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

Chapter 8

Thornbury House in Grosvenor Square was the largest private residence in London and Vivienne had lived in it for a year without ever being inside her husband’s study.

That was the detail she kept coming back to, later, when she tried to explain her marriage to herself. Not the diamonds, not the empty bedchamber, not the three-week absences. The study. The tall double doors on the second floor at the end of the passage, always shut, the lamp always burning behind them until two or three in the morning, and in twelve months the Duke of Thornbury had never once opened those doors to his wife.

The physician came and went. Dr. Halloway was a small, ancient, dry-handed man who had attended the Hales since before Adrian was born, and he examined Vivienne’s cheek in the yellow light of her own bedchamber with an expression of profound uninterest that she understood, three minutes in, was the highest form of professional courtesy. No questions. No arch remarks. No glance at the Duke standing at the window with his arms folded, backlit by the fire, radiating a stillness like a drawn bow.

“A contusion, not a fracture,” he said at last, snapping his case shut. “The bone is sound. Cold cloth for the night, another for tomorrow, and no powder on it for a week or it will fester. I shall leave you something for the pain.”

“I don’t want the pain to go,” Vivienne said. “I want to feel it tomorrow.”

Dr. Halloway paused with his hand on the door. He looked at her for a moment — really looked, for the first time — and then at the Duke, and then back at her, and something moved in the flat old face that might have been the ghost of dry amusement.

“Then you will, Your Grace,” he said, “and I shall save my laudanum for people who deserve it less.” He bowed and went out.

The door closed. The fire cracked and settled.

Adrian stood at the window with his back to her and did not move, and Vivienne watched him, and she understood that he did not know what to do next. That was the astonishing thing. The man who had put a viscount against a wall by the throat an hour ago — who had walked through the corridors of Westminster and the lines at Badajoz with the same unhurried competence — was standing in his own wife’s room like a boy who had been told to wait there.

“Adrian.”

“Mm.”

“Come here.”

He came. He crossed the room and stood in front of her chair and looked down at her, unsmiling, grey-eyed, his coat still dusted and his collar still up from the ride, and Vivienne reached out and took hold of the damp wool of his sleeve and pulled him down to sit on the ottoman at her feet.

That was the first movement between them that was not a courtesy. She felt him go rigid — actually, physically rigid, like a man who has put his hand on a stove — and then, after a long breath, she felt the rigidity go out of him by degrees, and he let his shoulders come down, and he sat at his wife’s feet in a soiled travelling coat and looked up at her.

“Tell me about Reynolds,” Vivienne said.

Adrian’s mouth twitched. “You are going to be a difficult woman to be married to.”

“I have always been a difficult woman to be married to. You simply declined to notice.” She found that she could smile, and that her lip only hurt moderately when she did. “Reynolds. Who is he?”

“He was a quartermaster’s clerk in my regiment. He was with me in Spain for five years and he is the only man I have ever met who can read a face across a room and be certain of it.” Adrian’s voice shifted into that flat, administrative register she had heard a hundred times at dinner, except that now she was listening for what was underneath. “When I came home I bought him out and gave him a clerk’s position in the household, which is his public occupation. His actual occupation is that he watches people for me.”

“How many people?”

“Sixteen at present, across seven households.”

“Sixteen.” She sat back. “And this evening’s letter — it came to him in Edinburgh.”

“It was carried by a man who was paid in small coin and thought he was carrying a business letter for a linen merchant in Threadneedle Street. Reynolds read it, copied it, sealed it back exactly as it had been, and let it go on its way.” Adrian paused. “Montague’s agent will never know it was seen. That is the entire value of Reynolds’ work, and it is why I keep him.”

“And the letter was about me.”

“The letter was about you.” He said it without softening it. “It instructed the recipient to confirm that Greave had been managed, and it referred to the objective as ‘the removal of the Duke’s influence in the matter of the Corn Bill, through the person of his wife.'” He watched her face. “It did not use your name. It did not need to.”

Vivienne sat very still and let that come to her bones.

“Who else was in that room?” she said. “In the anteroom. Did anyone see him come in?”

“Two footmen saw him leave the north gallery at a quarter past eleven, walking quickly, by the servants’ stair.” A pause. “One of them has already been paid a substantial sum to be certain that he didn’t.”

“By you?”

“By me.” Adrian’s eyes did not move. “And I have let it be understood among the staff of Wrenfield House that anyone who speaks of tonight to anyone will find that the Duke of Thornbury has a long memory. Nobody will speak of it. I will not have that bruise become a story told in other people’s drawing rooms before I have decided what to do with it.”

“No.”

He stopped.

“No,” Vivienne said again. She was surprised to hear her own voice so level. “You will not have it hidden, Adrian. If nobody speaks of it, then in six months Lady Jersey will be telling a story about a Duchess who fell down a staircase in a strange house, and it will be worse than the truth, because a story unspoken always grows teeth.” She leaned forward. “The bruise is going to be seen. Tomorrow night. On my face. In front of every man in the Tory party.”

Adrian was silent for a long moment.

“You understand what that means,” he said at last. “If you walk into Richmond House visibly marked, you are not declaring yourself a victim. You are declaring that you have chosen — that you have decided to be seen, and that the man who marked you and the man who paid him are both going to have to look at their own work across a dinner table.”

“Yes.”

“There will be no way back from it. Not socially. It will be in every letter written on Wednesday morning. Half the women in London will not receive you until Whitsun.”

“Then half the women in London will be about five months behind,” Vivienne said, “and I shall have the other half eating out of my hand by March.”

Adrian looked at her.

He looked at her for so long that the fire sank down and had to be built up again by the servant who came and went in silence, and when he finally spoke, it was with a kind of wonder that Vivienne recognised, from very far away, as the sound a man makes when he finds something he has been looking for in the wrong house.

“I want the study opened,” she said.

His eyebrows moved a fraction.

“I want to see the papers you have on Montague, and I want to see them tonight,” she said. “You have been fighting this man in the dark for four years. I have been standing in his drawing room three times, drinking his wife’s tea, listening to his guests talk over my head as though I were a hatstand.” She tilted her head, and it hurt, and she did not care. “You have a spy network and a war record and sixteen men. I have ears, a beautiful face that nobody remembers, and three years of being invisible in the drawing rooms of every great house in this city. Adrian — I can tell you the name of Lord Rupert Montague’s mistress, where she lives, what she wears, who visits her on Thursdays, and what he tells her on Sundays when he is drunk.”

Adrian went very still again.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Lady Fiona Bray. Threadneedle Street, above a draper’s shop, in a house with a green door and a knocker shaped like a fox. He visits on Thursdays and Sundays. His wife believes he is at his club.” Vivienne paused. “She wears French lace. Not English lace. Real, expensive, hand-worked French lace, the kind that has been illegal to import since the Berlin decrees — and I know it is French because I have spent my life in ladies’ drawing rooms listening to women argue about lace, Adrian, and I can tell the difference across a ballroom.”

She watched her husband’s expression change.

It did not change much. Anyone in London would have said the Duke of Thornbury’s face was exactly as it always was.

But his eyes had gone from flat grey to something with a live coals banked behind them, and Vivienne had lived with this man for a year, which meant she had learned to read him the way one learns a hard language — badly at first, and then in an instant, all at once, and then never forgetting it.

“Smuggling is a petty crime,” Adrian said slowly.

“Smuggling is a petty crime,” she agreed. “It will buy us a magistrate’s fine and an afternoon of gossip and nothing else. Which is why I intend to find out what a man with a taste for French lace and a great deal of money does with the rest of his warehouse.”

The fire cracked.

“The Corn Bill,” Adrian said. His voice had gone quiet in the way she was learning to be afraid of on behalf of other people. “He is buying against the Bill.”

“Meaning what.”

“Meaning that four years ago, when he first began to oppose me, Lord Montague took a very large position — through agents — on the price of imported grain, on the assumption that the Bill would fail. If the Bill passes, he loses tens of thousands of pounds. If it fails, he makes sixty.” He was speaking faster than she had ever heard him speak at a dinner table. “And in the last year, the position has grown. He has been covering his losses as the debate has turned against him, and the way a man covers losses in that trade is to move goods that do not pay duty.”

Vivienne put her hand flat on the ottoman beside his knee.

“He is not merely a political opponent,” she said. “He is a smuggler who is losing his money and drowning in his own pride. And a man like that has ledgers. Living men keep their ledgers everywhere — in counting houses, in cellars, in the houses of women they trust more than their wives.”

Adrian smiled at her, and this time the smile was not wolfish at all. It was a small and very private expression, as though a door had opened on a room he had forgotten he owned.

“Reynolds,” he said, “leaves for Richmond at dawn.”

“No,” Vivienne said.

“No?”

“Reynolds leaves for Threadneedle Street at dawn,” she said. “I will tell him what the green door looks like.”