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

Chapter 7

The tenderness went out of her husband’s face the way a tide goes out — fast, complete, leaving a different country behind. She felt his arm change around her, felt the grip become less a cradle and more a brace, and when he spoke the voice was the one she had heard at a hundred dinner tables and never once at her own.

“The candle,” he said.

“What?”

“Look at how he came at you.” Adrian’s eyes were fixed on the middle distance now, flat and grey and moving very quickly. “Percival Greave has been drunk for two years. He was drunk tonight, everyone in that house saw it, and drunk men do not choose rooms.”

Vivienne opened her mouth and closed it.

“The blue anteroom at Wrenfield House is at the end of the north gallery, past two sets of doors. It is not on the way to anything. You cannot stumble across it. You cannot be passing it. He had to know it was there. He had to know you were there. And he waited in the corner of that room — the corner that had a clear line to the door and a clear line back to the hearth, so that whichever way you moved he was already between you and safety.” His voice was level. “How long were you in that room before he spoke?”

She had to think about it. “Two minutes. Perhaps three. Not more.”

“Then he was placed before you arrived, or he followed you into it. Both of those are decisions, Vivienne. Both of those are the actions of a man who came to that house with a purpose.”

“Percy is a drunk and a degenerate, but he was never —”

“Percy is a drunk and a degenerate who is three days from the Fleet.” Adrian’s arm tightened. “A man in the Fleet has nothing to lose and no reason to approach the wife of a duke unless somebody has put a reason into his hand.”

Her mind was beginning to move now, following his down the dark corridor.

“What are you saying,” she said. “That he wanted the earrings?”

“That he wanted a scandal.”

The carriage turned into Grosvenor Square and the horses slowed.

“If you had been found in that room with him — the door shut, no husband in the house, the Duke of Thornbury eight days away in Edinburgh — you would have been compromised. Not seduced, not ruined in the true sense, but compromised, which in this city is exactly as bad and needs only half the proof. If he had torn that necklace off your throat and run, you would have been found bleeding and undressed of your own jewellery, which is a scandal of a different and much more interesting colour.” He paused. “And if he had only struck you — if he had done nothing else at all, but left a mark on the Duchess of Thornbury’s face where every gossip in London could see it —”

Vivienne closed her eyes.

“— then everybody in Mayfair would ask the same question in the same week,” Adrian finished quietly. “What has been happening in that house?”

The carriage stopped. Outside, a footman’s boots hit the wet stones and a lamp came bobbing down the steps of Thornbury House, and both of them sat still in the dark and did not move.

“A scandal of that kind would not have damaged me in my person,” Adrian said. “It would have damaged me in my seat. The Duke who cannot govern his own wife cannot be trusted to advise the Crown, and the men around the Prince Regent are very quick to notice that sort of thing.” He looked at her at last. “Two days ago in Edinburgh, my man Reynolds intercepted a letter that was never meant to be read. It was on the road, on a fresh horse, going south, and it was dated — Vivienne, it was dated the day before I left.”

Her blood, which had warmed in that carriage, went cold again.

“Greave’s debts were all bought up,” Adrian said. “Every gambling loss, every mortgaged field, every note held against his name — bought, quietly, in one week, by agents who took care not to sign. And the man who owns a ruined man’s debts owns the ruined man.” He paused. “The letter offered to cancel the whole of it. Every pound. In exchange for one evening’s work.”

“This evening.”

“Lord Rupert Montague,” Adrian said, “has been looking for a way to destroy me for four years, and he has finally understood that the way to destroy a man like me is not at the dispatch box. It is through his wife’s face.”

Vivienne sat very still in the dark of the carriage with her husband’s arms around her and the footman’s lamp swinging at the window, and she felt something happen inside her chest that she had not felt in a very long time.

It was not fear. The fear had gone. It had burned off with the shock, somewhere between the blow and the doorway.

It was fury. White, clean, enormous fury, and it filled her all the way to the fingertips like light going into a lamp.

“How long have you known what Montague was,” she said.

“Four years.”

“And you did nothing.”

“I did a great many things. None of them worked, and all of them were done in the dark, and none of them were done with you.” He held her eyes. “Which was the mistake.”

“Adrian.”

“Vivienne.”

“Lord Montague has a place at Richmond,” she said. “He gives a private dinner to the whole of the Tory leadership on the second Tuesday of every month. He will be at his own table tomorrow night with the Earl of Castlereagh and half the Cabinet, and he will have heard about me by then, and every man at that table will have heard it from him.”

“Yes,” Adrian said. “He will be expecting me to be sitting in my study with a bottle of brandy, dealing with the ruin of my wife’s name.”

“No.” Vivienne sat up.

Her cheek pulled when she spoke and the pain made her eyes water, and she did not care at all. She put her hand flat on her husband’s chest, on the wet wool of the greatcoat, and she looked up into that grey, level, watching face, and she smiled — and she felt the smile arrive as something new, something with teeth in it, something she had not made in a year.

“No,” she said again. “He will be expecting that.”

Adrian Hale, the sixth Duke of Thornbury, went very slightly still — but it was not the wall going up. It was a different kind of stillness altogether, and she recognised it now for what it was, because she had seen the same expression on the face of a man watching his best horse take a fence at a gallop.

“I have been in that man’s drawing room,” Vivienne said. “Three times. I have poured his wife’s tea and listened to Lady Montague complain about the smuggling of French lace through the Cheapside warehouses, and I have said nothing and looked at nothing and remembered nothing, exactly as a beautiful, discarded porcelain doll is supposed to do.” She tilted her head. “But you told me a moment ago, in this carriage, that I looked like the only honest thing in London. I am going to prove you wrong about that, and you are going to help me.”

The footman opened the carriage door. Light fell in across them both.

“Arthur,” she said, and used his name for the first time in her life, and heard how easily it came — “tomorrow night, we are going to give Lord Montague a far more entertaining evening.”

Adrian looked at her for a long moment.

Then he did something she had never seen him do, in a year of marriage or in any drawing room in London.

He smiled. Wolfish, unhurried, and entirely without mercy.

“Get in the house, Duchess,” he said, “and let me have a physician look at your face, and then tell me everything you have ever heard in that man’s drawing room.”