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

Chapter 6

Adrian went still.

Vivienne felt it happen — the whole long body against hers turning to carved wood, the arm around her shoulders locking, the thumb at her jaw stopping mid-stroke. She had lived with this man for a year and she knew, better than she knew her own hands, the exact quality of that stillness. It was the wall coming down. It was the door locking. It was the Duke of Thornbury deciding, with the enormous discipline of a man who has spent his life deciding things, that a question had been asked which must not be answered.

He is going to give me courtesy, she thought. He is going to give me some beautiful, empty, well-made sentence, and I will have to accept it, and I will spend the rest of my life beside a man who will not be in the room.

“Never mind,” she said quickly, before he could. “Forget I asked. It was the shock. I am not myself.”

He looked at her.

The gaslight came through the window and crossed his face and went away again, and in the half-second of light Vivienne watched something extraordinary happen to her husband’s expression. She watched the walls go up behind his eyes — she could see them go, the way you can see a portcullis drop — and then she watched him look down at the blood on her lip.

And she watched the walls come apart like wet paper.

He let out a breath. It was a ragged, broken sound, the sound of something structural giving way, and he dropped his forehead against hers and stayed there.

“Because I have been a coward,” he said.

The words landed in the dark of the carriage like stones dropped down a well.

“A bloody, stupid coward, and I have been one for a year, and I have been one every single day since the morning I signed the settlements in your father’s library.” He pulled back just far enough to look at her. The grey eyes were not cold, not distant, not administrative. They were fixed on her with an intensity that was almost unbearable. “You believe our marriage was a transaction. A sensible arrangement made between two men over brandy — an heir for me, a fortune for your father, a coronet for you. That is what I let you believe. I encouraged you to believe it, because the truth frightened me more than anything I saw in Spain.”

Vivienne’s breath caught. “The truth?”

“I saw you.”

He said it as though confessing to a crime — low, reluctant, dragged out of him.

“Three months before I ever approached your father, I saw you in Hyde Park. It was the second week of April, early, the mist still on the Serpentine, and you were riding that impossible grey gelding of yours — the one that spooks at everything — down the long straight by the water.”

She remembered the gelding. Pericles. Half-mad, entirely beautiful, ruined by an earlier owner, and the only horse in England apart from one she had ever managed to sit.

“You were laughing,” Adrian said. “You were laughing at your brother, who had just lost his hat to a tree. You were riding with your face up and your bonnet hanging off its ribbons at the back of your neck and your hair coming down, and you looked —”

He stopped. His jaw worked.

“You looked entirely alive, Vivienne. Brilliant and loud and fierce and completely untouched by any of the rot in this city. You did not look like a girl on the marriage mart. You looked like the only honest thing in London.” His voice dropped. “And I sat on my horse at the end of the path and watched you for a quarter of an hour and did not go up to you, because I had no earthly right to, and I went home and thought about you for three solid months, and then I went to your father.”

The carriage lurched over a rut and neither of them moved.

“I am not a good man,” Adrian said.

“I know what you are. You are the sixth Duke of Thornbury and you have a reputation for pragmatism.”

“That is what the House thinks. That is what the clubs think.” He turned his face toward the window slightly, toward the rain and the sliding dark. “I spent five years in the Iberian Peninsula under Wellington. I was at Talavera. I was at Badajoz.”

The word sat between them, and Vivienne — who had read the dispatches in the newspapers like everybody else, and who had heard in drawing rooms the way men went quiet when the name came up — did not say anything.

“Badajoz was a city taken by storm, and when a city is taken by storm, the officers who are supposed to hold the men are the men holding the torch. I have seen what soldiers do when the discipline goes. I have given orders that sent men into lines that killed four out of five of them and I gave those orders because the alternative was worse, and I have made that arithmetic so many times that I no longer need to write it down.” He spoke without drama, without self-pity, the way a clerk reads a ledger. “Four hundred and eleven of my regiment came out of that campaign, out of eleven hundred and six who went in. I know all of their names. I say them sometimes.”

He turned back to her.

“My soul is stained, Vivienne. There is enough blood on my hands to drown a street in London, and most of it I chose, and I would choose it again, and I am at peace with that.” He paused. “But I came home from that war and I met you in Hyde Park, and I looked at you on that horse, laughing, and I thought: That woman must never see what I have done. That woman must never be touched by it.”

Vivienne stared at him.

“So I gave you wealth, and status, and distance,” Adrian said. “I gave you the first house in London, diamonds worth a dowry, a box at the opera, and every servant in Mayfair trained to treat you like a queen, and I kept my heart behind a locked door in a locked room in a locked wing of my own house, and I told myself it was protection. I told myself that if I never let you close enough to see the dark, then the dark could never get at you.”

The tears came up in her eyes so fast she had no time to stop them.

“And so you left me in a ballroom, alone, three weeks a year at a time,” she said, and her voice broke in the middle of the sentence, “and every woman in England decided I was a discarded ornament, and men like Percival Greave decided that a wife without a husband at her side is a wife without protection, and do you know — do you know what the joke of it is, Adrian?”

“Tell me.”

“Your protection was the only thing I wanted from you.” She was crying properly now, and it hurt, because the tears stung the cut at the corner of her mouth. “You could have kept everything else. All the diamonds, all the footmen, the carriage, the opera — I would have given them away at the door. I have been sitting alone in that beautiful house for a year, in the middle of the greatest city on earth, married to the most powerful man in the House of Lords, and the one thing I was never once given in three hundred and sixty days —”

She had to stop and breathe.

“Adrian. Did you think I was so fragile?”

He didn’t answer.

“I have ridden horses that would have broken your collarbone. I have managed my father’s household since I was fifteen while he drank his way through his own estate. I have stood in my own drawing room and listened to Lady Jersey sharpen her claws on my name and smiled at her, with tea in my hand, and never spilled a drop.” She reached up, and her palm came to rest on his rough unshaven cheek. “I did not want a golden cage, with all the bars polished. I wanted a husband. I wanted a man at my side. I wanted you.”

Adrian closed his eyes and leaned into her hand.

He leaned into it the way a man leans into a wall he has been walking toward for a long time in the dark — with a desperation that went through her like a blade.

“Vivienne —”

And then his eyes opened, and everything in them changed.