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

Chapter 9

Reynolds was not what she had expected.

Vivienne had built a picture in her head over the course of a sleepless night — a wiry, dark, watchful man with a knife in his boot and a way of standing in corners. What appeared in the small breakfast room at half past five in the morning was a round, pink-faced, entirely forgettable man of forty in a plain brown coat, holding his hat in both hands, looking exactly like what he claimed to be: a clerk who had been roused early and was not pleased about it.

He bowed to her very correctly. He looked at her bruise for approximately one quarter of a second and then at nothing else for the rest of the interview.

“The green door,” Vivienne said. “Threadneedle Street, four doors west of the corner with Finch Lane, on the north side. There is a draper’s shop on the ground floor with a red awning and lettering that says Potter & Sons though there has been no Potter in the family for eleven years. The door to the upper house is at the side of the shop, up four steps, painted green, and there is a brass knocker shaped like a fox.” She paused. “The fox has a chipped left ear.”

Reynolds’ small pale eyes flickered.

“You’ve been inside, Your Grace?”

“Twice. Once for a charitable committee — I was collecting subscriptions for a dispensary in Spitalfields, which was an excellent excuse to be seen in the wrong part of the city.” Vivienne folded her hands. “The second time to deliver a gown Lady Montague had promised to a cousin who did not exist, at which point I stood in the hall for eleven minutes while the maid went up and Lady Fiona declined to be at home. The hall is narrow. There is a coat press on the left, and a stack of trunks on the right, and behind the trunks — I believe — stairs down to a cellar.”

Adrian, at the window, said nothing. But she felt him listening the way a man listens to a horse he intends to buy.

“The maid is called Betsy,” Vivienne said. “She is sixteen, from Norfolk, and she is frightened of her mistress and she is not frightened of me, because on my first visit I gave her a shilling and asked her about her mother’s rheumatism.” She looked up. “Mr. Reynolds, when you go in there this morning, I would like you to take Betsy out of the house before anything else happens in it. Not paid off. Not frightened. Moved. She is a child and she has done nothing, and when this business is finished I want her to be able to say that nobody ever treated her badly.”

Reynolds looked at the Duke.

The Duke looked at Reynolds, and something passed between them that had no words in it at all, and the clerk put his hat back on his head and said, “Very good, Your Grace,” and went out of the room without another question.

The door closed. Adrian crossed the breakfast room and sat down opposite his wife at the little table by the window, where the grey dawn was coming up over the chimney pots of Grosvenor Square, and poured them both coffee with his own hands.

“You did not tell me,” he said, “how much of a problem you were going to be.”

“You did not ask.”

“I have a document in my study, drawn four years ago, assessing the political value to me of my marriage.” He said it plainly, without apology. “It runs to eleven pages. It refers to my wife in the third person throughout and it does not once use her name.”

Vivienne sipped her coffee. “Burn it.”

“I intend to.” He watched her over the rim of his cup. “There is also a scheme — three years old, never executed — to have you sponsor a charitable foundation in Spitalfields, on the theory that a duchess with a public good work would soften my reputation in the northern boroughs.”

“Splendid. Then I have something to do on Fridays.”

“That scheme,” Adrian said, “assumed that you would lend your name and nothing else.”

Vivienne put her cup down.

“Then the scheme was written by a man who has never met me,” she said, “which, given that he is my husband of one year, is a matter I intend to raise with him at a later date.” And then, because the light was very grey and the coffee was hot and because the side of her face was throbbing in a slow regular tide, she laughed — a real laugh, out loud, the first one that had come out of her in the whole of the wasted year, and she watched the Duke of Thornbury sit back in his chair as though a window had blown open.

At seven, Reynolds’ man came back with a message.

At eight, another.

By ten o’clock in the morning of the day on which she was supposed to be ruined, Vivienne knew four things. Lady Fiona Bray’s cellar contained not lace but paper — three crates of ledgers, which had been carried there in the last eleven days by men who came at night through the mews. Lady Fiona had not been told what was in them; she had been told they were commercial documents for a linen venture and she had been paid a great deal of money not to ask. Betsy the maid was at this moment sitting in a kitchen in Clerkenwell being given bread and butter and a great deal of hot tea. And the ledgers, which Reynolds had opened with a small tool out of his pocket, were not linen accounts.

They were the records of a counting house at Wapping, and they contained columns of figures for the sale of British gunpowder to ships that flew French colours.

Vivienne read the copy Reynolds sent her — four pages, in the neat hand of the clerk who had made it — and she read it twice, and then she sat back in her chair in the small room on the second floor with the morning light coming in and felt her fingers go cold.

“Adrian.”

He came and read it over her shoulder. He was very close and he did not touch her and she felt the exact shape of the air between them.

“Treason,” he said at last.

“Treason?”

“The French privateers have been taking our merchantmen at the mouth of the Channel for two years. Every cargo of powder in this ledger is in a French gun at this moment, and the guns are aimed at British sailors.” His voice was perfectly even. “During a war, in time of open hostilities, the sale of ordnance to the enemy is high treason. Not smuggling, not fraud — treason. That is a capital charge, and the sentence is hanging at the Tower.”

The room was very quiet.

“Then we have him,” Vivienne said.

And Adrian Hale, the sixth Duke of Thornbury, said the thing that changed the shape of the whole day.

“He will know by two o’clock,” he said. “Reynolds opened a cellar that was watched. Montague has been careful for four years and he has never once kept his insurance in one place.” He looked down at her. “By this evening he will know that a woman in a green dress asked about the house in Threadneedle Street on Tuesday, and he will know that the Duchess of Thornbury was seen in Spitalfields last month talking to a maid, and he is a clever man, Vivienne. He will put it together.”

Vivienne’s hand went to her own cheek.

“Then he will send someone,” she said slowly, “before dinner. He will not wait for the dinner. He will want me silent before ten men of the Cabinet sit down at his table —”

The door of the morning room opened.

Nan stood on the threshold, and Nan’s face was the colour of the paper in Vivienne’s hand, and behind her in the passage there were two footmen and neither of them was looking at anything.

“Your Grace,” Nan said. “There’s a man at the front door.”