32. CHAPTER 32
T he invitation arrived the next day, in Lady Hartfield's own hand, in a tone so warm it almost made up for the fact that Vivienne knew exactly what it was for.
They arrived at three o'clock. Lady Hartfield met them in the hall and brought them through to the drawing room. She was a beauty without an ounce of conceit. Her warm and serene manner immediately put Vivienne at ease.
The drawing room was nothing like the room in Kensington Palace Gardens.
The carpet had clearly survived something small and determined being dragged across it.
There was a basket of wooden blocks under the window.
A doll missing one shoe lay on the seat of an armchair.
Everywhere she looked, the room felt lived-in.
The air smelled of lemon polish and, faintly, of something milky and clean that Vivienne did not at first identify and then realized was the smell of a baby in the house.
Her chest gave a twinge at the recognition, and she set the sensation aside to analyze another moment.
Colin, the Earl of Hartfield, didn't look like a physician or an earl.
He was big, built like a laborer, with longish blond hair and a harsh face that belonged to some northern field, not a Mayfair drawing room.
But his manner was gentle, and he greeted her with warmth and without pity.
He reminded her, in some small way, of Paul.
Tea was served. Lady Hartfield — Abigail, as she insisted on being called — poured with ease .
"Now," said Alice. "I want to see my niece and nephew before another minute passes. Abigail, where are you hiding them?"
"I'm not hiding them. They are in the nursery. It is the only way to ensure we have a peaceful visit devoid of disruptions."
"Bring them down."
"Alice — "
"I have been in this room for ten minutes and there is no child in it. I shall riot."
Abigail laughed and rose to send word upstairs.
What came down the stairs was not what Vivienne had expected. Even in the small world of Guernsey, children did not partake of afternoon tea with adults. She had no recollection of attending a tea as a duchess, but she was fairly certain high-society rules had not included them either.
The nursemaid set a small, fair-haired girl down at the threshold, and the girl came running. Behind her, Abigail took the baby boy from the nurse's arms and settled him against her shoulder with ease.
The little girl made directly for her father.
Lord Hartfield, in the middle of telling Nathaniel something about a debate in the Lords, broke off, scooped his daughter up, and arranged her on his knee without losing the thread of his sentence.
He went on speaking. The child settled against his waistcoat and considered the room from her new vantage point.
Then she put her thumb in her mouth and watched the company with grave blue eyes.
Vivienne wiggled her fingers and smiled at the little girl, who returned her smile shyly, turning her head into her father's waistcoat.
She had not known, until that moment, that a man could hold his daughter and continue an adult conversation as though the two activities were not in competition.
Her own father loved her, by all accounts.
He had also, she suspected from things her mother had let slip, loved her at the careful distance the nursery imposed.
Lord Hartfield was doing something she didn't have a category for.
He was simply being a father in the same room and at the same time that he was being an earl .
She looked at Dalton, beside her on the small settee, to see if he had noticed.
He had.
His face had not changed in any way a casual observer could see. But Vivienne knew his face now. She knew the small, particular stillness that came over it when he was looking at something he wanted very much and did not believe he was permitted to want.
After a few minutes, the little girl decided she had seen enough of the view from her father's lap.
She slid down with the imperious efficiency of a person whose decisions were not subject to negotiation, crossed the carpet on a wandering diagonal, and arrived at the settee where Vivienne and Dalton sat.
She looked up at Dalton. Dalton looked down at her.
The toddler's small hand rose, not toward his face, but toward the gold chain crossing his waistcoat.
"Be careful, Your Grace," Lord Hartfield said, with the air of a man delivering a long-standing warning. "She is a little pickpocket, that one. Sees something she likes and will swipe it before you are the wiser."
Dalton did not move to secure the watch. Instead, he reached into his waistcoat pocket, drew out the heavy gold watch, and held it out to the child on the open palm of his hand.
"What do you want, sweetheart? This old thing?" His voice had gone soft and tender, measured to soothe a small child. "You can have it."
The little girl took the watch in both fists. She turned it over, then over again, and her small fingers set themselves to the task of trying to pry the halves apart.
"Oh, no," said Lord Hartfield, in a tone of mock dismay pitched to be heard by his wife across the room.
"Now you have gone and done it. She has already broken two of mine.
I have been trying very hard to discourage her habit of playing with pocket watches, but I shall never succeed so long as she is able to charm them out of other people's hands.
She didn't even need to pick your pocket. You handed it to her."
Dalton lifted his shoulders in a small, helpless gesture. "What can I say? She looked at me with those sweet, big eyes, and I was unable to refuse her. "
"That is the effect she has. A little charmer. She uses it shamelessly, and I shall have my hands full with this one when she grows up."
Dalton laughed — a quiet, real laugh — and laid one careful hand on the top of the child's head. A single short pat. "I do not envy you the task," he murmured.
It was a polite thing to say. It was also, Vivienne saw with sudden cold clarity, a lie.
He envied him terribly.
The yearning on his face was plain to see.
She remembered what Venus had told her at Penrose. Before his mother died in childbirth, they had been a happy family. Of course he had been carrying the absence of it inside him for twenty-three years.
Her own throat closed around something hot and difficult.
She made herself look at Abigail, who was watching her husband and her daughter with a small, soft smile full of contentment.
Vivienne wanted to weep, and she didn't know why. She made herself sip her tea.
It was Colin who spoke to her after a while.
He had moved to the chair beside hers without ceremony. The little girl had returned to her father's lap with her gold prize, the baby boy had been carried over to be kissed by his Aunt Alice, and the room had relaxed into an easy domestic disorder that was both comfortable and inviting.
Colin's voice was quiet.
"I understand you have been through quite an extraordinary ordeal."
It was such a soft opening that for a moment Vivienne did not recognize it as a doctor speaking.
There was no notebook in his hands. There was a teacup.
He was holding it comfortably, with no intention of putting it down for a more important purpose.
The opening was an invitation, not an interrogation, and she could decline it without giving offense.
She liked him. She had not expected to like him.
What she had been bracing against in the carriage ride to Mayfair did not survive the sight of a man who held his daughter on his lap while entertaining guests, and who looked at his wife across the room as though he were continuously astonished by his good fortune.
A man like that did not see women as cases to be sorted into rooms.
So she answered him.
"It has been strange," she said. "Wonderful at times. Unsettling at others."
"How so?"
She took a breath, searching for the words. "For years, the absence of memory was… a fact. Part of who I was. Now I have begun to remember, and I realize how much I have lost. I want to remember more. People expect me to remember more. I just don't know how."
"May I ask what it feels like from the inside?"
She thought about it. It was not an idle question.
"Like standing blindfolded in a room that used to be familiar," she said slowly, "but someone has rearranged all the furniture. I know things are there. I can feel the edges of them. I bump into them. But I cannot see them, and when I reach for them, they move."
He nodded, and did not interrupt.
"Sometimes a smell brings something back.
Like the flowers at the folly in Cornwall.
Or a flavor. The crème de violette. A particular biscuit at Penrose I didn't remember eating until I tasted it, and then my body knew it before my mind did.
The fragments come from underneath. Unplanned. Never when I'm looking for them."
"I should tell you," Colin said, "that I am not a specialist in this condition.
I treat mostly conditions of the bones rather than the brain.
What I know about amnesia I learned mostly from treating wounded soldiers from the American War when I lived in New York.
" He set his teacup down. "That said. What you have described is consistent with what I have observed.
I believe your memories are not gone, Duchess.
They are inaccessible. There is a significant difference between the two.
Gone would mean wiped clean. Inaccessible means behind a closed door. "
That was encouraging. Inaccessible was a word with hope inside it.
"I attended two soldiers who had lost memory after head wounds," Colin went on.
"The first had lost only the war memories — from his enlistment to the moment an artillery shell burst near him and struck his head.
He told me, when he was well enough to speak, that if the memories were anything like his nightmares, he didn't want them back.
By the time he went home to his farm in Pennsylvania, he had not remembered anything.
"The second man lost his entire past. He didn't even know his name when he came to the hospital.
He stayed with us much longer because his other wounds were grave.
His wife came down from Boston and sat with him every day.
She brought their two children. They read to him.
They told him stories about himself, the way your mother is telling stories about you.
I watched him for nearly four months, and I want to tell you what I saw. "
He paused, choosing his words.
"He did not recover everything. Not by the time he was well enough to leave the hospital, at least. But proximity to the people who had made his memories — the voices, the smell of his wife's perfume, the feel of his daughter's hand in his — those things brought pieces of him back.
Not on a schedule. Not in any order one could predict.
But they came. And by the time he left, he had recovered part of his past."
She hadn’t noticed she was crying until Dalton pressed a handkerchief into her hand, and Hartfield looked away so that she could blot her eyes unobserved.
"You can't force a door that opens from the inside, Duchess." His voice was very gentle. "But you can stand near it. Don't strain yourself, but don't shy away from it either. That is what I would tell you. Patience and proximity. The rest will come."
He glanced briefly at Dalton, who was watching her.
"I should add," Colin said, in a still quieter voice, "that you appear to be in the company of a man who understands the principle without being told."
Vivienne, not trusting her voice, only nodded.
After that, the talk turned to easier things. Such as Alice's pregnancy. Abigail had moved to sit beside her sister, and was listening with the particular sympathy of a woman who had survived two such confinements herself and remembered the worst of them in helpful detail.
"I had been told about the mornings, Abigail," Alice was saying. "But no one warned me they would take the entire day."
"They were the entire day for me as well.
Both times. I will give you my remedy. It is not mine; in fact, it is Mr. Wang's.
You have met him, have you not? He is Colin's associate at the clinic.
He knows things about ginger that no English physician has ever bothered to learn.
I swear by it. I shall write the recipe for you. "
"Bless you."
"And for you as well, Duchess." Abigail turned her gentle smile on Vivienne. "For the future. Every woman ought to have a jar of that remedy in her pantry for the day she needs it. It keeps for months and tastes a great deal better than you would expect."
"Thank you," Vivienne said. "You are very kind."
She kept her smile on Abigail's face and did not allow herself to look, even for a second, in Dalton's direction.
She had walked into the Hartfield drawing room afraid of a doctor and was leaving with a hope based on doors that opened from the inside.
And somewhere between the time they sat down to talk and the moment Dalton gave his watch to the child, she had unexpectedly learned a thing about her husband she could no longer pretend not to know.
He wanted a child.
And was, for some reason she did not yet understand, refusing to make one with her.