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

Chapter 21

Two years later, on the eleventh of April, 1817, the Earl of Wrenfield gave a ball at Wrenfield House for the first time in four years, because it had taken that long for the family to recover from the gossip that had attached itself to the blue anteroom at the end of the north gallery.

They had tried repapering it. They had tried renaming it. In the end, Lady Wrenfield had done the only sensible thing available to a woman of her rank and temperament, which was to fill the room with better furniture and to invite the Duke and Duchess of Thornbury to stand in it in front of everybody.

Vivienne arrived at that ball at half past nine, which was when a woman who no longer needed to arrive early arrived anywhere.

The drive was choked with carriages, the same way it had been on the night everything happened. The same iron gates. The same paper lanterns swinging in the wet dark. The same great staircase, packed with scarlet and silk and nodding feathers, the same smell of crushed roses and beeswax and expensive French perfume, and Vivienne climbed it unhurriedly on her husband’s arm and felt, as she came up the last four steps, nothing at all except a mild and pleasant curiosity about what the supper would be.

She was twenty-four years old. She had been married three years. She had four hundred and thirty-one women in her ledgers and two houses at Wapping and an office in the City and a solicitor who had argued a case in front of a committee of the House of Commons and won it. She had been called, in print, in a pamphlet that was still selling in the Strand, the most dangerous woman in London, which Adrian had had framed.

She was also, as of the previous November, the mother of a daughter.

The child was called Alice Rose, and she was four months old, and she had been left at Grosvenor Square in the care of Nan and a wet nurse and a nursery the size of a small church, and Vivienne had spent the entire carriage ride worrying about her and had been told twice by her husband that this was perfectly normal and once by her husband that if she mentioned the nursery again he would turn the carriage around, and had called his bluff, and had lost, and had come to the ball in the end.

The blue anteroom had been repapered in a soft dove grey and there were new crimson hangings at the windows and a new carpet.

The Ming vase had been replaced with one that was nearly as good.

People were standing in the room. That was the thing Vivienne noticed first — that a room which had once been empty and dim and full of shadows was now full of talking people who had come to stand in it on purpose, because there was a story attached to it now and the story was told in a way that reflected credit on the house.

Nobody in that room knew what had actually happened in it. Vivienne had made sure of that for two years, with all the quiet competence she had learned at the side of the Duke of Thornbury. The two footmen had been pensioned. Rotherby was dead. Reed the clerk had been given a passage to Halifax and had taken it. Lambert the attorney had been made a King’s Counsel and had no reason to speak of a discontinuance entered six years earlier. And the one man in England who might have told the story had been in Bath since May of 1815 and would not be coming back.

So the room was full of innocent people, and Vivienne stood in the middle of it on her husband’s arm with a glass of ratafia in her hand and let them come and be introduced to her, and said everything that was expected of her, and was very, very good at it.

At half past ten, she went out to the north gallery for some air.

Adrian came with her. Of course he came with her — he had given up on the pretence of not watching her in public somewhere around Christmas of 1815 — and they stood at the tall window at the end of the gallery, above the drive, with the rain coming down on the lanterns and the carriages drawn up in a long shining row, and neither of them said anything for a while.

“This is where the two footmen were,” Adrian said.

“I know.”

“I paid them four hundred pounds each in 1815 and told them that if either of them ever said a word about that night I would know within a week.” He looked out at the rain. “They are in Yorkshire now, both of them, with little farms, and neither of them has ever said a word.”

“One of them wrote to me,” Vivienne said.

Adrian turned his head.

“In September, of the first year of Alder House. He wrote to the office — not to the house, to the office, which took him some trouble to work out, and the letter was in a very bad hand and Mrs. Deverell had to read it to me twice.” Vivienne took a sip of the ratafia. “He said he had a sister who had been put out of a house in Leeds with nothing, and he had heard what the Duchess was doing at Wapping, and he wanted to know whether there was a place, and he wanted me to know that he had not spoken about the night at Wrenfield House and that he never would, and that it was not because of the money but because he had been standing at the bottom of those stairs and had watched a man in travelling clothes come in out of the rain at half past eleven and go up four steps at a time, and had thought at the time that it was the first true thing he had ever seen a great man do.”

Adrian was silent for a long moment.

“Did you take the sister?”

“She is the housekeeper at the second house. She has been there fifteen months and she is very good and she bullies the matron.”

“Of course she does.”

They stood at the window and looked down at the drive.

“Adrian,” Vivienne said. “I want to say something about tonight and then I am never going to speak of it again.”

“You do not have to.”

“I am going to, because I have been thinking about it for four weeks and it has been getting larger in my head, and if I do not say it out loud it is going to keep getting larger for the rest of my life.” She turned and looked at him. “When I was standing in that ballroom an hour ago with all those people being introduced to me and being pleasant and being afraid, there was one moment when I felt exactly as I felt standing at the top of the stairs at Almack’s two years ago. Which was: if I turn my face away now, everything I have built goes back to being nothing.”

Adrian started to speak and she put her hand flat on his chest.

“I know what you are going to say. You are going to say that it is not true, and that the four hundred and thirty women are real, and that the house at Wapping is real, and that you would love me whatever the room thought of me. And I know all of that, and it is all true, and none of it is the point.” She looked up at him. “The point is that I am still frightened, three years later, in a room full of people, of what a woman like Lady Jersey is going to decide about me in the first three seconds. And I have decided that I am never going to stop being frightened of it, and that this is all right, and that I am going to do it anyway, every single time, for the next forty years.”

The guttering of the lamps in the drive below them.

“Why are you telling me that,” Adrian said.

“Because you spend every dinner at your own table watching me across the room to see whether I am all right,” Vivienne said, “and I want you to stop. I want you to eat your soup. I am not going to be all right, Adrian, and I am going to be absolutely fine, and those are two different things and I need you to be able to hold both of them at once.”

Adrian Hale looked down at his wife for a long moment.

“You know,” he said at last, “I have spent the last two years being rather pleased with myself about the fact that I finally told you everything and let you into every room in the house.”

“Yes. You have been insufferable.”

“It has just occurred to me,” Adrian said, “that you have been doing the same thing to me, in reverse, for two years — letting me think that the woman I married to protect from the world was a woman who needed to be protected from the world, because it was easier for you than having the conversation we are having now.” He paused. “Which is a much more sophisticated kind of cowardice than mine, and I resent it enormously.”

Vivienne laughed. It was the real laugh, the one that carried — the hunting-field laugh, the one that had gone up over Hyde Park in April of 1814 with a bonnet hanging off the back of her neck.

“Then we are even,” she said, “and we shall begin again, and I shall go and be frightened at Lady Jersey, and you shall eat your soup.”

They went back into the ball, and Vivienne danced a quadrille with poor Lord Hastings, who was eighty-one now and smelled of snuff and kindness and stepped on her hem twice, and who told her, at the end of it, holding her hand a moment longer than he should have, that she reminded him of her mother, and that he had once been in love with her mother, and that he had never told anybody, and that he found now that he minded a great deal less than he expected to.

At one o’clock in the morning they went home.

The Corn Bill passed its third reading in the House of Lords on the ninth of June, 1817, by eleven votes.

The Duke of Thornbury spoke for forty minutes on the second day of the debate and was not, according to the report in The Times the following morning, interrupted even once. He was walked back to Grosvenor Square afterwards by four men who had voted against him and who wished to have it understood, publicly, on the pavement outside the House, that their objections had been to the measure and not to the man.

Vivienne read the report the next morning over breakfast with her daughter on her lap, and reached across the table, and put the newspaper into her husband’s hand, and said, “You will want the third column.”

He read it. He put it down.

“The women of this country will eat cheaper bread in November than they did last year,” he said. “That is all that has happened. It is not romantic.”

“No,” Vivienne said, adjusting the baby. “It is not romantic. It is entirely the sort of thing you would do. And I am going to remember it, and so will four hundred and thirty women at Wapping, and in fifty years, when somebody is writing the history of how the price of bread was settled in England, there will be a sentence in it about the Duke of Thornbury and nobody in it at all about the fact that he came home from Edinburgh without being sent for.”

Adrian looked at her.

“That was three years ago,” he said.

“It was the third week of April, 1815,” Vivienne said. “You rode four hundred miles in three days. You came into a ballroom in your travelling clothes. You stood in a doorway and told a man you would take his hand, and then you put your arms around your wife on the steps of Richmond House and told her everything you had never said.” She turned her daughter around on her knee so that the baby was looking at her father. “Alice, your papa believes that history is made in the House of Lords. Do not let him get away with it.”

The child made a noise that could reasonably have been interpreted as agreement.

Adrian Hale, sixth Duke of Thornbury, Keeper of the Privy Seal, hero of Badajoz, sat at his own breakfast table in Grosvenor Square with the newspaper in front of him and his wife and daughter across the table in the spring light, and did something that his entire household — his twelve footmen, his four grooms, his sixteen watchers, and the whole of Mayfair, and the whole of the Tory party, and the Prince Regent himself — would have bet a great deal of money they would never see him do.

He put his face in his hands and laughed until he had to be given a glass of water.

The Duke and Duchess of Thornbury returned to London society and did not leave it again.

She was not a porcelain doll. She had never been a porcelain doll; the ton had simply been lazy, and had found it cheaper to mistake a woman’s silence for emptiness than to ask what she was doing with it. By 1820 there were four houses under the name of Alder, and a Bill before Parliament concerning the property of married women that Mrs. DevereLL had drafted and the Duchess had carried into eleven separate drawing rooms, and a habit in the newspapers of referring to political scandal as a Wrenfield affair without needing to explain what it meant.

The blue anteroom at Wrenfield House is still there. The hangings are still crimson. There is a new carpet, laid in 1817, that has been worn thin in the middle by thirty years of people standing on it to be introduced to one another, and none of them have ever known why the room is the size it is or why the door is so far from the music, and none of them ever will.

But the woman who was struck in that room on the evening of the eleventh of April, 1815, kept the shards of the Ming vase that broke when she fell.

She had them collected from the floorboards the next morning by a housemaid, at her instruction, wrapped in a piece of the crimson silk from the gown she had worn to Richmond, and she kept them for the rest of her life in a lacquered box on the shelf above her writing desk at Alder House, where the women who came to her — four hundred and thirty of them, then a thousand, then more than any ledger ever managed to count — could see the box and wonder about it, and where, once a year, on the eleventh of April, the Duchess of Thornbury would take it down and look inside it for a moment, and then put it back on the shelf, and go down and get on with the day’s work.

She never once told them what it was.

She did not need to. They knew the shape of a thing that had hit a woman hard and had been kept anyway, and they had all of them, every one, brought their own.

The End