31. CHAPTER 31
D alton had told her an old friend wished to call.
The Greystones had worked with him for years, he said, and Alice was eager to see her again.
Vivienne had agreed because she sensed the meeting mattered.
And because there was a great deal her husband was not telling her about his work.
Perhaps Alice, who had spent years working at his side, could shed some light on his professional life, the way Venus had on his personal one.
He had said he would be in his study all afternoon and would join them later. She thought that was probably no coincidence.
Alice arrived at the appointed hour, which Vivienne had come to understand was unusual in London.
She was dark-haired and pretty in an understated way, dressed simply in slate-blue silk that did nothing to conceal that she was well into a pregnancy.
Her manner was friendly. Her eyes watchful and warm.
She came through the drawing room door, took one step inside, and stopped.
For a long second, she only looked at Vivienne.
Then, quietly, she said, "Your Grace. It is so good to see you."
There was nothing performed in it. None of the polite masks Vivienne had learned were the norm during morning calls. It was the tone of a person greeting a friend long thought lost, and Vivienne found her throat suddenly difficult to manage.
"Lady Greystone. Please — come and sit. "
"Alice. If you will."
"Alice. You must call me Vivienne, then."
Venus rose from her place by the window to make the introductions formal, though they were already past needing them.
Vivienne's mother was already on her feet, and within a minute the four of them took their seats around the low table.
A maid brought the tea service, and for a few seconds they engaged in the innocuous ritual of serving the tea.
"I thought," Alice said when they had poured the tea, "that I should tell you who I am.
Or rather, who I was before this." She gestured down at her own waistline with a small, wry movement.
"It is the part that is not in Debrett's, and I have found that people prefer to be told than to discover it accidentally. "
"Please," Vivienne said.
"I worked for the Foreign Office. So did my husband. We worked for several years under your husband's direction. He was, and is, the best man at that work I have ever known."
Vivienne set her teacup down carefully on its saucer.
She had suspected something. Of course she had suspected something.
The locked rooms in the tunnels that had turned out not to be dungeons.
The way correspondence arrived for Dalton at all hours.
She had assembled the suspicions the way one assembles a puzzle with most of the pieces still missing.
Alice's small, precise sentences set the missing pieces down on the table beside the teacups and waited.
"I see," Vivienne said. "Were you a spy? Is my husband one as well?"
She didn't know what had possessed her to put it so plainly. But Alice only laughed.
"We prefer agents of the Crown . As for your husband's role, I will let him explain that himself."
Alice was watching her with a steady, equal attention that felt close to respect. Vivienne felt the same respect rise to meet it. Alice was speaking to her as a whole person, and the kindness of it almost undid her.
"I tell you this," Alice said, "because I would rather you know it from me than wonder at our connection with your husband. And because I am about to ask you to trust my judgment on a thing, and you ought to know what kind of judgment it is."
"Go on."
Alice glanced at Vivienne's mother. Vivienne saw the glance and understood, in the small flush of heat that rose under her collar, that they had planned this meeting with a purpose.
The understanding ought to have made her angry.
It did anger her for one bright second. Then she looked at her mother's face, and the anger dimmed.
It was her mother who spoke. "Darling. Alice and your father and I have been talking. About a doctor."
The word landed like a slap.
Vivienne's spine straightened of its own accord. "No."
"My love — "
"No, Mama." Her teacup was rattling against its saucer.
She set the saucer down on the table to stop the sound.
"I have already said this. There will be no examination.
No assessment. No sitting in a room while a man with a notebook asks me whether I know what year it is and what the name of my pet was when I was six years old. I won't do it."
"Vivienne."
It was Alice. Her voice was very soft.
"May I ask why?"
There was no challenge in it. No prepared argument waiting behind the question. Only the quiet of a woman who was ready to listen.
Vivienne looked at her. The unhurried hands. The sympathetic eyes. Then at Venus, sitting forward with her own hands folded in her lap. At her mother, whose lower lip was doing the small trembling thing it had been doing on and off for a week.
She didn't understand why she answered.
She had refused this same conversation with Dalton.
Had refused it across her father's silence and her mother's tears and her own husband's promise, and walked out of his study to make the refusal stick.
And now a woman she had never met before this afternoon was asking her the question, and her mouth was already opening to give the answer .
Perhaps because Alice had not flinched. Or because of the way she asked the question. Or the curve of Alice's belly under her dress, which had given Vivienne a small pang of recognition. And she was learning to heed those.
"Because I'm afraid," Vivienne said, "of being committed to a madhouse."
Her mother made a small, awful sound and moved as if to speak. Alice extended a hand, palm down. Not a command — a request for calm. To Vivienne's surprise, her mother heeded it.
"I overheard a conversation in Guernsey," Vivienne went on.
The words came faster now that she had begun.
"Two women outside the church. Talking about me without knowing I could hear them.
They said I was not well. Poor thing , they said.
Her mind is scrambled. She should be taken to a hospital where they can fix her. "
The drawing room was silent.
Whatever was in Alice's eyes was not surprise. It was the quiet recognition of a person hearing something she had heard before, in other rooms, from other women, and had believed every time.
"Vivienne," her mother whispered. "My darling girl. Your father and I have never, not for one moment…"
"I know, Mama." She knew her family meant well.
That was not the point. "But the doctor would not be you.
What if he meets me, listens to me for a quarter of an hour, and then says I require a course of treatment that can only be given in a residential setting?
And you are all standing in the room loving me, wanting what is best for me.
What does no even mean from me at that point?
When everyone who loves me has just been told it is the only way? "
"Never."
The voice came from the doorway.
Vivienne turned her head. Dalton stood there, one hand still on the latch, as if he had only meant to look in, and what he heard had arrested him on the threshold.
His face was white at the edges. She knew that particular pallor.
She had seen it at the cove, and when he found her in the tunnels.
It was the color his face went when he believed he had almost been too late.
He came across the room and knelt at her chair.
He didn't touch her. He knelt at a careful distance, his eyes level with hers, and made himself still.
"Never," he said again. "Do you hear me?
I would never permit any doctor to put you in any clinic, sanatorium, hospital, or whatever name they have invented for it this season.
I would take such a place apart with my own hands before I allowed you to be kept inside its walls for one night.
There is no man in England, or in the entire world, with the authority to overrule me on this.
" His voice had gone very low and even, and Vivienne, who knew the registers of his voice now, recognized this one as the register he used for the sentences he meant most. "I will let no one take you from me.
For any reason. Not while I draw breath. Never."
The word. The same one he had used the other night, when he was deep inside her and vowed never to let go. It reached the place where her fear lived. She could see he meant it. The truth came off him like the heat from a fire.
And still the idea of a man with a notebook sitting across from her and asking her about her childhood made her stomach clench like a fist.
"It just feels so strange. Being analyzed. My mental capacity analyzed as if I were deficient…"
"I propose something different," Alice said.
Vivienne turned to her, grateful for the interruption without knowing why.
"Not Harley Street," Alice said. "Not a specialist's rooms. An afternoon at my sister's house.
Abigail is married to Lord Hartfield. He is also a doctor.
One you can meet in a social setting. In his drawing room, with his children present.
Over cake and tea. Abigail is wonderful, and I will be there, and Venus and your parents will be there as well if you wish it.
The whole occasion need only be exactly as long as you wish it to be.
You leave whenever you wish. If you want him to ask you nothing, he will ask you nothing.
He will listen to whatever you wish him to know.
There will be no notebook. No assessment.
Only tea, and a man who happens to be a doctor, in a room full of people who love you.
" She paused. "It is the smallest version of the thing you fear.
And if it is still too much, we will not ask again. "
Vivienne took a deep breath. Let it out in a rush.
She was aware of her mother's held breath, and of Venus's careful stillness, and of Dalton at her knee, who had not moved, as if he were waiting for her permission to do so. The fear had not left her. But it had taken a small step backward, far enough that she could see past it.
She looked at Alice's belly. At the curve under the slate-blue silk. Something old turned over inside her — an ache she had not known she still carried, surfacing now under another woman's hand resting unconsciously on the place where her child was.
"Yes," she said. "I will go to that."
A breath went out of three people at once.