Lady Carstairs
Chapter nineteen
Violet
The gown had come that afternoon in a box near as long as Violet was tall, and three of Madame Renard’s girls had carried it up the stairs between them with the care of pallbearers.
Sarah had lifted it free of the paper and held it to the window, and the silk had taken the grey afternoon light and changed to the colour of the inside of a shell.
Violet had not asked how a gown that wanted two weeks had been finished in one.
She knew. The chemist from Lamb’s Conduit Street had knelt upon her drawing-room carpet two days before and read an apology off a folded sheet in a voice that would not hold steady, and she had understood from that, if from nothing else, that her husband had been about the town on her behalf and had left a particular kind of weather behind him wherever he went.
She had thanked the man and sent him out and had not known, afterward, what she felt.
It was a strange thing to be defended so fiercely by a man who treated her like a tax collector, except for those late hours when the animal in him demanded an audience.
Sarah dressed her as the light went. The sleeves were the great gigot she had promised since the first morning, full at the shoulder and narrowing to the wrist, and the waist drawn in close.
When Sarah had done with the pins and stood back, Violet looked at the woman in the glass for a moment then looked away because she did not know how to be looked at.
The Duke of Iredell was glorious in the evening black.
The clean line of him against the dark squab, the white at his throat, the way the lamp found his square jaw and straight nose.
She had been married to him some weeks and had not grown used to the look of him.
And tonight, she found she could not look at him at all.
Violet drew out the card from her reticule and held it across the dim space between them. The duke took it without a word. She watched him read it and saw the line come down between his brows.
He looked at the card a moment longer than expected then gave the direction to the coachman through the front glass. He sat back and the carriage moved off into the wet.
She would not have said he was angry. Anger she had seen on him, the heat of it, the vein at his temple. This was something with the heat gone out of it, colder and further down. It filled the carriage and left no room for her in it.
She became aware that she was working the seam of her glove between two fingers, the small, worried motion her hands made. She made them stop. She laid them flat in her lap, one upon the other, and held them so.
“Why did you accept this one?”
His voice came quiet out of the dark. She had not expected him to speak, and it took her a moment.
“I did not know any of the names. There were a great many cards, and I could not tell a good house from a poor one. So I asked Sarah. She marked the ones I ought to answer.”
“Sarah.” He said it without inflection.
“She said this one was an old set, and a good house, and that the connection would matter to me. That I should be glad of it later.” Violet looked at the card where it lay upon the seat beside him.
He nodded then turned his face to the window, and the silence came back worse than before.
“Have I made a mistake?” she asked.
She thought he would not answer, but he spoke at last in his deep timbre.
“I find them dull,” he said. “The whole set. Cards and a great deal of music and very little wit. You need not have troubled.”
“I am sorry. I shall be more careful.”
“Do not accept their invitations again,” he said to the window.
Lady Carstairs received them beneath a portrait of a horse. She was small and bright, sixty perhaps, with diamonds at her ears too large for the rest of her. Her gaze found Violet first and stayed there, and the warmth in it was immediate and entire.
“So this is she.” She took Violet’s hand in both of hers.
“You are not what they promised, my dear. They promised me something wild from Hampstead, and here is a composed woman in the loveliest gown in the room.” She tightened her grip around Violet’s hand briefly then let go.
Not enough to hurt her but enough to signal: I have a message or Your sleeve plumper has deflated.
Then she turned to Henry. The warmth left her face, replaced by contempt.
“Iredell.” She did not offer her hand. “I shall keep your duchess by me. You will find the card room through the gallery. I trust you will be civil, though I confess the evidence for that expectation is thin.”
A gentleman with the look of the law about him claimed Henry almost at once and steered him toward the card room. Two older gentlemen near the door watched Henry pass and did not bow. One turned his shoulder. Henry looked back at Violet once before the doorway took him, and the look was not easy.
Lady Carstairs took Violet on her arm as though nothing had happened. Her hand covered Violet’s where it rested in the crook of her elbow, a small anchoring pressure that said you are under my protection.
It went worse than Violet had braced for.
A pair of women by the pier glass watched her come and turned, between one breath and the next, to study the curtains.
A gentleman bowed to Lady Carstairs and let his eyes pass over Violet.
An older duchess to whom Violet was presented gave a smile with nothing behind it, showing her back before Violet had finished curtseying.
The rejection moved ahead of her through the room.
“Stupid creatures,” Lady Carstairs muttered beside her. “Do not worry, my dear. There is no one in London I cannot make behave.”
And she did. She planted Violet beside a marchioness who had known her grandmother and stood guard until the old lady thawed.
She produced two young wives near Violet’s age, kinder than the rest, who wanted only to know whether the sleeves were truly to be worn so wide and whether she had her gloves from Paris.
“You will do,” Lady Carstairs said in her ear when the young wives had moved off. “Stand here a moment. There is a bishop by the window I cannot decently leave to drown, and then I shall come back and steal you the good champagne.” She pressed Violet’s arm and was gone.
“You are the fourth,” a new voice said.
A woman of forty or so had come to stand beside her, golden-haired and sharp-featured, wearing the sort of expression that had decided not to trouble itself with pleasantries. She did not smile.
“Do not be alarmed. I have not come to make a scene. I came to look at you.” She studied Violet with frank appraisal. “I am Lady Wharton. The first wife of your husband was my sister.”
Violet went very still.
“You did not know,” Lady Wharton said.
“No,” The word came out too quickly. Violet steadied herself against the mantelpiece with one hand. “I have heard of your sister, Elizabeth. I did not know this was her family’s house. I was not told.”
The woman snorted through her nose. “I am not surprised. Henry conserves words like he might need them in winter.”
“I do not understand why Lady Carstairs would have me in her home,” Violet said.
“You must think us very strange.” Lady Wharton’s eyes met hers. “I will be direct with you, Your Grace, because you speak your mind plainly.” She turned so that they stood side by side, facing the room. “My mother insisted on inviting you. Not to scare you. To warn you.”
“Warn me?”
“My mother believes your husband killed my sister,” Lady Wharton said without drama. “She wanted you here so that she could look at you and alert you to the manner of house you had married into. She regretted not warning his second and third wives, so profound was her grief.”
Violet’s throat had gone dry. “And you? Do you share her belief?”
Lady Wharton said nothing for several seconds.
“No,” she said at last. “He was different, you know. Before. Never a charmer, but he laughed now and then. Jested. Loved.” Her voice softened on the last word.
“Theirs was the kind of love match people tell stories about. Do you know that he used to ride forty miles between Friday and Sunday only to stand under her window in the rain? Our father had forbidden the calls. A second son, and Father had ambitions for the eldest girl.” A pause.
“Then his brother died, of an illness, they say, and the second son was a duke. I had my own thoughts on his brother’s illness.
I opposed the marriage, but Elizabeth was smitten with him. ”
She glanced at Violet, and some private memory drew a smile out of her.
“When Elizabeth told him she was carrying before the family, he lifted her clean off her feet and held her there. He was laughing, spinning her in front of everyone. He did not care who saw.” Lady Wharton’s eyes had gone bright.
“That is not a man who murders his wife and their unborn child. Mother cannot see it because her grief demands someone be responsible for her daughter’s death. ”
“Then why are you telling me?”
“Mother asked me to. And in case I am wrong. Because I want to know if anything in that house has frightened you.”
“Go gently, Sylvia,” Lady Carstairs had returned to Violet’s other side.
“All these years and the pain does not leave us.” She took Violet’s hand between her own.
“Forgive us, Your Grace. We are poor company at the moment.” She squeezed Violet’s hand and her voice was very quiet.
“I will say one thing, and then I shall let you be. My Elizabeth was well. She was happy. She was carrying a child she wanted.” She pulled Violet closer.
“Be careful in that house, my dear. That is why I wanted you to be here. And to tell you, if you ever have need of me, you have only to send.” Her eyes filled.
“I could not save my girl. I should be glad to save one of you.”
Her gaze rose above Violet’s head. “Iredell. Come for your duchess?”
Violet turned. Henry stood behind her, and his face was stone. His eyes went from Lady Carstairs to Lady Wharton and back.
“Come Sylvia.” Lady Carstairs linked her arm with her daughter’s. Lady Wharton nodded at Violet and Henry as her mother turned her back on the duke without another word.
Violet stood where they had left her.
“You have gone white,” Henry said. His hand found the small of her back. “Come. You have done your duty to this house and more. We are leaving.”
He took her the shortest way to the hall, called for her cloak himself, and had her out the door into the cold wet air before the footmen had quite caught them up.
The rain had thinned to a mist. He stopped her at the top of the steps, out of the light, and turned her to face him, his hand still at her back.
“Breathe,” he said. “You are all right. Breathe.”
He shielded her from the door and let her have a moment of it, saying nothing. Then he handed her down the wet steps to the carriage himself.
The carriage shut them into the dark, and the wheels found the cobbles, and for a while neither spoke.
Henry broke it himself. He did not wait to be asked.
“I know what they told you.” He looked at the rain on the glass. “They told you that I killed her.”
Violet said nothing. She watched the raindrops on the window.
“There was no hunting accident.” A calm had settled in his timbre.
“She had not been well since the child quickened. It began with her insisting she had lost it. She had not. Every physician I brought had agreed. The child was sound and so was she. She would not believe them. She said she could feel that it was dead in her. She stopped eating. She kept to her bed and to the dark and turned her face from me.”
A hush landed. Words seemed to evaporate. Henry raked his fingers through his hair before continuing. “Her family never knew. She begged me to keep it close. She was ashamed.”
Another pause. He dropped his head and exhaled deeply.
“The day she died, I made her get up. I begged her to walk out with me. I said I would carry her if her legs would not serve. She would not walk, so we rode. She had the kitchen put up a basket and that gave me hope. I thought, she is coming back. We rode to the high field. I was tying the horses. I heard the shot.”
His breaths came out shallow. “My pistol. She had taken my pistol.”
He buried his face in his hands. “I rode for the doctor with her before me the whole way, and she was breathing when we reached him. She died a little after, with me holding her.”
Violet’s hand had come up over her mouth.
She sat with the horror filling the dark. And underneath the horror, shameful and undeniable, relief.
The carriage rocked and she looked at his face and saw bone-deep grief etched there.
A pang of sharp pain took root in her chest and bloomed.
She ached for the grieving man and ached for herself for having shared a bed with him..
It is alright, she told herself. She had not married for love.
She had married for survival, and survival was what she had. That was enough. It had to be.
Something compelled her to slide across the seat.
He did not look at her. She put her arms around him. She felt him go rigid, but she held on through the carriage swaying, gravel threatening to toss her off the seat.
Then his arm came around her: slow and indecisive but pulling her against him. He turned his face into her hair. She felt the long exhale of him. It was a long breath, the kind that comes when something held too long is finally let go.
His arm came all the way around her waist and stayed. The weight of it settled her in a way she had not been settled since she left Thornwick. She heard her own breath leave her.
“I am sorry,” he said into her hair.
She held him tighter and said nothing.