally went into her husband’s study.

She had not been avoiding it. That was what she told herself, and it was a lie, and both of them knew it. In the four months since the night at Wrenfield House, the door at the end of the second-floor passage had stayed shut, and neither of them had ever once mentioned it, and every time she walked past it Vivienne felt the old shape of the year rise up in her chest like a bad smell in a cold room.

Then on the fourth of August, Nan came to her and said that the maids had been at the west wing with the lamps and that His Grace’s study door had been open and that the whole passage smelled of gas, and that she thought perhaps someone had left the light turned up and gone down.

Vivienne went up at eleven o’clock at night in her dressing gown with a candle, and pushed the door open.

The lamp was burning. The room was full of paper.

It was far worse than she had imagined and far better. It was a working room, not a show room like Montague’s — three desks, two of them piled, and a long map table under the window, and shelves from the floor to the ceiling with the ledgers and the rolls and the case papers of twenty years. The floorboards were worn in a path from the door to the middle desk and from the middle desk to the window. The whole room smelled of lamp oil and sealing wax, and underneath that, faintly, of the particular wool of the greatcoat that hung on the back of the door.

On the middle desk, in the centre, with the ink set down flat and the blotter squared, was a bundle of papers tied with a black ribbon.

The ribbon was old. The papers under it were of different sizes and different ages and had been folded and unfolded so many times that the creases had gone soft as cloth, and they were bound in a bundle nine inches thick, and on the topmost sheet, in a hand Vivienne now knew from a hundred letters a day, somebody had written a date and nothing else.

The date was the eleventh of April, eighteen months earlier.

The day after he had seen her riding in Hyde Park.

They were letters he had never sent.

There were two hundred and forty-one of them, over a year and a half, written at night in the study after the House had risen, some of them four lines long and some of them six pages, and not one of them had ever left the room. The first was dated the day after the ride on the Serpentine and it began I saw a woman on a grey gelding this morning and I have not been able to think about anything else since and broke off after eleven words.

Vivienne sat down on the floor of her husband’s study at half past eleven at night in her dressing gown and read them.

Most of them were about the day. The vote he had lost in March. A piece of stupidity in the Lords that had made him angry. A headache. What he had eaten. A thorn tree in the park at Thornbury that had come into bloom and that he thought she would have liked. Pages of it, years of it, the whole interior life of a man who had been living in the same house as his wife and writing to her every night in a locked room because he could not say any of it out loud.

She found the ones about the argument at the settlement signing. She found the one written on the morning of their wedding — three lines, and the handwriting was bad — I am going to make a mess of this and I know it. She looked so calm at the church. I would give anything to know what she is thinking. She found the ones about the three weeks in Edinburgh and the two before that and the four before that. She found the one written on the day he had come home from a dinner at which Lady Jersey had called his wife a porcelain doll in his hearing, which was nine pages long and which she read twice, and which was not a letter at all by the end of it but a list of every single thing he intended to do to that woman and had not done.

And near the bottom of the bundle, dated nine days before Wrenfield House, she found one that stopped her.

I have the letter from Reynolds about the debts. I have been staring at it for two hours. I am going to break every rule I have made for myself in the last year. I am going to go home. I am going to go home three days early and I am going to walk into that ball and I am going to take her out of it in front of the whole of London and I do not care what it costs me.

If she will have me.

If she does not, I will have made a fool of myself in public and she will know that I have wanted her since April and she will be able to decide what to do with that, and at least it will be out of the room where I have kept it.

The next sheet was dated the eleventh. It was two words long.

Too late.

Vivienne sat on the floor of that room and wept, and it was the first time she had wept properly since the carriage, and it went on for a while.

She had the whole bundle in her lap when the door opened at midnight and her husband came in from the long gallery with a lamp in his hand and stopped dead in the doorway.

He looked at her on the floor. He looked at the bundle. He looked at the ribbon, which was not where he had left it, and which had been tied and untied and tied again in a way he would have noticed from the door.

He did not say anything at all for a long moment.

“You were not supposed to read those,” he said at last.

“I know.”

“I have been meaning to burn them for a year and a half and I have never once been able to.”

“I know that too.” Vivienne got up off the floor, which took some doing, and set the bundle down on the middle desk, and stood in front of her husband in a dressing gown with no powdered face and her hair in a plait and red eyes. “Adrian, this is the best thing anyone has ever done for me and it is also the most stupid, and I want you to understand that from now on there is not one thing in this room that is not mine to know. Not one. Not the working of the watchers, not the money, not the north estates, not that cabinet behind the map table that you think nobody has noticed.”

Adrian set the lamp down slowly on the shelf.

“The cabinet behind the map table,” he said, “contains the eleven pages of the assessment I drew up four years ago on the political value of my marriage, which I told you in April I was going to burn and which I have not, because I could not bring myself to, and which I would like you to burn in front of me tonight.”

Vivienne looked at him.

“Then bring it,” she said.

So they burned it, in the grate in the study, at midnight on the fourth of August, in front of each other — eleven pages on the political value of the Duchess of Thornbury, referred to throughout in the third person, which flamed up bright and went to ash in about ninety seconds while both of them stood and watched it and neither of them said anything at all.

Afterwards they sat on the floor of that room with their backs against the map table and drank the brandy he kept in the drawer of the middle desk, out of the same glass, and Vivienne asked him whether he had any more secrets and he told her three, all dull, all about land, and she told him two of hers, one of which was that she had once bitten Lord Hastings in the ankle at a picnic when she was eleven, and the other of which is not recorded here.

And in the autumn, on the second of October, in the rain, Alder House took in its four hundred and seventh woman — a woman of twenty-six with a black eye who had walked from Whitechapel with a child on her hip and who stood in the doorway of the office at the top of the stairs with water running off her bonnet and said that she had heard there was a place.

Vivienne Hale, Duchess of Thornbury, who had been Lady Clara Ravenscroft and Lady Vivienne Ravenscroft before that and who had been, for one long year, a beautiful discarded porcelain doll in the greatest house in London, came out from behind her desk and took the woman’s hands and said, “There is. Come in and sit down.”