37. CHAPTER 37
T he house was, once again, a tomb.
It had briefly been a home when she was in it.
He had not known the difference. He knew it now.
It was evident in the silence of rooms that had held her voice.
A hairpin on her dressing table. A bottle of her perfume, half full.
He had given orders to leave everything as she had left it. Just as before. In case she comes back.
She had not come back.
Sue for divorce, Dalton. Free yourself and free me.
He had gone to his study after the carriage left, poured a brandy, and not drunk it. He sat in the chair behind his desk and stared at the small bottle of crème de violette on the sideboard. Something in him had shifted, although he didn't yet know what.
He went to a lonely and cold bed after midnight. Daybreak found him already awake.
He rose at six. Shaved and dressed without his valet.
Went to his study to open the dispatch box from the Foreign Office.
Three coded messages. A report from Marseille.
A surveillance summary on Lord Ashby. He read them all and understood none of them.
He tried again. The cipher key for the third was one he had designed himself, and he could not remember the sequence.
At noon, Mrs. Trevena brought a tray. At three, Prowse appeared with a sealed note from the Kilbrannan residence. He recognized Lord Kilbrannan's hand and placed the note unopened in his desk drawer .
At seven, in the dining room, the footman had set two places. Dalton looked at the second setting. "Remove it."
He rose at six the next morning. He went to his study. The dispatch box was still on the desk where he had left it. The note from Lord Kilbrannan was still in the drawer. Mrs. Trevena brought a tray at noon. The footman set one place at seven.
He didn't write to Lord Kilbrannan.He didn't even open the dispatch box.
He sat in the chair behind his desk and watched the light move across the carpet. On the fifth day, when he heard Venus in the entrance hall, he could not remember what day of the week it was.
By the time she burst through the study door, he was standing at the window, pretending he had not been sitting in the dark for the past hour.
"You look dreadful," Venus said.
"Good morning to you as well."
She closed the door and stood with her hands folded.
"Vivienne's mother called on me. She is worried about her daughter. She is also worried about you, though she expressed it as annoyance, which is her custom." Venus paused. "Lady Kilbrannan says Vivienne has not left her room in five days."
He turned back to the window.
"Dalton."
"She told me to divorce her."
"Yes. She told her mother the same thing. Lady Kilbrannan called it the most spectacular display of noble self-destruction she had ever witnessed." Venus paused. "She was not wrong."
He said nothing.
Venus crossed the room and sat in the chair opposite his desk. "I am going to ask you a question, and I would like an honest answer."
"Ask."
"Do you love her?"
He looked at her. She knew the answer. She was asking because she wanted him to say it .
"Of course I do."
"Then what, precisely, are you doing sitting in this room?"
"I won't risk another pregnancy. She is better off — "
"Do not finish that sentence." Her voice could have cut glass.
"You are about to tell me she is better off alone.
Childless. Unloved. She wants you. Has always wanted you.
She wanted you when she had every memory, and she wants you now when she has none.
You are what is best for her, and the fact that you cannot see this is the single most infuriating thing about you. "
He looked at his sister. The girl he had raised. The woman who had saved his life after the shipwreck by telling him he was mirroring their father.
"I'm afraid," he said.
Venus's expression did not soften. It changed.
"I know. I have always known. But Val, Father was afraid too. And what destroyed him was not the love. It was the loneliness afterward. You are choosing the loneliness in advance. You are building the mausoleum before anyone has died."
She stood and smoothed her skirt. Then walked to the door and paused with her hand on the handle.
"Trust your love. Or lose her. Those are your options. There isn't a third."
She left.
He went to Vivienne's rooms.
The air still smelled of her. Roses, bergamot, lily.
He sat on her bed and put his head in his hands. He was so tired of trying to be strong. The wet on his fingers came before he knew he was crying.
It didn't last long. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. He sat in the stillness.
His father had loved his mother without restraint. When she died in childbirth, he had not survived her by a year. The drinking. Then the silences. The pistol. The lesson had seemed inarguable: love without control destroyed everything .
He had built his life on that lesson. He had loved Vivienne from the first moment he saw her across a crowded ballroom, and he had set about containing the love. Managing the risk.
Three miscarriages. Three times her body had tried to give him a child, and three times it had ended in blood and his hand holding hers while she sobbed. After the third, he had made the decision for both of them. No more.
And then the shipwreck. He had lost her, or so he believed. And the grief had been —
Annihilating.
He had spent the next seven years proving that discipline worked. He had grieved, then he had contained the grief, and he had functioned. Not moved on. Not found happiness or peace. Just functioned.
But now she was back. Alive. It was a miracle he had not dared to hope for. And she wanted him to divorce her. To marry another woman who could give him a child. If only she knew how impossible that was.
He remembered something he had not thought of in years.
A year after the wreck, on a night the loneliness would not ease, desperate for relief, he had gone to a house in St. James's.
A discreet establishment. He had chosen a woman at random.
She had been beautiful and skilled. They had retired together to a room with silk sheets and excellent brandy.
When she had begun to undress, he had sat on the edge of the bed and wept.
He had apologized, horrified at his loss of control. Paid double and gone home full of shame and crushing despair. He had sat in this same room and understood that he was ruined for any woman who was not Vivienne.
He had told himself for seven years that what kept him going was discipline.
It had not been discipline.
He had sat on his wife's bed and wept, but he was still here, breathing. He had not killed himself. Whatever had held him together for seven years, it had not been the fortifications.
He looked around the room. The dressing table. Her bottle of perfume. The bed where he was sitting .
It had been her. Even her absence. Even the version of her he had thought was a memory.
She was three miles away at her parents' house. He had driven her there with his fear. And the pain of losing her this time was the same pain as the first, except this time she was alive, and within reach, and he could choose differently.
He loved her. Without qualification. He loved her stubbornness and her courage and her honesty. Loved that she had survived seven years alone and come out braver than he had ever been. He loved that she had left him because she thought it was best for him.
He needed to tell her.
He was going to go to her parents' house and say it, and give her the child she wanted, because a life without her was not a life. It was the mausoleum Venus had described.
He bathed, shaved, and sent word to Prowse to ready the carriage.