In All Her Glory
Chapter twenty-two
Violet
The Duchess of Cranbrook arrived on a Monday, without warning, in the manner of weather.
Violet heard her before she saw her: a voice in the entrance hall pitched to carry the length of a ballroom, informing Patten that she would not be announced, that she had been coming to this house since before he was breeched, and that he might therefore stop arranging his face into an obstacle and have someone send up tea.
By the time Violet reached the top of the stairs the woman was already halfway up them, drawing off her gloves finger by finger and looking about her at the hall as a general looks at ground he means to take.
She was perhaps sixty. She was not tall, but she occupied the space of someone who was. Her eyes found Violet on the landing and did not let go.
“There you are. Good. You are taller than they said and thinner than I should like, but the bones are sound and that is most of it.”
She arrived at the top of the stairs and took both of Violet’s hands in hers. Her grip was warm and very firm.
“I am Cranbrook. We shall not stand on the title between us, it grows tiresome with two of us in a room. You shall call me Cranbrook as everyone does, my husband included, and I shall call you Violet when I am cross with you and Iredell when I am not. Now, where do you sit in the mornings? Not here, I hope. This hall is built to make a person feel small and it succeeds. Take me somewhere with a fire.”
“The morning room,” Violet said.
“Lead on.”
She led on.
It was not until they were seated, and tea had been sent up with a speed Violet had never once managed to extract from the kitchen herself, that she understood she had been outflanked in her own house inside of four minutes.
“I have been told that your last attendance at the Carstairs’s ball did not go as expected.” The Duchess of Cranbrook poured for them both, waving off Violet’s hand. “Iredell wrote to me. He said you had asked me to take you in hand with your social calendar.”
“I am most grateful,” she said.
Cranbrook drank her tea. “My husband imagines he has done me a favour by giving me a project, and the maddening thing is that he is right, and I shall have to be grateful to him, which I detest. My children are all married. My last spaniel died at Michaelmas and Cranbrook will not hear of another, on the grounds that he is too old to live through the chewing of a further pair of boots. I have, in short, nothing whatever to do, and a great deal of capacity for doing it.” She set down her cup.
“And then there is you. A baron’s daughter married into the most talked-of house in England, who by every account has been left to find her own feet in it with no more guidance than a lady’s maid and a housekeeper, and who has consequently put one of those feet wrong in public at least twice that I have heard of, and I hear most things. ”
The tallow. The chemist. The Carstairs’s ball. Violet kept her face still and found that the woman was watching her keep it still and approved of the keeping.
“I am not here out of charity, Iredell. Understand that. I am here because I am bored to the edge of my reason and you are the most interesting thing to happen to me in a twelvemonth. We shall be of use to one another, which is the only honest basis for any friendship between women, whatever the poets say.” She picked up her cup again. “Now. The first matter is the ball.”
“The ball.”
“Your ball. Here, at Iredell House. Six weeks from Saturday.”
Violet set down her own cup with care. “We are not… that is, I do not think His Grace intends to entertain.”
“His Grace’s intentions are not the point, and in any case, he has surrendered the field to me, although he does not know it yet.
” Cranbrook produced from her reticule a small leather book and a pencil.
“You will host. You will not attend other people’s balls and creep along their walls hoping to be tolerated.
That is the strategy of a woman who believes she is on sufferance, and the moment the world smells that on you it will act upon it.
You will open your own doors, and they will come, because there is nothing on earth the ton will not do to get inside a house it is afraid of.
I shall want the guest list by Friday. You have clothes, I am told, so we need only the one gown, made to my eye, for the night itself.
” She looked up. “And you may stop wearing that expression.”
“What expression?”
“That one. The one that is doing sums under the table.”
Violet had, in fact, been doing sums, but likely not the one Cranbrook was thinking of. She was calculating how long she would have been married in six weeks’ time, and if she would indeed be still alive.
Cranbrook’s pencil stopped tapping.
“You are thinking about the wives. The dead ones Henry buried.”
Violet swallowed because she did not know how to respond to such a frank observation.
“I don’t believe in curses, Iredell. I have buried a husband’s brother, two of my own sisters, and more friends than I care to number, and not one of them was carried off by anything more mysterious than a fever or a fall or the ordinary cruelty of being alive.
Why, I myself have lost four children.” She gripped the pencil and positioned it on her notebook.
“So. The guest list. Once this and the seating chart are finished, everything else will seem easy by comparison.”
Cranbrook held that the most influential ladies in Society were the self-righteous sort who involved themselves in charities so that they might sleep at night, and that if Violet wished to be among them, she had better learn to sit through a committee meeting.
Violet was not given the option of declining.
The committee for the lying-in hospital met on Thursdays, in a cold upstairs room over a draper’s in Holborn.
There were perhaps a dozen women in the room when they came in, and Violet felt the temperature of it change at her entrance.
They looked at her as if she were already dead.
One soft-faced woman near the window could not keep the pity off her face.
She looked away, looked back at her, and looked away again.
Cranbrook made her own view of the matter known simply by installing Violet in the best chair and standing at her shoulder like she was ready to bite. The pity did not leave the room, but it learned some discretion.
They were discussing the ward. There had been a run of childbed fever through the winter, three women lost in January, and the talk had turned to what might be laid in against the spring.
A Mrs Ferrers, who was holding the floor on the subject with misguided knowledge, was urging the committee to fund a quantity of the purgative root for the ward.
Violet listened. She had not meant to speak. She had meant to get through the hour and go home. But Mrs Ferrers was wrong to recommend a strong decoction given to women already weak from the bed.
“Forgive me,” Violet heard herself say. “But I do not think you would want to give it at that strength. Not to a woman in childbed.”
The room turned to her. Mrs Ferrers turned to her with bright eyes and tight lips, preparing to condescend.
“My grandmother—”
“Was likely an excellent woman.” Violet kept her voice even and her hands steady in her lap.
“But that root is a purgative before it is anything else, and a woman who has lost blood cannot spare what it will take from her. You would do better with a simple infusion, raspberry leaf and a little of the white archangel, and keep your stronger physic for a body that can stand to be emptied. If you mean to spend the committee’s money on one thing, spend it on clean linen and a window that opens.
The fever travels in the close air more than in the blood.
My mother held that and buried fewer mothers than most.”
There was a silence of a particular quality. One where people were shocked to hear something sensible from one they hadn’t expected.
The hospital’s own matron, a square, weathered woman, leaned forward. “The white archangel,” she said. “The deadnettle. Would you use the flower or the leaf, Your Grace?”
“The flower tops. Dried in shade, not sun, or it loses the virtue.”
“And for the afterpains, when they won’t settle?”
“A little cramp bark, if you can get it true. It is often adulterated. I could tell you where to get it true.”
One question followed another, and another, and within the hour the room had quietly reorganised itself around the chair Violet sat in. Mrs Ferrers retreated into wounded dignity by the urn. The matron pulled her own chair closer. Even the soft-faced woman had begun to write things down.
Cranbrook said nothing at all but watched her with something akin to triumph. That warmed Violet more than she would have thought possible among strangers.
“Well done. That went much more smoothly than when the second duchess joined the meeting. What was her name? Catherine?” Cranbrook fixed her gloves while they waited for the carriage.
“Such a lively creature she was, always laughing. Now do not think that was a compliment. I know people find such personality charming, but I did not find her charming. We would be discussing serious matters, some life or death, and there she went laughing and taking the discussion in tangents.”
They boarded the carriage and sat across from each other.
“I never could credit it, you know,” the Duchess of Cranbrook continued.
“The way she went. Catherine. A woman who swam like a fish, summer and winter both, and then to drown, of all things. I never could make it sit.” The older woman caught herself.
“I beg your pardon, my dear. Sometimes this old mouth runs off without permission.”
“You needn’t beg my pardon,” Violet said.
And she meant it. But Her Grace’s words had lodged, and she couldn’t help but feel troubled.
She came home later than she had meant to, and the lamps were lit in the hall. Henry was there.
He was standing at the foot of the great staircase with a letter in his hand.
The letter was not open. He looked at her, and something about the way he looked at her was different tonight.
She did not know what to do with it, but she was aware, absurdly, of the loose pin at her temple and the mud at her hem, and aware that he had noticed and did not seem to mind either.
“You are late,” he said.
“The committee ran long. The Duchess of Cranbrook is thorough.”
“She is that.” His gaze moved over her with appreciation and not in inspection. “I am told there is to be a ball,” he said, his gaze returning to her face.
“Yes. I had very little to do with the deciding of it.”
“No. One does not, with Cranbrook.”
Violet gave him a small nod and walked past him onto the stairs. When she had reached the third step: “Violet.”
She turned.
He stood with the unopened letter in his hand and looked up at her, and for a moment she thought he might come up the stairs. And her heart did a foolish and undignified thing at the prospect of it.
But he only inclined his head. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Your Grace.”
She went up. And at the turn of the stair, where the banister curved and the lamplight gave out, she glanced back.
He was still watching her. He did not look away.