The Bickles
Chapter twelve
Violet
Patten sent up the afternoon’s post on a salver. Among the cards and a note from Mr Brigg was a letter in a large round hand, crossed and recrossed to spare the paper, that could only be Mrs Bickle’s.
Her mother had warned her of this. Mrs Bickle would be at her door to see the inside of the house and carry the report back to the whole of Hampstead, and Violet might as well give her a good tea, for she would come whether Violet willed it or no.
She read now, by the window, three crossed pages of news, who had married and who had not and whose pig had taken a ribbon, working toward the announcement two pages in that Mrs Bickle did mean, if it were no trouble in the world and her dear Violet must say at once if it were, to call.
She had not reached the foot of the page when Patten knocked again. “Mrs Bickle, Your Grace,” he said with uncertainty, “and Miss Bickle. And a Mr Harris.”
Behind him came Mrs Bickle in her best, which was a great deal of best, a bonnet with so much fruit upon it that a duchess’s dining room seemed the proper setting for it; and behind her, her daughter Letty, who came through the door with her face up at the ceiling and very nearly went down over the edge of the carpet; and behind them both, hat in his two hands and saying nothing, Kit Harris.
“Oh, my dear.” Mrs Bickle stopped and put both hands to her bosom and took in her hall, the staircase, the marble, the great cold height of it. “Oh, my dear. Look at where you are.”
Violet crossed the hall and let Mrs Bickle gather her in, fruit bonnet and all.
The good woman smelled of camphor, of home.
Behind her, Letty was explaining to no one in particular that the chandelier beat the one at the Assembly Rooms by half.
Kit had stepped back and set himself to watching the corners of the hall, as he had once watched the corners of every room her father entered.
The hackney had cost a shilling and ninepence, Mrs Bickle announced, and been worth every farthing, for she would not have found the place in a week of Sundays.
These western streets were got up to look alike on purpose, she was sure of it, to keep honest folk out.
She had not cared to come so far from home without a man to lend her countenance, and Lady Thornwick had been glad enough to spare Kit for the afternoon.
“Though it takes him from his work, my dear, for he is much in demand now.” She dropped her voice on the word work as though it were something fragile.
“There is not a merchant in Holborn who would not have him keep his books, after the way he kept your poor father’s.
And not the books alone, as you well know. ”
This was Mrs Bickle’s method of informing the butler, who stood by the door pretending not to listen, that the quiet man with the worn hat was a person of consequence and to be used as one.
“You look well, Kit.”
“Well enough, Miss.” He caught himself. “Your Grace.”
The old name and the correction hung a moment in the cold air.
Patten was waiting still to learn what these people were, whether they were for the morning room and the treatment of persons who had presumed, or for something gentler. Violet did not leave him in doubt.
“We will take tea in the drawing room. The good room. Bring it up yourself, Patten, with the seed cake. Please tell Mrs Greer the best service.”
Mr Patten, to his credit, kept his expression neutral. “Very good, Your Grace.”
She meant them to have the best of everything even though she herself wasn’t sure what the best would look like.
A shopkeeper had turned her into the street over the cut of a gown.
She would not, under her own roof, do to the people who loved her what the world had been so willing to do to her.
Let Hampstead hear that the Duchess of Iredell had given Mrs Bickle the good room. Let the whole of them hear it.
Tea in the good room did Mrs Bickle a great deal of good. By the second cup she had recovered the power of consecutive speech, and Letty, who had been struck dumb only by the ceiling, found her tongue along with her mother.
It was Letty who reported how Hampstead was getting on.
“We went to the broker’s in Theobald’s Road, Your Grace, the whole party of us, your lady mother and Miss Primrose and Miss Poppy, and we bought a sofa.
” She said sofa the way someone else might have said barouche—with a hint of condescension and pride.
“A green one, only a little worn at the one arm, with two chairs to match, and a long glass for the hall that’s hardly foxed at all except in the corner.
Your mother said we were furnishing like the King himself, and we laughed so the broker thought us mad. ”
Mrs Bickle’s own news included that she and Violet’s mother were scheming a business between them.
Her ladyship lent respectability even if only on paper, and Mrs Bickle had the instincts of a woman born to sell.
Between the two there was surely a living in selling honest remedies to honest people who could not afford a doctor.
Cordials. Cough drops. A salve that took the ache out of a washerwoman’s hands like magic.
“I say there’s no shame in an honest penny. We’re to call it Thornwick’s. A baron’s name on the bottle carries, you know. Now, I’ve waited just enough, I think. Where is that stillroom of yours?”
So Violet took them down, and the house watched them go.
Two housemaids stood aside on the landing and curtseyed to her, then forgot to lift their eyes from Mrs Bickle’s bonnet until she had passed.
In the kitchen passage a footman flattened himself to the wall, his face arranged in the careful blankness servants assume they have occasion to laugh.
Mrs Bickle entered the still room ahead of everyone else, as if she owned it. She went along the shelves with her lips moving, making small sounds of reverence, for there was a duchess who had known her business.
She stopped at one jar, and her face changed.
“HAROLD’S COUGH,” she read aloud. She clicked her tongue and held it to the light. “Oh, the poor lady. Made it up for the boy, I don’t doubt, and small good it did her.” She set it down with the tenderness owed a relic. “You’ll know the story, Your Grace, being family now.”
Violet did not know the story, so she said so.
Mrs Bickle, who had been waiting for a moment exactly like this one, told it.
“His Grace’s mother buried her husband one winter, his heart they said.
So the elder boy stepped into the title.
Young Harold. A fine young man by all I ever heard, and not above five-and-twenty.
” She lifted four fingers toward the ceiling.
“Duke not four months, the poor lamb, and then he took a cough. It settled on his chest and would not be shifted, not for love nor money. Not even with his mother physicking him day and night. He was dead by autumn. And the second boy, he was off soldiering in the far side of the world, so they had to send all that way to fetch him home and make him duke. A sweet boy, they had said. Well, you know better than I do if that’s still true of His Grace. ”
Mrs Bickle set the jar back on the shelf.
“And the poor mother took to her bed and was gone inside a twelvemonth after,” Mrs Bickle finished.
“Grief, my dear. There’s no physic for it on any shelf.
Three of them in three years, the duke and the duke and the duchess, and that great title coming down on a boy who’d sooner have stayed a soldier.
They say the great aren’t happy. I never believed it till I had the dressing of the tale. ”
Violet stood with the cold of the stillroom on her arms and felt a pang of pity toward her husband. Father, mother, brother, then three wives in quick succession. It was no mystery why he was rumoured to be so ill-tempered.
And his brother’s death, she was relatively sure, was not the work of her husband. Did that mean the rest were not either?
The cold stayed on her arms and would not be reasoned off.
Mrs Bickle’s mind had already moved on to supply. A stillroom like this wanted stocking, if Violet meant to use it, and there was only the one place in London for the rare things. “You’ll have been to Renshaw’s, in Lamb’s Conduit Street.”
Violet’s fingers curled into her palms. “No, I have not been.”
By the time they came up again the light had gone amber in the hall and Kit had his eye on the clock.
He said the four o’clock coach from the corner would not wait, and that the streets did not improve after dark for ladies on foot from the stage.
Mrs Bickle protested they had only just come.
Kit said nothing more and let the clock do his arguing, and presently she began the long business of gathering her shawl, her daughter, and her impressions for the road.
They were nearly at the door when it opened ahead of them and the duke came in.
He gave his hat and gloves to Patten, his coat after them.
While he did it, his gaze caught the people filling his hall.
The frown came down slowly and stayed. His eyes went last and longest to Kit.
Kit looked back at him with no sign of reverence.
Kit stood with his hat in his two hands and met the Duke of Iredell’s stare as if they were two equals.
Violet could not decipher what was passing between them.
Then he looked at his wife.
She made herself smile and went to him, because that was what a wife did, especially when the whole room was watching.
“You are home early,” she said. It was the kind of thing married people said.
“I am home at this hour every day.” He said it plainly.
A flush went up the back of her neck. She did the only thing left to her. “Your Grace, may I present Mrs Bickle, a dear friend of my mother’s. Her daughter, Miss Bickle. And Mr Harris.”
Mrs Bickle came up out of a curtsey so thrilled that her bonnet shed a wax cherry on the marble, talking all the way. His Grace received it with a cool civility. Letty, not to be outdone, sank lower than her mother, caught her foot in her own hem coming up, and pitched forward.
Kit moved. He was quick and was halfway to her when His Grace put out a hand and set the girl on her feet again with the briefest of movements. Kit stepped back.
Letty, scarlet, in the arms of a duke and then very suddenly out of them, made a sound like a kettle coming to the boil.
Violet would have given a year of her life to have them gone, safely and at once, before anything further could befall them on her account.
Her husband took his letters from the salver in Patten’s hands and was already turning for the stairs.
“Your Grace.”
He stopped on the second step and turned partially. One hand on the rail, the letters held loosely in the other.
“I should like the use of the carriage this afternoon. To see my guests home safely.”
A sound came from his throat that was not quite a word. He gave a single nod and then he was gone up the stairs.
Kit said nothing, but she saw his eyes narrow, saw the muscle stand at the corner of his jaw.
She instructed Patten to have the carriage brought around, the one with the Iredell crest marked on it, and saw to it that her guests boarded safely.
Then she stood and watched the carriage pull away with Mrs Bickle waving enthusiastically until the street had taken them.
When she turned back into the hall, Patten was clearing the salver and the wax cherry from the marble, and the house was as it had been before they came.