Turnips
Chapter six
Violet
You lied to me.
Four words. He could have made a speech of it. He had given her four, and the door, and the rest of the evening to live with it.
She had not lied to him. She held that distinction close, as if it might keep her upright.
Trowbridge had written his name and hers in a book at White's and claimed what he had never taken.
The ruin was his doing. The entry was his hand.
She had been offered a thousand pounds to call it false, and she had refused, not because the claim was true but because denial would have cost her everything and bought her nothing.
A baron's daughter's word against a duke's, inscribed in the betting book at the most famous club in London—no retraction of hers would have scratched the ink.
She and her sisters would have been ruined and penniless and Trowbridge would have carried on.
So she had kept her mouth shut and let his lie do its work.
She had thought of calling out as he was leaving. By the time she had decided it did not matter, the door had clicked shut.
The candles burned down. The linen cooled under her.
She rose at last, washed at the basin Sarah had left, carried it through to the dressing room and tipped it into the slop pail.
She stripped the under-cloth from the bed, folded it small and set it on the chair by the door, and lay back down on the clean linen beneath.
Between her thighs throbbed the dull ache he had left her with. A burn, a soreness. She shifted onto her side, found that worse, and lay flat again.
She had been told certain things by Letty who had the habit of reading everything she could manage.
She’d used a half-comic voice to explain the act and the pain that may come with it.
She had been told by her mother, two evenings ago, with a candle between them.
It is briefer than they tell you. It is not, in your case, going to be kind.
He will be careful or he will not. Either way it is over, and you do not have to think of it again until the next time.
Brief, yes. Kind, perhaps. He had used the oil.
He had asked if she was ready. She did not know what else he could have done.
The hurt had been a sharp surprise. She had set her teeth against the inside of her lip, and they had held until the cry came out around them.
After that there had been a different hurt, steadier, and she had pleaded with him to continue because to make him stop was to give him grounds to leave the bargain entirely.
There had been no pleasure in it. Whether women were supposed to feel pleasure she could not say.
Her mother had not gone that far in her instruction, and Mrs Bickle, her mother’s particular friend in herbs, had spent twenty years compounding remedies to lessen her own husband’s appetite while compounding others to raise her own, and had achieved neither.
Mrs Bickle had once told Violet that the marriage bed was the smaller half of her difficulty, and that the larger half was the years on either side of it.
Violet thought of Mrs Bickle and understood her, at last.
Was that all she had to look forward to?
The pinch of him pushing in. The held breath.
The cold of the linen afterward. A husband leaving without a word.
She would have to lie beneath him on every night he came, until she conceived, and after that as well because the contract required it and because two thousand pounds would keep her sisters fed but only a husband’s goodwill would see them married.
A small dry sob came out of her before she could brace for it. She pushed her face into the pillow, let three more come out, and stopped the rest.
The house was unfamiliar. The Hampstead house creaked at the joists in places she had known since she was nine. This house creaked elsewhere, in patterns that meant nothing to her. She listened anyway.
She woke before six. The room was still dark. She lay for a moment not knowing where she was. Then she remembered and put her feet on the cold floor.
At Thornwick she would have been up at half past five, checking the fires, putting the kettle on and making porridge. Here there was no sound she recognised and no routine that was familiar.
She dressed in what she had, with short stays she could lace herself. Her old shoes. Her hair she twisted up and pinned as if there was manual labour to be done and no one to see her do it.
The corridor outside her room was dark. She had no candle and did not know where one was kept.
She put her hand on the wall and followed it.
The wallpaper was smooth under her fingers, a heavy weave she could feel the pattern of without seeing it.
The corridor turned. A staircase presented itself, not the great staircase she had come up the evening before but a narrower one, uncarpeted, that went up and down. She took it down.
The house, in the early dark, was a different creature from the house she had been led through last night.
The passages were cold. The floors were stone.
Somewhere below her a door stood open onto a draught, and the draught carried the smell of coalsmoke and bread and the particular mineral smell of a kitchen range that had been banked overnight and not yet brought up. She followed it.
The kitchen was enormous. She had known it would be, but the scale of it, seen from the doorway in the grey half-light of a February morning, was something else.
A long scrubbed table. Copper pans above it in rows.
A range that took up most of the far wall, with two spits and an oven door wide enough to take a goose.
A scullery she could see the edge of through another door.
A woman was at the range. She was stoking it, her back to the door. The woman was perhaps fifty. Stout. Her cap was already on. Her sleeves were already rolled. She looked at Violet over her shoulder and slowly rose to her feet. Violet tried a small smile and approached.
“Good morning.” She tried to keep her voice friendly.
The woman turned fully, her eyes moving over the dress then back to her face.
“Mrs Greer didn’t tell me she’d hired anyone new. You’re early.”
“I—”
“Well, don’t just stand there. There’s bread on the board if you’re hungry. Don’t touch the butter, that’s for upstairs. I’m Mrs Garrick. You’ll call me Mrs Garrick or Cook.”
“Yes, Mrs Garrick.”
She should have said I am the Duchess of Iredell, but it felt like a lie. And she did not want to say it. She wanted to keep her hands busy, have something to do.
“Can I help with anything?”
Mrs Garrick looked her over a second time. “Can you peel?”
“Yes.”
“Turnips in the larder. Through there. Knife’s on the hook. Peelings in the bucket, not on my floor.”
The larder was through a narrow passage past two closed doors.
At the second she slowed. The smell coming through the gap beneath it was one she knew.
Dried lavender, chamomile, something sharper underneath.
A stillroom. Her mother’s kitchen at Thornwick had smelled like this in autumn, when the bundles hung from every beam.
The larder was cold and dim and smelled of root vegetables and hanging game. The turnips were in a hessian sack by the door. Violet took the sack and the bucket and the knife back to the long table and sat on the bench and began to peel.
She had peeled a thousand turnips at Thornwick. Her hands knew the work. The knife turned in her grip. The peel came off in long curls.
Mrs Garrick glanced over once, saw the peel going into the bucket. “You’re quick,” she said. “I could use quick. Where did Mrs Greer find you?”
“I came on my own, in fact.”
“Did you now? Well, you’ll do if you keep your head down and don’t give me trouble.”
Violet was about to thank her when the service door opened and a silence preceded the person behind it. The scullery maid straightened. Mrs Garrick stood up. Violet turned and found Mrs Greer standing in the doorway in her grey dress and white cap.
Mrs Greer looked at Violet then at her hands holding a knife and a turnip. She looked at the peelings in the bucket. Her gaze moved to Mrs Garrick.
“Mrs Garrick.”
“Mrs Greer.”
“Is Her Grace peeling turnips in your kitchen?”
Mrs Garrick looked at Violet. The blood left her face. “Her Grace, Mrs Greer?”
“Yes. The Duchess of Iredell, Mrs Garrick. Sitting at your table. Peeling turnips.”
“Oh, Lord. Oh. I didn’t… She came in and I thought…”
“I can see what you thought.”
“She asked to help. She asked! And she looked like she needed something to do, and I didn’t know. The dress!”
“Mrs Garrick.” Mrs Greer put her fists on her hips.
“Mrs Greer,” Violet set down the knife, “Mrs Garrick has been very kind. And the turnips needed peeling.”
Mrs Greer regarded her mistress with something maternal behind her eyes.
“Your Grace, Sarah is waiting for you upstairs.”
Violet stood and wiped her hands on the kitchen cloth hanging from the hook.
“Thank you for the bread, Mrs Garrick. I am sorry for the confusion.”
Mrs Garrick, who looked like she might not recover for some days, managed a curtsey. “Your Grace.”
Violet followed Mrs Greer up the service stair. At the top, where the stair gave onto the main corridor, Mrs Greer stopped.
“I shall have tea and biscuits sent up to your room, Your Grace. Breakfast will be laid in the morning room at nine.”
“Tea and a biscuit in my room will be quite sufficient, Mrs Greer.”
“Very good, Your Grace. I should mention that His Grace will be breakfasting at nine.”
The mention of her husband sent a coldness through her that had nothing to do with the corridor.
“I think… I will not need any more than tea and biscuits, Mrs Greer.”
“Very well, Your Grace, but you will have soft-boiled egg as well. You are far too thin, and I will not have it said that this house does not feed its mistress.”
Violet thought about her mother. “Very well, Mrs Greer. Thank you.”
Sarah Baker came in at twenty past seven with the tea tray in one hand. She was perhaps around her own age. She was pretty with dark hair and quick hands.
She set the tray down and met Violet’s eyes with an open expression.
“Good morning, Your Grace. Mrs Greer tells me you’ve already had an adventure.”
“Yes, a little.”
“The kitchen is still recovering. Would you like your tea as usual, or would you like to try coffee? Many of the young ladies have gone over to coffee. It’s thought very modern.”
“Tea,” she said.
“Without sugar or milk as usual, Your Grace?”
Violet hesitated. “I’d like to try one sugar, one milk, please.”
Sarah poured the tea. “You’ll find ours rather out of the way, Your Grace. There’s not another cup like it in London.” She handed her mistress the cup. “And Mrs Greer says you’re to eat all three biscuits and eggs, Your Grace, and I am to report to her if you haven’t.”
Violet ate the biscuits and eggs. Sarah moved about and chattered away while watching Violet eat. “We have a great deal to do today, Your Grace.”
She disappeared into the dressing room and returned with dresses. She held up the first dress. A dark blue morning gown, simply cut.
“Mrs Greer had two day dresses bought from a shop on Regent Street. They will hold you for the week while Madame Renard prepares a proper wardrobe for Your Grace. These are not what a duchess wears.”
“They are quite sufficient, Sarah.”
“They are quite unreasonable by the standards of your station and this house, Your Grace.”
Violet drank her tea. It was not unpleasant, but there was a flavour she could not quite place.
It sat beneath the black tea flavour, almost lost, and a less practised tongue may not have tasted it at all.
But she had been raised in a kitchen where her mother dried and steeped and tinctured half of what grew in Hampstead.
She had been made to taste all of it, the wholesome and the foul, until she could tell tansy from feverfew blind.
“Your bath is drawn, Your Grace. I shall do your hair after.”
The bath was hot. The dressing room was warm.
Sarah washed her hair and dried it with a cloth softer than anything at Thornwick.
She sat her at the dressing table and pinned and curled until the face in the glass might belong in a house with copper pans and shortbread biscuits.
Sarah brought the blue morning gown, buttoned it up the back, and made an adjustment at the bodice with two pins.
“The fit is acceptable.”
Violet looked at herself. The dress fit her better than anything she had ever worn.
“Now, Your Grace. The plan for the day.” Sarah stood behind her in the glass, hands folded. “This morning you are to go to Gillows with Mrs Greer for furnishings. Your rooms need curtains, carpet, all furniture, and whatever else you wish.”
“Mrs Greer may order whatever she thinks best, Sarah. I should not know where to begin. Will you pass the message to her?”
“Your Grace, the mistress ought to choose to her own taste. The rooms are yours. Mrs Greer will guide you, but the selections should come from you.”
“I shall not be any help, Sarah. I have no preference. I have never had occasion to form one.”
“But—”
“Enough. I am decided.”
Sarah’s shoulders dropped a little. “As you wish, Your Grace. I shall inform Mrs Greer. This afternoon, Madame Renard’s for proper fitting. Walking dresses, evening dresses, and a ball gown.”
“A ball gown?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“I have not been to a ball since my presentation.”
“Lady Carstairs’s annual is in three weeks.”
Violet’s hands worried her skirt.
“All eyes will be on you, Your Grace. Every woman in that room will be looking at the new Duchess of Iredell. What you wear, how you carry yourself, whom you speak to, all of it will be observed, and all of it will be discussed the following morning.”
“Sarah, I have not danced in… a decade.”
“Then His Grace will arrange for lessons. There is time.”
“There is not... I do not belong at a ball in a ball gown.”
Sarah’s eyes held hers a moment longer than usual, and whatever she saw there, she did not remark upon.
“You shall feel quite differently by the time the ball comes around, Your Grace. The beautiful dress alone will convince you of where you belong.”
Violet looked at the woman in the glass. The Reaper’s fourth wife. The girl who lied her way into a duke’s bed.