The Stillroom
Chapter fourteen
Henry
He went to her at midnight in his dressing gown with nothing beneath it, and her room was empty.
The bed had been turned down. One candle guttered on the table, the fire had gone to embers, and the nightgown the maid had laid out lay uncreased. He stood in the doorway between their two rooms and felt the wanting in him sour into temper.
He had wanted her all week. It was undignified, the degree of it, and he had not come down the connecting passage to find a cold grate and no wife in the bed.
That she was not where a man could find her at midnight struck him first as an offence, and only second, with a small unwelcome lurch, as a worry.
He took the candle and went to look.
Henry knew by now that his wife would not be found in the drawing room or the library or one of many rooms designed for leisurely pursuits, according to Mrs Greer’s accounts.
He went to the garden first and upon finding it cold and empty, he headed to the kitchen. A light showed under the stillroom door at the end of the kitchen passage, the one room in the house he had not entered in over a decade.
His duchess was on the floor among some of the larger jars.
She had taken a dozen of them and set them in a half-circle on the swept flags and was working through them one at a time.
Prising the old wax, lifting each to the candle to read its brown label, setting it back.
What she opened gave up a fine grey powder onto her fingers, and a smudge of it crossed one cheekbone where she had pushed her hair off her face.
He should have gone back up. He did not. He stood in the doorway and watched his wife work, smudged and angry, and felt the wanting start in him, low and unreasonable.
He opened the door wider and stepped inside. Violet turned her head, pushed up on her palm, and sat taller.
“Your Grace.”
“It’s late,” he said.
“It is. I could not sleep, so here I am.”
“I was expecting you to be waiting for me in your room.”
She tilted her head almost imperceptibly. “I did not know if you were coming. It seemed you had made alternative arrangements.”
“How do you mean?”
She turned back to her work. “You and Sarah Baker. I heard you yesterday in your chamber.”
Henry searched his memory for the occasion she spoke of.
“Sarah has been in this house since I was fifteen and she six. She needed to speak to me in private.”
“And do you make a habit of inviting a maid to your private chambers for discourse?”
“When I am rushed, occasionally. Mrs Greer has been to my room several times.”
Violet pushed off the floor and sat upright, looking at him. “And what did Sarah have to speak to you so urgently about?”
Henry hesitated for a beat before deciding he owed her the truth.
“My brother, Harold, left a child. I never knew of it until Sarah came to me. She and Harold had an affair. I have seen them provided for since, for Harold’s sake, although I have never met the boy.”
“Oh.”
He took a step forward, closing the door behind him. His wife startled then hurried to her feet. She made a great show of replacing the jars in their rightful place.
“Something else is on your mind,” he said, looking at the firm line of her mouth.
“I am vexed.”
He didn’t mean to sigh so loudly, but he did. “About your friend, I gather.”
“Yes.” She whirled to face him. “The people who came to this house today did so out of love for me and got a cold word and shoulder for it. They are my friends and you treated them horribly.”
“They might be your friends, but they came out of curiosity, not concern for you. If they were your friends, where were they when the six of you were shivering in the cold? The fruits on the woman’s bonnet alone could have fed you for days.”
“Mrs Bickle is Mama’s dear friend and has been like the second mother to me. And Letty is my friend. I do not need you to approve. I only need you to respect them because I do.”
Henry scoffed. “And Mr Harris? How good of a friend is he for him to be present during my visit, during our contract signing, and even today? What is he to you? To your family?”
“He’s a friend. No more. He has been looking after our family for years. He was Father’s secretary. Now he helps around the property without pay. He prepares firewood, repairs holes in the roof, keeps vagabonds away.”
Henry laughed, the sound cynical in tone.
“What do you find so amusing?” she snapped.
“If Harris is a secretary, I am a lamb. There is nothing remotely secretarial about the man except perhaps his use of the letter opener for a different purpose.”
“That is nonsense.”
“We shall disagree. No matter. I do not want them near this house or near you any longer.”
“You cannot be serious!”
Henry took a step closer to his wife. She tilted her head back to look up at him.
“I am nothing but serious where the reputation of this family is concerned. We already have enough scandals between us to feed the gossip sheets for the rest of our lives.”
“They are not beggars! They are respected in their circles, and I care about them.”
He was about to avert his gaze from her flushed cheeks, rosy lips in a pout, when her hand turned his chin.
“And where are your friends? Where were they when the ton accused you of murder? When you were grieving? I did not hear anyone speak up on your behalf, declaring your innocence. If they had, you would not have had to marry the likes of me.”
Her last words had him still. “The likes of you? You are not the same as your friends. You are a baron’s daughter. You are a lady.”
She lifted her gaze to him, her eyes wary. “Only in name. If I die in this house, the madwoman’s daughter, they will only say it was a kinder fate than my mother’s. And you? One more dead wife and you are finished, duke or not. So you see, your doom is mine now, and mine is yours.”
Neither of them moved. The candle on the workbench threw their shadows against the jars, and the stillroom was quiet enough that he could hear the fire shifting in the kitchen range through the wall.
He did not know which of them closed the distance. Her hand was on his chest, flat against the bare skin where the gown had fallen open, and his hand was on her hip, and neither gesture had been planned or permitted. Her palm was cold from the flagstones. He felt it through his whole body.
His thumb found the ridge of her hip and pressed.
When she did not pull away, he drew her closer.
His mouth went to her throat—not her lips, because that was a thing he had not done since Elizabeth and he was not prepared to learn whether he still could.
Her breath caught against his ear. The sound went through him like a fissure through ice, and whatever had been holding him in place gave way.
He gathered her skirts and found the skin above her knee.
She stiffened, then did not. His hand moved higher, slow, deliberate, with none of the mechanical haste of the nights that had come before.
When he touched her, she was slick without the oil, and the discovery of that undid something in him he had not known was still held together.
He moved his thumb, her breath changed. He did it again, and her hand came to his forearm, not to stop him but to hold on.
He kept his mouth against her throat and felt her pulse hammering there and worked at her with a slowness that had everything to do with the fact that he did not want it to stop, until her grip on his arm tightened and her breathing went ragged and a sound came out of her, low and startled, that she had clearly not intended to make.
He had not known he wanted this. Not the act, the act he had managed after their wedding, but this: his wife shaking against him, her composure undone by something he had done with his own hand.
He lifted her onto the workbench. Two jars went to the floor and he did not care.
She pulled him closer by the lapels of his dressing gown, and he took her there with the candle burning down and her face buried against his shoulder, and when she cried out it was not the sound of a woman enduring something but the sound of a woman who had forgotten, briefly, to be afraid.
Then it was over.
The cold came back to him by degrees. He stood away and set his clothes to rights. He found the handkerchief in his pocket and held it out without looking at her. She took it.
Something about the nearest corner of the room caught his attention.
“What is the matter?” she asked.
“There is something different about this room. I cannot say what.” His eyes moved around the walls. “There are nights I think this house is listening.”
He tied the gown and left her sitting on the workbench among his mother’s jars.
Henry found himself weary the next morning, his wife’s words circling his mind in a relentless loop.
Your doom is mine now, and mine is yours.
He had been at his desk for two hours and accomplished nothing. The ledger was open to the same page it had been open to when he sat down. The pen had dried twice. The headache from the brandy had settled behind his eyes, a dull steady pressure he had earned.
He dipped the pen. The pen hovered over his ledger. He could not recall what he was about to write.
Mrs Greer knocked twice and entered with the straightness of spine that meant she was bracing for his reaction. She had been his governess before she became the housekeeper, and she was always the one who brought him the news no one dared.
“Good morning, Your Grace.”
“Good morning, Mrs Greer.”
“Her Grace had gone out two mornings past in the ducal carriage. Alone.”
He did not look up from the ledger. His agitation, which had not been put out completely since his marriage, was simmering now.
He turned a blank page. “And?”
“Her Grace was upset when she returned. She had been crying. Or near to it. She said she was perfectly well, but she didn’t seem well to me, Your Grace.”
Henry stopped pretending nonchalance.
“Did she say where she had been?”
“Sarah said Her Grace had gone to a herbalist. Renshaw’s on Lamb’s Conduit Street.”
He put the pen down. He lined it up with the edge of the blotter. He did not look at Mrs Greer.
“Her Grace told Sarah in confidence, but Sarah thought it best to inform me given the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“Apparently the proprietor suggested Her Grace try Covent Garden.”
Henry leaned back in his chair. “Did she tell him who she was?”
Mrs Greer touched her temple. “She did, but the man didn’t believe her and chased her out of the shop.”
Henry’s chair scraped back from the desk. “Why is she still wearing servant’s clothing?”
“It appears that Her Grace left the modiste’s early because she had been insulted by Madame Renard.”
Henry muttered a chain of profanity under his breath.
The older woman stood calmly then hesitated. “While you dress down these merchants, you might wish to reflect on your own conduct, Your Grace.”
Henry spun around mid-pacing. “What could you mean by that?”
“Her Grace has been residing here for over two weeks.”
“I am aware.”
“And yet you have not once invited her to dine with you. Or spent any time with her.”
He opened his mouth then spread his hands out in front of him in a gesture of helplessness. “I am known for my temper, not my charm, Greer. I would only make things worse.”
“Then I suggest Your Grace say as little as possible and lead Her Grace through the steps. You have one week to learn how to stand beside your wife without the whole of London seeing that you cannot bear to.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have a ball to attend in one week. Her Grace might be in need of practice.”
Henry said nothing, which Mrs Greer took, correctly, as agreement. Following his housekeeper out into the corridor, Henry bellowed for his secretary.