Lady Thornwick
Chapter ten
Violet
She had not pressed the point. The late duchess grouped her preparations by complaint rather than by ingredient, which Violet had suspected from the labels, and which made the alphabetical scheme an inconvenience that any working herbalist would quickly want undone.
She would put it right herself, jar by jar, as she came to know what each contained.
Nothing had been thrown out. That order, at least, had been followed.
She could see, on the lower shelf, jars labelled simply HAROLD’S COUGH and HENRY’S SHOULDER and IT and several others which were of no use to anyone living except her.
She turned the calendula jar in her hand and uncorked it. The smell was faint, almost gone. Eight years was a long life for an unguent. She corked it and set it back upon the shelf in its alphabetical place, beside the bergamot oil that had been still further gone.
Footsteps came along the corridor. The maid, Bessie, looked in at the door without entering, because the stillroom was the duchess’s room now and she had not yet been invited to cross the threshold.
“Your Grace. Mr Patten asks if you would come up. There is a woman at the front door.”
“A caller?”
“He thinks not, Your Grace. The lady is claiming to be your mother.”
Violet was on her feet before she had quite registered the words.
She went up the service stair, lifting her skirts. By the time she reached the head of it she could hear voices in the entrance hall, low but firm. Mr Patten’s voice, and another voice, lighter and quicker, and unmistakable.
“…do not require an appointment to call upon my own daughter. I should think the situation perfectly plain. The girl I have been speaking to was incapable of taking a message, or you would have had me announced an hour ago—”
“Madame, if I might—”
“Lady Thornwick to you. Send your housekeeper—”
Violet crossed the marble in five quick strides and put her hands on her mother’s shoulders.
“Mama.”
Her mother was wearing her good travelling cloak, which is to say the one without holes, and a bonnet that had been respectable twenty years ago, and she had brought a quantity of mud in with her from the street.
Her hair was coming down on one side. She looked at her daughter and her whole face opened.
“Violet.”
The hands went around her, and her mother held her hard enough that the bonnet slid further back on her head.
“Mama. Why did you not tell me you were coming?”
“I came on the morning coach from Highgate. I have a great deal to tell you. This gentleman here, I think it is Patten, was kind enough to attempt to send me away. I have explained the situation, and I should like a cup of tea.”
“Of course, my lady.” Patten had the grace not to glance at the mud on his marble. “I shall send up at once.”
“And the garden. I should like to see the garden. Violet, dear, do you have a garden? In London, I never know.”
“There is, Mama.”
“Then we shall begin there.”
She tucked her arm through Violet’s as though they were going in to dinner at Thornwick. Violet walked her through to the back of the house, and Patten, who had been a butler in this house for only three years, watched them go without a word.
The garden was small compared to the vast country estates of nobility Violet had seen, but she considered its presence in a London home a miracle.
A long rectangle behind the wall of brick, with paths of fine gravel and beds in the formal Italian style.
The herbaceous border ran along the south wall and was, at this season, mostly bare.
The beds were still brown but for a scatter of crocuses, the first thing to bloom since the year turned.
A bay laurel stood in a great urn near the kitchen door.
The mulberry at the end of the lawn likely had been there since the reign of the third George.
Her mother let go of her arm and walked directly across the lawn and pulled a leaf off the bay and crushed it between her fingers and smelled it.
“Good leaf. They water it. Not many gardens in town keep a bay properly watered.”
“Mrs Greer has gardeners.”
“Mrs Greer has more than gardeners, by the smell of this. Someone here cares about plants. Is it you?”
“Not yet, Mama. I have been here only eleven days.”
“Then someone before you. Or one of the gardeners. We shall see.”
Lady Thornwick began her circuit. She ran her fingers along the box hedge, crouched to feel the soil between her fingers, pulled a spent head off a lavender bush and rubbed it between her palms. Violet had watched her mother move through gardens this way since she was old enough to follow.
The commentary was half-whispered, directed at the plants rather than at anyone listening.
The light, which had been grey at breakfast, was beginning to come through the high clouds.
“Are you happy, my love?”
“I am.”
“Let me see you.”
Violet looked at her.
“I am happy, Mama. His Grace is good to me. He is busy with his affairs, and I am busy with the house. We hardly cross paths in a day, but he is not unkind. He has settled my pin-money and ordered everything for me I asked for and a great deal that I did not. The household is generous. The staff are respectful.” She paused.
“He is an important man. He is preoccupied with his concerns. It is the natural way of things in a house like this.”
A deep crease formed between her mother’s brows.
“That is exactly what I told myself, my dear, for the first ten years of my marriage. Your father was an important man, in his way. He went to Parliament three days in the week and read the papers at his club two days more, and what remained of him on Sundays was a man with a good opinion of his own occupations and very little time for the woman he had married.”
Her mother crouched down to examine a flowerbed. “I had told myself that he was not a bad husband but an absent one. He thought of us, spoke of us, arranged for us when arrangement was required.”
She stood up, rubbing the dirt off her hands. “But even that ended when Primrose was born.”
“Primrose?”
“Yes. I do not know to this day what figures came home with him from his man of business that week. He went into his study and was different when he came out. He never sat in Parliament again. After that came the rest of it. The cards, and the brandy, and the schemes, and the men he should not have had in the house, and the daughters he had stopped thinking about.”
Violet brushed dirt off her mother’s skirt.
“I am not telling you this to frighten you, Violet. I am telling you that a husband who is busy with his affairs can be a good husband even if he is an absent one. However, I should not wish you to mistake the absence of cruelty for the presence of love. That is all.”
“He has not been cruel to me, Mama. I shall not expect much more than that.”
Her mother cradled Violet’s face gently with one hand. “I hear such wicked rumours about the man’s character, his violent temper. The moment he becomes cruel, you come home, you hear?”
“Yes, Mama.”
They began walking again, arm in arm, taking one deliberate step at a time.
“Have you bought any new clothes for yourself and the girls?” Violet asked as she linked arms with her mother. “Or furniture for the house?”
“Not yet. I would not know what to do. I was hoping that perhaps you might help since you would know where to go.”
Violet felt a knot form in her belly as the unwelcome memory of the modiste came back to her. “I shall do my best. I could enlist Mrs Greer’s assistance. She is more proficient than anyone I have seen.”
“That would be wonderful. Primrose must have her debut this Season.”
They made their way back toward the house. Her mother’s voice was a little lighter when she spoke next. “Mrs Bickle mentioned a place called Renshaw’s on Lamb’s Conduit Street. Do you know of it?”
“No.”
“They are said to carry something extraordinary. Mrs Bickle had it from her sister-in-law that a consignment of Egyptian myrrh, the proper sort, has recently arrived. She is dying to know whether the man has it or whether it is a rumour. Are you in a position to make the enquiry?”
“I shall try, Mama.”
“My word. My daughter, able to enquire after the Egyptian myrrh. Why, they must cost a fortune. Do write Mrs Bickle, my dear, and tell her so. She would be in raptures. I expect she would ask to come up and see you when she may. She has been speaking of nothing else this fortnight, has not been to London in eleven years. Imagine her face when she sees your garden and your stillroom and how, as she puts it, the wealthy live.”
“She is most welcome, Mama. She and her daughter. They are to come whenever they like.”
“Should you not ask the duke? Or your housekeeper?”
Violet turned to face her mother. “You can be assured that I am the mistress here, Mama.”
Her mother beamed, her mouth curving into a shape Violet had not seen in so many years.
“Mrs Bickle will write within the week. She will probably arrive the same day the letter does.”
“Then I shall be ready for her.”
Violet considered, and dismissed, mentioning the tea. Her mother would seize upon it with both hands, and Violet was not yet certain enough to warrant the alarm. But she had been saving the dregs for a fortnight now, and the papers in the drawer were accumulating.
They went back into the house. Greer had tea laid in the small morning room, but Violet, after the briefest hesitation, took her mother past the morning room and along the corridor and up the great staircase.
“I want you to see my rooms first,” she said to her mother.
On the landing of the principal floor, Violet paused at her door and opened it.