Renshaw’s
Chapter eleven
Renshaw’s
Violet
It was a small thing, a degree only, but the third taste in the tea was stronger.
Another steeping, she told herself, a heavier hand at the caddy.
She turned over every herb she knew that might leave such a print on the tongue, bitter under sweet, a coldness at the back of the throat after, and came to nothing. That in itself was strange.
When she was alone with breakfast in bed, Violet poured the cold dregs into a twist of paper, folded it small, and put it at the back of the desk drawer filled with half written letters to her mother and sisters. She did not know what she would do with it yet, but she knew she had to do something.
Sarah returned swiftly after alerting the butler of her mistress’s outing and laced her into the grey wool, talking the whole time about sleeves.
They were to be enormous this year, by Sarah’s account, the great gigot shoulder narrowing to the wrist, so wide a lady could scarcely come through a door without turning sideways.
Madame Renard had promised three day-gowns and an evening dress, and Sarah had seen the patterns and could speak of nothing else: the sleeves, the waist drawn in close, the skirts shorter than the year past so a lady showed her foot, the hair to be dressed high on the crown the way the Frenchwomen wore it now.
She spoke of it as though it were happening to her, and not to the plain woman she was lacing into wool a superior servant might wear on her afternoon out.
“Tighter, Your Grace, if you’ll bear it.
It’s the line of the thing.” Violet had said enough a moment before, but Sarah drew the laces tighter regardless, yet the stays still lacked half an inch of meeting, and the boning bit cruelly into her ribs.
On a fuller woman the drawing-in would have made the very waist Sarah had been painting.
On Violet, it only found the bones and stood them up, and the wool hung off the result with no line to it anywhere.
“There. You’ve the waist for it. Half the ladies in London would lace till they swooned for a waist like that and never come by it.”
Violet looked at herself in the glass while Sarah tied off. With her collarbones standing up at the neck of the grey wool, she thought she looked less like a duchess than like the thing a duchess might frighten her children with.
Sarah scraped back her mistress’s hair and pinned it in a practical fashion that Violet was used to wearing.
“I shall be out this morning.” Violet turned away from the mirror. “The whole of it. You needn’t wait on me.”
“Out, Your Grace?” Sarah’s hands paused on the hairbrush. “I’ll see you into the carriage, then. You’ll want me with you, if it’s any distance.”
“I shan’t need you today.”
“As you say.”
Sarah smoothed the back of her mistress’s gown. Violet was glad her lady’s maid did not insist, and could not, a moment after, have said why she was glad.
The shoes were new and plain, black kid off the same rack.
She had never owned a pair that had not first belonged to Poppy who had been taller and bigger than any of her sisters since the day she was born.
She turned her foot to admire them then stopped when she saw Sarah watching her with a peculiar expression.
Violet turned away from her lady’s maid to hide her blushes.
She rang for Patten and asked him to have a carriage brought round.
“Of course, Your Grace. The town coach?”
“Something plainer. Have you one without the crest on the door?”
A wealthy duke’s household like this one, Violet reasoned, warranted the query.
“There is the old chariot, Your Grace. We send the upper servants in it, and it answers for wet weather. It wants the crest, as you say.”
“That one, then.”
“Very good.” He did not move at once. “Shall I have Miss Baker attend Your Grace? Or send a footman down with you?”
“Neither. I shall manage alone this morning.”
There was the smallest pause. “As Your Grace wishes.”
He inclined his head and went to send word to the mews.
The chariot came round within the quarter hour, plain and dark and unremarkable, Wither up on the box. A footman handed her in at the door, and she put her head to the front and gave Wither the direction herself, low, so that it went no further than the two of them.
The street was being mended at the Holborn end, and the coachman could get no nearer than the corner. Violet told him to wait, and stepped down, and her new shoe came down in a rut of black water she had not seen.
She stood on one foot and looked at the other. The kid had gone dark to the ankle. The hem of the grey wool had taken a tidemark of the street.
She had walked the lanes of Hampstead all her life and never once thought of her shoes.
Now she had a clean new pair ruined in the first ten yards, and standing in the road with one foot lifted like a heron, she understood finally that ladies did not keep their shoes clean.
Footmen did. A lady alone, on a torn-up street, with no one to hand her down, was inevitably a woman in the mud.
She put her foot down and walked to the shop.
The window read RENSHAW, CHYMIST & HERBALIST in faded gold. A bell rang as she went in, and the smell took her at once to her mother’s kitchen and the stillroom. She could have named half the jars on the near shelf with her eyes shut. She got no further than the mat.
The man behind the counter was not alone.
Two ladies stood with him in good pelisses and better bonnets, a paper of something open between them, and all three turned to look at her as the bell died away, and all three arrived at the same verdict in the same moment.
She knew the verdict. She had worn it on people’s faces the whole of her life.
It was only that she had let herself think, lately, that she had left it behind.
“We don’t buy at the back door,” the shopkeeper said, “and we don’t take no custom off the street. Whoever it is you’re selling, we’ve no want of it.”
He said it for the ladies as much as for her, the way some people wipe an already clean counter to show that it is clean.
“I have not come to sell anything. I should like to ask after some of your stock. Egyptian myrrh, if you have it, and a few other things besides.”
One of the ladies made a small sound behind her glove. The other looked her over from her flattened hair to her muddled hem and let her lip curl. The shopkeeper, with an audience now and warming to it, came round the end of the counter.
“Egyptian myrrh.” He set down his scoop.
“Two guineas the ounce, and I’ve one customer in this parish who can pay it, and you are not her maid, for I know her maid.
Off you go now, before you put the gentlewomen off their morning.
” He came round the counter briskly as if he was about to lift a cat off a chair and had the door open before she had decided what to do.
She should have gone. She knew, even in the doing of it, that the cleverer thing by far was to go. But the ladies were watching, and she’d never allowed she’d never allowed a stranger to dictate her worth. Not if she could help it.
“I am the Duchess of Iredell,” she said.
For a moment the shop was quite silent. Then the shopkeeper laughed, one short bark of flat disbelief.
The ladies did not laugh in the same way. Violet watched the name register on one of them, watched her turn it over and lean to murmur to her companion behind one glove. The other woman’s eyes came back to her with a fresh and feasting interest, and then they were both laughing, low and pleased.
She knew what they were thinking. The penniless nobody who had cornered the Reaper of Iredell into marrying her. The mad baroness’s madder daughter.
“Try Covent Garden,” the man finally said, wiping his eyes. “They’re easier about your sort down there.”
Violet went out onto the street, leaving behind the bell ring and the laughter taking up again.
Violet came in at the front door. She would not creep round to a side entrance of her own house, however she felt, but she went through the hall fast, fast enough that Patten had time to begin his bow and not to finish it.
She did not trust her face to last the length of a civil word.
She had held it together the whole way home in the dark of the chariot.
She could hold it as far as her own door and not an inch past.
Sarah was in her room, and Violet had forgotten she would be.
Her maid stood at the chest by the window with a drift of new stockings across the lid, silk and fine cotton, sorting them into pairs and folding them away.
Presumably, Mrs Greer and Sarah had ordered them.
They were the sort of thing that simply arrived now, without Violet’s input.
Six pairs finer than any she had owned in her life.
“Your Grace.” Sarah straightened. Whatever she saw, she did not mention it. “You’re back early. Shall I bring something up? You look perished.”
“No. Thank you.”
Violet sat at the dressing table because her legs wished her to, and Sarah went on with the stockings. The small domestic slip of the silk was very nearly more than she could bear after the morning she had had.
“It didn’t go as you’d hoped, then,” Sarah remarked, to the stockings rather than to her mistress.
“It was nothing. An errand that came to nothing.”
“Mm.” A pair folded, set by. “They didn’t know you.”
Violet didn’t respond.
“That’s all it is, Your Grace. They didn’t know you.” She said it gently, and she had it exactly right, which was the worst of it. “It happens to any lady who goes about plain. There’s no cure for it but to be known, and you’ll be known soon enough, Your Grace.”
She came and took the bonnet, her hands careful, and talked while she did it, low and easy, as if she was talking to settle a startled horse.
“If you’d return to Madame Renard, Your Grace, to select the materials and styles, you may avoid this type of misunderstanding. Or there’s Mrs Cole in Bruton Street, who’s quicker, they say, and every bit as good. Once you’re dressed as you ought to be, you won’t have another morning like it.”
Sarah was right, of course. Violet knew that, but she could not do it. She couldn’t listen to another hour of Madame Renard measuring against the ghost of the duchess before her.
“Not this week. Leave it a while.”
“As you say, Your Grace.”
The cards were where she had left them, propped along the chimney piece next door, and the thought of them was almost a relief. It was something she could do sitting still with no one to tell her she was a fraud.
“Sarah. How long have you been at Iredell House?”
“Nearly all my life.” She put away the stockings neatly in a drawer.
“My grandmother was housekeeper here, under His Grace’s mother.
She took me in when I was orphaned, as a kindness done her, and I grew up below stairs and was trained up to the work.
The linen was my very first, then I was made lady’s maid to the first duchess of the current master. ”
Making her decision, Violet handed the cards to Sarah.
Her lady’s maid took them and held each one to the light.
She was quick and decisive. This one yes, a very good house.
This one, Your Grace might leave a week and answer then.
It shall do no harm to be a little sought.
This one you should attend.” She set it forward.
“Lady Carstairs’s set, that. I dressed the first duchess for all the balls in that house.
” She said it casually and looked so pleased to be of use that Violet thanked her and set the card down.
By the time the light began to go she had a neat pile of acceptances in her careful new hand, on paper stamped with a crest she still did not feel was hers.
It was the first thing all day that had felt like the work of a duchess, and she was absurdly pleased and grateful.
She sealed the last of them and thought no more about it because she had other matters to attend to. Like searching her husband’s chambers.
She had been avoiding drinking the tea for two days as a precaution. The taste of it was growing stronger. And because she could no longer ignore the rumours about the Reaper of Iredell.
She waited until Henry was at his club before making her way to his room through the connecting door. She found cold grates, meticulously organised drawers full of smalls, and a small painted miniature of a fair woman she assumed was his mother.
In the dressing room she went through the rest. A campaign chest stood at the foot of the bed, every compartment squared away to a hard military order: razors in their case, a strop, a tin of tooth powder that smelled of orris and myrrh and stopped her a moment until she saw what it was.
There were scents enough on the stand to chase, eau de Cologne, the sweet bergamot of the oil he dressed his hair with, and not one of them was relevant to her search.
The wardrobe breathed camphor and cedar when she opened it, the smell of wool guarded against the moth, and nothing worse.
His physic was in a drawer that locked, the key still sitting in it: a bottle of laudanum half gone, a jar of embrocation that stank of camphor and turpentine.
At the back stood a small dark phial. She carried it to the window to read the label, and what she read there made her go still: tincture of monkshood.
Her mother had grown monkshood at the far end of the garden and forbidden the children to touch.
It could kill a grown man between his dinner and his bed.
For one long moment she thought she had found him out. Then she made herself think.
The phial stood near full, the dust thick at its stopper, bought and scarcely used.
And the thing she was hunting was slow and quiet.
Aconite was anything but slow and quiet.
They died of it inside the hour, in agony, and any physician alive would know it at a glance.
But a few drops were also useful for a pain that would not let a man sleep. Nothing worse than that.
A cased pair of pistols lay on the high shelf, cleaned and lately oiled. She stood with them in her hands longer than was wise. She put them back. Every gentleman in England kept a pair and they proved nothing.
At the very back, beneath a folded stock, were a curl of fair hair bound with black threads and a worn little book of psalms. These she did not touch despite her curiosity.
She put each item back as she had found it, pushing down the shame, although she could not make herself regret it.