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

Chapter 4

The arm came up and swung, and the flat of his hand caught her full across the left side of her face.

The sound was not like a slap. A slap is a stinging thing, a lady’s rebuke, a scandal at a card table. This was a wet, meaty crack — the noise of something solid meeting bone, and it went up into the coffered ceiling of the blue anteroom and came back down again like the report of a dueling pistol in an empty church.

Vivienne’s head snapped sideways. Her body followed it, all of her weight going the way the blow had thrown it, and her silk slippers skated on the waxed oak and lost. Her hip met the corner of the low mahogany side table with a violence that lit up her whole left side like struck flint. The table jumped. The Ming vase on it, that beautiful cold white thing that had stood in that house for sixty years and through three generations of careful hands, tilted, considered, and came down.

Porcelain does not break like glass. It bursts. A whole white flower of it, a hundred jagged petals, skittering out across the boards in every direction and one shard of it spinning all the way to the hearth.

Vivienne went down on her knees among the pieces.

For one horrifying moment the heavy skirts of her gown billowed up around her like water closing over a stone, and she had time to think, with a clarity she would remember for the rest of her life: They will say I fell. They will say it in a drawing room, and they will say it kindly, and it will be a lie, and nobody will ever know.

Silence. Total, ringing silence.

Two rooms away, the waltz played on. She could hear the cellos going round and round in their sweet circles — three-quarter time, the endless turning of a world that did not know and would never be told.

She knelt on the floor stunned, both hands out flat on the wood, and her left ear was screaming a high thin note like a wire pulled too tight. Something warm was filling her mouth. Copper, salt — she had bitten through the inside of her cheek and the taste of it bloomed and spread under her tongue. She lifted a hand — it was shaking, and she looked at it shaking as though it belonged to somebody else — and she brought it to her face.

Her fingertips found the cheekbone, and the cheekbone was wrong. It was already rising. Hot, tight, hot as a poker left in a fire, and the whole side of her face from jaw to eye socket was filling with a heat that pulsed in time with her heartbeat.

She could not get breath into her lungs. That was the strangest part. She had been knocked down and she had not yet been breathe — the air had gone out of her and would not come back in, and she knelt there in a fortune’s worth of silk with her lungs empty, and no one had ever struck her before. Not her father, drunk as he had been for the last four years. Not her governess, not the schoolroom, not once. And certainly never the imposing, silent, absent man she had married.

So this is what it is, she thought, and the thought was very quiet and very far away. This is what it is to be a woman in a room with a man who has decided.

Percival Greave stood over her, chest heaving as though he had just run the length of the park.

The blow had sobered him instantly. That was the thing she saw through the haze — the violence let out of him like steam from a valve, and what came in behind it was not triumph. His eyes went to his own hand, still trembling at the end of his arm, as though it had done something without asking his permission. Then down to her. Then to the wet red thread at the corner of her lip.

“Vivienne.” His voice cracked in the middle of her name. He took a half-step back and his heel crunched on a shard of the vase. “You — you pushed me to it. You shouldn’t have spoken to me that way. You shouldn’t have —”

He stopped. He was trying to find his old sneer, and it kept sliding off. He got it back, badly, crooked as a badly hung door.

“You see what happens,” he said, “when you forget your place.”

The words were meant for her. He was watching her face while he said them, waiting for her to break — and she could see, with a strange and detached pity, that he needed her to break. He needed to see her destroyed, because if she was not destroyed then he had simply struck a woman who had never done him any harm, and he had done it because she told him the truth.

I will not give it to him, she thought. Whatever else he takes, he does not get that.

She began, very slowly, to raise her head.

“Now give me the diamonds,” Greave said, “and I’ll be gone before anyone comes in and finds the Duchess of Thornbury on the floor like a Covent Garden doxy.”

He crossed to her. She heard his boots on the boards and then on the ruined porcelain, grinding the white shards to powder. She heard the rustle of his coat as he bent. His shadow came over her, and his hand came down toward her throat — toward the necklace, toward the two blue-white drops that hung by her jaw, toward the diamonds that would save him —

The footsteps in the corridor stopped.

Everything stopped. The waltz went on and the rain went on against the tall windows and Percival Greave’s hand hung in the air, three inches from the Harrington diamonds, frozen mid-motion like a man in a tableau at a country fair.

“Touch her again,” said a voice from the doorway, “and I will take the hand.”

It was not loud. It never was. It was a low, resonant baritone, smooth as the surface of dark glass, and underneath it there was something that had no name in polite English — a promise, coiled and patient, and the whole temperature of the blue anteroom seemed to drop ten degrees in the space of that sentence.

Vivienne’s eyes flew to the door.

Adrian Hale stood in the threshold, framed by the heavy velvet drapes, and he was not in evening dress.

He was in travelling clothes. A greatcoat of dark wool still heavy with damp, shoulders wide under it, collar up, and beneath it a black coat that had been slept in. His boots were tall leather riding boots coated in a fine grey film of road dust, dust that had dried in rings around the ankle and along the outside of the calf — the signature of a man who had not stopped. His hair was disordered. There was mud on his cuff.

The Duke of Thornbury was supposed to be in Edinburgh. He was supposed to be eight days and four hundred miles away, disputing a boundary and a rent in the grey northern cold.

He had ridden. She understood it in a flash, from the dust and the sweat-stained girth-mark on his coat and the way he stood — the way a man stands when his legs have not yet forgiven him for the saddle. He had ridden hard, and he had not stopped, and there were flecks of foam dried on the leather of his boots because he had pushed his horses to the edge of foundering to do it.

Adrian’s eyes, which were normally the exact grey of a winter sky over the fens, were black.

They swept the room with a calm that was worse than fury. She watched them take inventory the way a quartermaster takes inventory after a battle. The shattered vase, wrecked across the boards. The overturned side table. His wife’s gown, flung out around her where she had fallen. The blood at the corner of her mouth, bright and wet against lips gone the colour of paper. And then the print — the perfect, unmistakable red print of a man’s open hand, blooming across the pale skin of her left cheekbone, the fingers still readable like a stamp in wax.

He looked at all of it for perhaps two seconds. Then his gaze came to rest on Percival Greave.

And Vivienne, kneeling on the floor of that room with her mouth full of blood, felt something she had absolutely not expected to feel.

She was afraid for Percy.

Because she had seen Adrian Hale make arguments in the House that destroyed men’s careers with the patience of a man filleting a fish. She had heard the stories they told about him in whispers over brandy — the Peninsula, the retreat to Corunna, the winter crossing, the four hundred men who came out the other side when eleven hundred went in because one colonel would not let them break. She had lived in his house for a year and never once seen him raise his voice.

She had never, in all that time, seen him look like this.

This was not a peer of the realm. There was nothing of Parliament or the drawing room left in him. This was a predator that had just found, in its own territory, the animal that had been eating its young.

Percival Greave spun around, and the blood drained out of his face so completely and so fast that he went the colour of the plaster behind him. His mouth opened. His hands came up, palms out, fingers spread — a gesture that belonged in a churchyard, not a ballroom.

“Your Gr—” he managed. “Your Grace. It is not — you have the wrong of it entirely, I assure you, the Duchess and I were merely —”

Adrian did not answer him.

He stepped into the room.