In the Dark
Chapter seventeen
Violet
The smell had been in the house a fortnight, and Violet was the only person in it who could not smell it.
She found that out on the stairs, at approximately ten o’clock, a book she had come down for in her hand and four of her husband’s oldest friends laughing in the hall below.
She had got no further than the turn of the stair, because one of them was talking, and what he said stopped her where she stood.
“No, but Iredell, in earnest.” A deep, hoarse voice said with a slight slur. “What is that smell? I have been trying half the night to place it.”
“It is nothing.” Henry’s voice rumbled low and steady.
“It is absolutely something. It is revolting, and I know it from somewhere.” A pause, then a bark of pure delight. “Tallow. By God, it is tallow. Your house smells of mutton-fat like my grandmother’s gamekeeper.”
Someone else laughed. “Has it come to that? Are we economising?”
“Leave it, Clarence.”
“I only ask because I’d hate to think a duke could not run to a wax candle.” The deep voice said with a chuckle. “Or is it the new one? They say she came to you with nothing but the gown she stood in. Perhaps she has brought her habits in with her. Tallow in the sconces, and turnips for—”
“Enough!”
Violet jumped at the sudden explosion.
“You will not utter one word, not a word of offence toward my wife. In fact, keep her out of your thoughts entirely. She is infinitely too good for you.”
“Iredell, steady on. A man may—”
“On your feet!” A chair scraped back. “All of you. The night is finished. Hurst, get him out of here before I put him through the window.”
No one argued. Violet heard the scramble of it, the boots, the muttering, and then the door slammed hard in its frame, and the cold came up the stair. She heard the voices outside fade then the carriage rattle away.
Her stomach turned over with unease. Violet placed a hand on her stomach to settle her nerves. She had announced to the whole of Mayfair exactly what she was and where she had come from.
Her husband returned and their eyes locked. He was breathing hard, and his colour was up.
For a moment she wanted to go to him. He had put four friends out of his own hall for an offending remark against her, and she wanted to wrap her arms around his neck and hug him. Be held by him.
Then she saw that the anger had not left with Clarence. It was coming toward her now.
“I am sorry. I gave the order. Mrs Greer told me it would be noticed, but I did it anyway. I thought I was saving six pounds each quarter this way.”
He stood two steps below her and gripped the railing until his knuckles turned white.
“Six pounds. You humiliated me for six pounds.”
“I did not think anyone would notice. I did not notice it myself. Six pounds is not nothing.”
“It is nothing to me! Insignificant enough that I would rather be without six pounds per quarter than to become a laughingstock to my peers!”
“I know that now. It will not happen again.”
“The damage is already done. By noon tomorrow every house between here and St James’s will know the Duke of Iredell burns mutton-fat because he married a woman who cannot tell wax from tallow.”
Violet tilted her chin up and crossed her arms. “I had good intentions. And if you cannot survive one mishap, your reputation must have been in question.”
“We both know how precarious both of our reputations are. And I will not have a wife who turns my house into a…”
He clenched his teeth together abruptly and turned his face away.
“Into a what?” She took one step down. “A poorhouse? My father’s house? Say it. You have thought it every day since you signed your name to me.”
“You do not know what I think.”
“I know you did not defend me tonight. You defended your name. You have never once defended me because to do it you would have to think me worth it.”
He went rigid. There was only her breathing in the quiet space.
He was first to break the eye contact. He went up the stairs past her without a word.
She woke to a mouth at her throat.
For a moment she did not know where she was.
Then Iredell House, her husband, the argument…
She felt the weight of him along her side, then his mouth against her throat.
She recognised his scent. No matter how detached she stayed, how impersonal their private moments had been, it was inevitable.
She had learned how his skin felt, how his breathing sounded, how he smelled, and what his weight on her was like.
His mouth moved behind her ear and her thoughts, which had been so clear on the staircase an hour ago, became difficult to hold.
“Trowbridge is gone to Lisbon,” he said against her skin. “He will not trouble you again.”
The dreamlike state lifted gradually as her senses returned to her.
“Gone…” Violet felt the pressure that had been pushing against her ribs since the incident ease a little.
“And I wrote a wager, in my hand, at White’s.”
He must have felt her stiffen because he lifted himself up on his elbows and looked at her as he spoke.
“I wrote that Trowbridge will not swear to his claim on you before any man of honour within the year. He will not take it. He cannot. The two entries will sit together for as long as the club stands. What he wrote, and what he would not defend.” He studied her face.
She could only stare back, her chest loosening further.
“I cannot strike your name out, Violet, but I can set mine beside it and make the book tell the truth about your innocence and the man who put it there.”
“You are staking your name on mine,” she said slowly. “In the most public book in London.”
“Yes. It is my honour.”
“Oh Henry, no one has ever defended me except my family and Kit.”
He looked away for a heartbeat but came back to her. “I was wrong to make assumptions about you, to take Trowbridge’s word. I was wrong this evening. I have been wrong about a great many things under this roof, and I find I no longer wish to add to the list.”
“Thank you, Henry.” Her voice was strained.
At his smile, her hands went to his back, feeling the rise and dip of his muscles as she caressed his bare skin. She was feeling brave in the dark, just out of her dream. She ventured lower down his back, then dug her fingers into the firm muscles of his arse.
He had always been gentle, but he was now tender in a way he had never been with her.
He was slow and careful and penitent, his mouth moving down from her throat then to her collarbone, then to her breast. She arched against his mouth, let him take her nipple and suck.
His hand massaged her breast, his hard member pressing against her thigh over the nightgown.
In her blissful haze, she thought she heard three words: I am sorry. But she was so deep into her pleasure that she could not be certain.
Then he moved down the bed, and the blanket went with him. The cold air found her skin at the same moment his mouth found her, and she did not understand what he was doing until she did, and then she could not think at all.
She was aware of his hands on her thighs.
She was aware of the sounds she was making and that they did not belong to the woman she had been an hour ago.
She was aware, distantly, that she had said his name, and that she had said it more than once, and that she could not have stopped if the whole household had been listening at the door.
“Henry,” she breathed as she climbed. Then his fingers pushed into her, curling gently, until she broke apart. She heard herself say his name again and again, helplessly, into the room.
When he entered her, she was ready, and the difference between this and every time before was so stark that she pressed her face into his shoulder to keep from making a sound she could not take back.
This was not the contract. This was not the heir. This was the man who had defended her name in a betting book and was pleasuring her while smelling of rain and remorse. She could feel it in the way he moved.
A thought arrived that she was not ready for: I could love this man. She buried it against his shoulder and held on.
Afterward, there was the small cool press of linen, careful, unhurried, his hand seeing to her in the dark.
When she woke the second time, it was grey morning, and the door linking the two chambers stood ajar. Through the gap she could hear the small sounds of him dressing: the creak of a drawer, the brush of cloth over cloth. The ordinary sounds of a man beginning his day in the next room.
She lay still and listened and chose to believe the three words she was not certain she had heard.