The Orchid
Chapter eight
Henry
The house was dark and still. He held the candle ahead of him and tried her sitting room first. The door was ajar. The room was empty, the fire dead, the chairs untouched.
He tried the shared parlour on the floor below.
Empty. The morning room. Empty. He moved through the house with the candle throwing his shadow long against the walls, opening doors onto cold rooms, and with each empty room the thought grew louder.
She had left. She had taken the satchel and walked out into the night the way she had walked into Thornwick’s drawing room.
Alone, with her back straight and her mind made up.
After what he had said. After what she had said.
She had decided she had had enough of him, and she had gone.
He took the stairs two at a time down the entrance hall. The night porter was slumped in his chair by the front door, asleep. Henry shook the man’s shoulder.
“Have you seen the duchess tonight?”
The porter blinked awake, saw the duke in his dressing gown holding a candle, and scrambled to his feet. “No, Your Grace. No one has come or gone since you arrived home, Your Grace.”
“You are certain?”
“The bolt is still thrown, Your Grace. I would have heard it.”
Henry looked at the bolt and confirmed it. He stood in the entrance hall with the candle dripping wax onto the marble and breathed.
She was in the house. She was somewhere in the house.
He went down to the kitchen. He had heard from Mrs Greer during their morning meeting that his wife was found peeling turnips with Mrs Garrick.
He took the service stair down, the candle throwing his shadow long against the bare walls. The range was banked. The scullery was dark. The long table was scrubbed clean. No one had been here since the kitchen was closed for the night.
He went past the scullery, where the copper pots hung in rows and the sink was dry.
Past the larder, where the cold air smelled of root vegetables and hanging game and the door stood closed as the cook would have left it.
He opened it and held the candle inside. Turnip sacks. A ham on a hook. No wife.
The passage at the back of the kitchen led to two closed doors.
He opened the first. The stillroom. The smell came up at him: dried lavender, chamomile, dust. His mother had spent hours in this room when he was a boy.
He remembered standing in the doorway watching her weigh and measure and label jars in her careful hand, and he remembered that she had not allowed him past the threshold because his elbows, she said, were a menace to glass.
The room had not been used since her death.
The jars on the upper shelves were filmed with dust. The workbench was bare.
The mortar and pestle sat where his mother had left them twelve years ago.
The second door opened onto a storeroom. Candle, soap, blacking, linen for the kitchen. He checked it and closed it.
He went down to the cellar. The stairs were stone and narrow, and the candle guttered in the draught.
The cellar was cold and dark and ran the length of the house.
Wine racks along one wall. Coal store through an iron gate at the far end.
He walked the length of it, his boots loud on the flagstone, and checked the coal store gate.
Locked. He tried to think whether a woman unfamiliar with the house might have come down here in the dark and not been able to find her way back.
The latch on the cellar door was simple enough, but in the dark, turned around, not knowing the layout…
He checked behind the wine racks, the alcove where the empty barrels were stacked.
He called her name once, quietly, and his voice came back to him off the stone walls and nothing answered.
He went back up to the kitchen, stood in the middle of the kitchen and did not know what to do.
So he found the poker and opened the grate and stirred the coals until a few of them glowed.
He needed kindling but didn’t know where it was kept.
It took him a few minutes to locate the kindling beside the ash pail.
He fed them into the grate one handful at a time.
The kindling flared and died. He fed more and blew on the coals like he had seen grooms do at the hearth in the stables. Ash came up to his face, and he coughed and sat back on his heels with his eyes streaming.
On the fourth attempt the kindling held. He added coal, too much, and the fire sulked under the weight of it. He waited, wondering if he’d manage a fire before the kitchen staff woke. The coal caught at last, unevenly, burning on one side and black on the other. It would do.
He filled the kettle too full and water slopped across the hob when he set it down.
He opened three canisters before he found the tea caddy and the leaves.
Uncertain how many leaves to add, he took a fistful and dropped them into the pot.
The cup he found was a kitchen cup, heavy brown stoneware, not meant for him.
The tea, when he thought it might be ready after two minutes, was black and bitter and so strong it furred his tongue. He drank it anyway, standing at the long table because he didn’t have the patience to look for sugar.
He was draining the last of it when the back door opened.
Cold air came through the kitchen. He heard footsteps and then the rustle of fabric against a doorframe, and she appeared in the passage that led from the garden.
His wife wore her dressing gown over her nightgown.
Her hair was loose down her back, and her old Thornwick shoes were dark with damp and caked with mud.
In her arms she carried a bundle of cuttings—stems, roots, a handful of something leafy and dark—pressed to her body with both arms as her mother had held her cuttings at Thornwick, her face flushed, her eyes round with surprise.
She saw him and stopped in the doorway.
He set the cup down on the table. It hit the wood harder than he intended. The sound cracked through the kitchen.
“Where have you been?” he barked.
She flinched. The cuttings shifted in her arms. “In the garden.”
“It is three o’clock in the morning.”
“I could not sleep.”
He came around the table toward her. She held her ground, but her arms tightened around the cuttings. “You went outside. Alone. In the dark. In your nightclothes.”
“In my dressing gown when no one is awake. It’s hardly a crime.”
“You are a duchess.” He was close to her now.
Close enough to see the mud on her hands, dirt packed beneath her fingernails.
Close enough to see her mother standing barefoot, wild-eyed, clutching her specimens.
His voice dropped. “You had better get used to the idea of acting with decorum. At all times. Night and day. I will not have the ton see you as your—”
The word sat in his mouth. He clenched his jaw around it. Her chin lifted. He watched her features harden, her shoulders draw back, her whole body stiffen.
“Say it.” The words hissed out of her.
He cleared his throat and turned away from her. “You get my point.”
“Say it, Your Grace. You have come this far.”
“You do not command me.” He swung back to face her. A vein was beating at his temple. “I am the duke.”
“Say it!”
“Your mother!”
The name ricocheted off the stone walls. Her hands balled into fists.
“She’s not mad!” Her voice broke high and raw. “There’s nothing wrong with her! She loves nature, that’s all!”
“She can love nature with shoes on!” He was pacing now, his hands on his hips. “Any hint of you possessing your mother’s illness will not only ruin our reputation but the child’s as well!”
She went still. Her shoulders dropped. When she spoke, her voice was quiet. “What does it matter? I shall be dead within a fortnight.”
All the air left his lungs. The fire spat.
She believed it. She married him anyway.
He turned and walked out of the kitchen without another word. His boots were loud on the service stair. At the top, he stopped and put one hand against the wall and stood there. The plaster was cold under his palm. His chest was heaving.
A servant opened the door then hastily closed it.
He remained until he was numb.
The carriage took him back through Mayfair at a walking pace, for the rain that had come down through the night was coming down still at four o’clock, and the streets between Brooks’s and Iredell House were thick with the slow crawl of other carriages and the steam of horses going home.
Henry sat with his hat on the seat opposite and watched the water travel down the glass. He had been at the club five hours. He had drunk nothing, transacted no business, and offered nothing to the three men who had attempted, each in his turn, to draw him into conversation.
A week. He had been married a week, and he could not make his mind behave.
She was in every room he was in and in every room he did not. She was in the smell of the house, she was in the ledger Mrs Greer had brought to him that morning, she was in the corridor at midnight in her bare feet.
And she was in the bed. The lie she had told him. He did not know whether he was angrier at her for the deception or at himself for not seeing it, and the fact that he could not separate the two made him useless for anything except sitting in a leather chair at Brooks’s watching rain.
He had meant to confront her. He had composed the conversation twice in his head.
Both times the answer was so obvious it did not require her voice to deliver it.
A woman and her unmarried sisters ruined by a duke’s word had one remedy.
A husband who believed the ruin was real.
Because the alternative is the workhouse or worse.
He could not find it in himself to punish that.