Cranbrook House
Chapter thirteen
Henry
The Alliance met on a Tuesday when Cranbrook decided there was business enough to warrant the brandy.
Henry had received the note at breakfast, brought up on Patten’s salver alongside a card from Lady Bramwell and a small brown parcel addressed to Her Grace from the Hampstead Botanical Circles that he did not examine. He pocketed the note and left the rest.
It found him within the quarter hour.
“Trowbridge… We shall consider this affair concluded,” Cranbrook said.
“The Trowbridge affair is mine to close,” Henry said. “I sent word this morning that the boy present himself here tonight.” A silence. Cranbrook’s brows drew together. Banbury looked up from his spectacles. Wiltshire’s cigar paused on its way to his mouth.
“The matter is not mended. Not until he answers for it first, in this room, before the only men whose good opinion he requires.”
Wiltshire settled back with an amused expression, seemingly preparing for a stage drama to unfold. “Do try not to kill him, Iredell. Your reputation is already quite firm.”
As if on cue, the footman opened the door.
Trowbridge entered the room with his chin held up by effort. He looked younger than his twenty years, barely growing a moustache. He looked at the ring of older men, then at Henry, and visibly shrank before his eyes.
“Your Graces.” The words cracked in the middle.
No one offered him a chair.
Henry crossed the room. He did not hurry and watched the boy’s throat work as the distance closed. He stopped a few steps away from him.
“Do you know who I am?” Henry asked.
The boy nodded.
“Do you know what they call me?”
Trowbridge’s eyes went to the others who were studying him with varying expressions of indifference.
“The Reaper,” the boy whispered, “Your Grace.”
Henry nodded. “I have never cared for it. But there are evenings I find it useful, and I believe this is one of those evenings.” He let the quiet stretch until Trowbridge’s hands had begun to tremble.
“You wrote a lady’s name in a book,” Henry said. “You wrote that you had had her, and you knew as you wrote it that you had never stood within a mile of her. You did it knowing it would ruin her life.”
Trowbridge swallowed. “I never meant any harm to her.”
“Yes, you did. Only you chose your pathetic pride over a woman’s reputation, her life, her family, her right to happiness.”
Henry pulled off his gloves slowly, one finger at a time, as though he was preparing to strike the boy. Trowbridge’s eyes widened, his bottom lip began to quiver. Once the gloves were off, Henry opened and closed his hands.
“I would like nothing more than to beat some senses into you. However, you are not worth it. Instead, you will go to Lisbon. Tonight, if the tide allows it. Should I find you in London within the next two years, I will show you how I have gained my reputation. Understood?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” the boy said enthusiastically, bowing unsteadily.
Cranbrook lifted two fingers, the footman drew the boy out, and the door closed.
“The affair is now concluded,” Cranbrook said into the silence.
“Not quite. A new one has begun,” Wiltshire pointed his cigar toward Henry. “We meant for Iredell to scare the chit, not marry her, although in your case the two seem indistinguishable.”
“You ought to have consulted us before proposing marriage to the Linton girl. Respectable blood but—” Banbury adjusted his spectacles.
“The Duchess of Iredell, Banbury,” Henry pinned him with his eyes, “will be addressed as such or Her Grace. Speak about her as though she is a servant girl, and I will rip your throat out. Literally.”
Banbury froze.
“Is there anyone else in this room who is taking issue with my marriage?” Henry looked around the room. “You sent me to resolve the scandal, so I did. None of you had to pay for it. That fool, Trowbridge, certainly has paid nothing for it until tonight.”
Wiltshire looked at Henry across the rim of his glass. “You cannot fault us for being concerned. A ceremony with barely enough witnesses to make it lawful, and a bride who every drawing room ridiculed. And the ton’s opinion reflects upon this body.”
Cranbrook set his glass aside. “Let bygones be bygones, gentlemen. The question is whether we mean to present the match publicly. I should think an appearance at Lady Carstairs’s ball is advisable. A duchess on the duke’s arm is a stronger answer than any notice in the paper.”
A faint memory of discussing Carstairs’ ball with his wife surfaced in fragments. He said nothing. Facing his former in-law’s accusation of murder was more tolerable than the entire ton turn against Violet. Being invited was an act of acknowledgement which he and his duchess should not ignore.
From his chair by the fire, Cromwell sat with one leg crossed over the other and his fingers steepled beneath his chin. “She is healthy, I take it?” Cromwell said, dragging out each syllable.
“My wife’s health is none of your concern, Cromwell.”
“Eight and twenty is not ideal but not impossible. Two or three years at most before nature closes the account.” Cromwell spoke as though reading from a ledger.
“I should advise against delay.” Cromwell examined his fingernails.
“Let us hope the baroness’s affliction does not breed true, or the Iredell line shall produce a duke who talks to the flowers and walks to Parliament without his shoes. ”
The room drew a breath.
Henry set his glass on the shelf behind him.
He crossed the space between the bookshelf and Cromwell’s chair in four strides.
His hand found Cromwell’s cravat before the man had uncrossed his legs.
He twisted the cloth and hauled him up out of the chair until Cromwell was on his toes and the fabric bunched tight enough against his throat that his face turned the colour of cooked lobster.
The room did not move. Brandy glasses hung in mid-air. The footman by the door took one step and then did not take another.
Henry held him there. He could hear the cloth straining and Cromwell’s breathing coming short through the constriction, and he held him there a beat longer than was wise because the satisfaction of it was considerable and he had not felt satisfaction in some time.
“If you speak of my wife again,” Henry said, “in this room or any other, I shall not limit myself to your cravat. And your dealings won’t bear the light, Cromwell. Duke or not, you will not survive the scandal and neither will your children.”
He released him. Cromwell dropped back into the chair with a thud that sent the brandy slopping over the arm. His hand went to his throat. His face was mottled. He did not speak.
Henry turned to the room. Cranbrook was on his feet. Wiltshire’s cigar had gone out in his fingers. Banbury was holding his brandy at some distance.
“Iredell.” Cranbrook’s voice was the voice he used for votes and reprimands. “That is conduct unbecoming of this Alliance. You will apologise to His Grace.”
“I will not.”
“Then you will accept a formal censure. This body does not tolerate—”
“This body tolerates a great deal when it suits you. It tolerated Trowbridge ruining a lady. It tolerated frightening an innocent young woman into silence. It tolerated insults to my wife! It will tolerate this.”
Henry drained his glass by the window where he had left it and walked out before he could hurt someone. Behind him, the drawing room erupted. He did not slow to hear what they said.
The carriage was waiting at the kerb. Henry climbed in and sat with his hat on the seat beside him and the rain running down the glass. The horses moved off. His hand was shaking from anger. He flexed it twice and placed it flat on his thigh and left it there until it was still.
The streets of Mayfair passed the window. He was not thinking about the Alliance.
He was thinking about curtains. Green ones, in a room that had been pink for two years. He had walked past Violet’s room and seen them and stopped in the corridor and stood there like a man who had lost his way in his own house.
There were other things. A smell of something herbal and sharp in the kitchen passage where for twelve years there had been only damp stone and coal.
A brass clock on the mantel in the morning room, flowers in a jug on the hall table, things cut from the garden.
His mother had done that. He had forgotten until he saw it and then he could not stop remembering.
The last time he had gone to her, three nights ago, she had not clutched the sheets.
Her hands had lain at her sides. He had lifted her nightgown and touched her thigh and she had not flinched.
And the absence of the flinch had gone through him with more force than it should have.
He had worked the oil longer than the act required, and when she exhaled, he had felt it in his own chest.
He did not know what to do with any of it.
His wife was filling his house the way water fills a crack in stone—slowly, and into every space he had left empty, and with a patience that suggested she meant to stay.
He had married her for an heir. He had not anticipated that she would make the house feel and smell different.
That the house would feel like home at last.
The carriage turned into the square. Iredell House stood tall and grey. The lamps were lit in the lower windows. Through the glass of the morning room, he could see the brass clock, and beside it, the shape of someone moving. His wife, or her shadow, crossing the room with something in her hands.
“Your Grace?”
Henry climbed down. The rain met his face. He went up the steps and Patten opened the door, and the house took him in, and it smelled of lavender and his wife’s footsteps were somewhere above him on the stairs.