Three Provinces
Chapter twenty-five
Violet
Kit had been a fortnight over the mews by then.
He was her late father’s man of business to anyone who asked, her shadow to anyone who watched, and so there was nothing remarkable in the Duchess of Iredell taking a turn round the square garden on a cold Wednesday morning with Mr Harris a pace behind her, while the nursemaids herded their charges down the gravel and the sparrows quarrelled in the bare planes of the trees.
She waited until the nearest nursemaid was twenty yards off and spoke without turning her head.
“Sarah takes her half-day today. She has taken it every Wednesday for a decade now. She leaves at one, back before supper.”
Violet watched a sparrow fight another sparrow. “I want you to follow her.”
Kit was silent for three paces. He had been silent for three paces before answering anyone for as long as she could remember. It was how she knew he was listening.
“It shall be done.” Three paces of silence. “You might tell me why.”
“We discovered that Sarah Baker had received training for poison. I suspect she was poisoning my tea until she realised I would have knowledge of it.”
The gravel crunched.
“We,” he said.
Violet looked at him. “What?”
“You said we.”
“What of it?”
His lips curved into a smirk. She could count on one hand the number of times he had done it.
“You and the duke, I assume?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “I like the sound of it.” A pause. “As long as he’s not the murderer.”
“He is not. He is…” Violet hesitated as memories of the embrace flooded in.
“You look well, Vi—Your Grace."
“I am well.” She tried to suppress her smile but failed. “One o’clock, Kit. The area door.”
At one o’clock Violet stood at the morning room window holding a letter she’d been reading.
Through the gap in the drapes, she watched her maid come up the area steps.
Sarah was wearing a good grey cloak and her good black bonnet and set off toward Oxford Street.
Thirty seconds later a man in a brown coat detached himself from the railings opposite and was gone the same direction.
Violet put down the letter and went to find her husband.
He was waiting at the foot of the east stairs with a ring of keys in his hand and no footman anywhere in sight.
“She has gone. Kit is following.”
“Good. We shall proceed as planned.”
The room Henry unlocked was the largest on the corridor, two doors from his mother’s.
It was a bedchamber by its bones, though no bed stood in it now.
He went in first and folded back the shutters, and the grey afternoon came down on what the room held.
Violet stood on the threshold and understood she had been wrong to think herself prepared.
It held three women.
Their things stood in three provinces, distinct as parishes: furniture and trunks and bandboxes, each province arranged with care around its own dressing table, its own chairs, as though three small rooms had been lifted whole and set down side by side.
Against the inner wall, three tall shapes stood sheeted.
Violet looked at the nearest province and saw that scarcely a film of dust was on Margaret’s trunks, where Catherine’s wore five years of grey film.
The province by the window, the oldest, she did not need to ask whose that was.
Three women’s lives, waiting to claim her as their own.
Violet stood at the threshold and was not prepared for the magnitude of how she felt.
Henry had gone to the sheeted shapes. He stood before them a moment, and then he drew the sheets, one after another.
“Elizabeth,” he announced, revealing several paintings including one large portrait of a young woman with blonde hair, holding wildflowers in her hands.
“She looks kind,” Violet said quietly.
“She was,” he said.
The second sheet came away: a woman painted very nearly laughing, against every convention of portraiture, her head half-turned as if the painter had given up making her be still and painted the failure instead.
“Catherine,” he said. Violet tried not to think about the openness with which Catherine must have laughed with the duke.
How could he not have loved her when she laughed like that?
“And Margaret.” She was composed with her hands folded. There was guardedness about the eyes.
Violet said nothing and went to work. Elizabeth’s province came first. The poppy-coloured shawl lay over the back of her own chair as though she had that moment gone down to dinner; the fan was on her dressing table, its guard-stick snapped and mended with silk thread, and then snapped again lower down and mended again, lovingly and badly.
Violet glanced at her husband and studied his expression. His face gave away nothing which might have been telling. She chose not to dwell on it. They had a mission to accomplish.
Catherine’s came next.
The medicine case was at the bottom of the second bandbox, a neat mahogany thing with its key in its lock. Henry held the lamp toward the failing window light and said nothing while Violet went through it bottle by bottle.
Rosewater. A liniment gone to wax. Paregoric, half-gone. Hartshorn. All of it orderly, all of it innocent. Violet was about to close it when she saw what she had been looking past. One socket, second row, standing empty. One bottle was missing.
She lowered her face to the empty socket and breathed in, and at the very bottom of the velvet, something fetid turned over in its sleep. “One bottle is missing. I cannot discern what it was.”
Violet left the pharmacy and went through the rest of her belongings. The reticule. The glovebox. And in the pocket of the dressing gown, folded over its own trunk-tray, her fingers found a handkerchief, wadded small, gone stiff at its centre with an old brown stain.
She breathed it warm in her cupped hands, and there it was. Fetid. Heavy. Green-sweet underneath, like a mouse dead in a wall where flowers had been. Once smelled, never mistaken; her mother had made her smell it repeatedly at twelve or thirteen precisely so she would never forget it.
“Henbane,” she said. “Cousin of belladonna. She was wiping it off the glass, or off her own lips, night after night, and carrying this in her pocket.” She folded that handkerchief with great care.
“Henbane unsteadies, before it does anything else. The limbs go heavy, the head swims.” She looked up at him, and then up at the portrait of the woman painted nearly laughing.
“A strong dose will make a woman seem drunk.”
Henry looked at the stained square of linen in his wife’s hands for a long moment.
“She took her composing drops the night she died,” he said. “Sarah gave evidence of it at the inquest. That she’d been restless for weeks, and took her drops, and went out before anyone woke.”
Violet’s hands went still over the linen. “Sarah.”
“Yes.”
The kerchief went into Violet’s pocket.
Margaret’s province was Catherine’s turned inside out: trunks containing various items more thrown in than packed, linens loosely squared, papers not labelled.
Violet asked herself where a person kept the thing she could neither throw away nor leave out and took up the most-read book in the trunk—Thomson’s Seasons, its spine gone soft. A small, folded paper slid from inside the back cover into her palm.
They read it together, heads close, his shoulder warm against hers and neither of them moving away. The hand was small and quick and clean.
Ten drops in warm milk at bedtime when the wakefulness is on you, and no more, and nothing of it to Dr Maddox, who scorns the old receipts. Burn this when you have it by heart.
No signature. No date.
“I wonder,” Violet said softly, “if at the end she had begun to wonder, and kept receipts on purpose, and told no one.”
Henry had not spoken. She looked up and found him grey to the lips and his eyes fixed on the paper.
“I have seen this hand before,” he said, the words coming from somewhere behind his teeth. He touched the edge of the paper once. “I cannot recall who."
They put the provinces back as they had found them, sheet by sheet, and at the door Violet looked back once. Three beautiful faces watched them out, and she thought, before she could stop the thought: every one of you was chosen.
She closed the door on it, and on them, and said something sensible about the light going, and they set off down the long gallery toward his mother’s rooms with the afternoon falling in the high windows and four hundred years of painted Iredells watching them walk.
She was aware of him looking at her. She kept her face in good order and her eyes on the dead dukes and expected the silence to continue.
“How did you come to this work?” he asked instead. “The plants. The healing.”
“My mother,” she said. “She can name every green thing in a hedgerow at a walking pace, in Latin and English and the old country words besides. When I was small that bench of hers was the only place in England where everything made sense. Five daughters and no money, her stillroom kept us alive, and learning it was…” she looked for the honest answer, “it was how I loved her. Other girls did their sampler at their mother’s knee.
I did foxglove, and was taught to be afraid of it properly. ”
They walked. And because he had asked her a true question, she found the courage to ask him one.
“Did you love them? All of them.”
He did not break stride, and he did not answer quickly.
“Elizabeth, yes,” he said at last. “In the way one loves at three and twenty, when love has cost nothing.” A few more paces.
“Catherine and Margaret, I was beginning to. There is a moment when warmth turns and becomes something more. I had reached it with both of them. And both times, within the season, they were taken.” His voice stayed level, but she heard the weight beneath.
“For twelve years I believed the beginning was the blade, Violet. That I had only to start loving a woman and I had as good as buried her. You cannot know what it is to be told the knife was never in your hand.”
She could not speak. She looked straight ahead. He looked at her, and she felt the full weight of his attention coming to rest on her face.
“They are my past,” Henry said quietly. “I will not pretend the past away, but…” They stopped walking. Henry turned toward her. “You are my present, Violet. And the whole of my future.”
She looked at him for a moment in the dying light and found she had no words. She began walking again.
“Here,” he said when they arrived at an ornate door. She was relieved for the distraction, for having something to do. He held the door open, and they went into his mother’s rooms together.
They searched the room but found no hidden compartments, no missed nooks.
“Perhaps I have missed something in the stillroom,” she said to Henry after they had given up looking.
“When I first entered it, there was dust.” She closed her eyes and envisioned the moment she entered the room for the first time.
“But there were specimens that were not as dry as they should have been. I credited the quality of the jar, even the specimen, but now I wonder,” she opened her eyes and looked at him.
“Perhaps they were not as old as a decade.”
Henry nodded. “There is only one thing left to do.”
He led the way and Violet followed.
But at the foot of the east stairs the smell of supper met them, and the clatter of the kitchen and somewhere below a girl laughing. They stopped without needing to confer.
“She is back before dinner,” Violet said. “And that room has a dozen reasons to be seen.”
“Then we wait,” said Henry. And then, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, he said, “Dine with me tonight.”
She tried not to make anything of it even though she could hardly breathe. “Yes,” she said.
It was the first time. In all the weeks of her marriage she had never once sat at his table.
Sarah dressed her for it. The note and the kerchief lay sewn into the hem of her workbag, six feet from those steady hands.
The dinner was unremarkable from any observer’s point of view, but to Violet, it was the first time she saw the true nature of her husband.
The duke served her from his own plate, filling her glass from the decanter at his own elbow, letting no dish reach her that had not first passed him.
He could have been protecting his investment. She wanted to see it as tenderness.
She had barely risen from table when Patten announced that Mr Harris begged a word.
“Show him into the morning room. We will both come.”
They received him with the door closed. Kit’s eyes went once to Henry and once to Violet, and she gave him the smallest nod. Kit’s voice was low and level.
“She walked to Holborn. She took the back parlour of a coffee room off Snow Hill, and a gentleman came to her there inside five minutes. Ten minutes’ talk.
Not warm, on either side. He passed her money at the end of it.
They were notes, folded small, under the table’s edge.
She said one thing more as she rose, and he shut his eyes at it.
He seemed tired of hearing what she said. ”
“Did you recognise him?” Henry asked.
“Yes, Your Grace. I’ve seen him at gaming holes.” Kit looked at Violet. She knew what he was asking to confirm. If she truly trusted the duke enough to divulge all the information. She gave him a small nod again.
Kit cleared his throat. “The man was Mr Vexley, Your Grace. I understand him to be your cousin.”
A log settled in the grate. Violet watched her husband receive his cousin’s name with no more expression than a man being told the weather.
“Go on,” he said.
“After, the carrier’s office at the Bull and Mouth.
She handed in a parcel, a small and soft one, and paid the carriage on it.
The direction’s in the clerk’s waybook; I can have it off him inside the week without anyone the wiser.
Then ribbons at a warehouse, and home.” Kit took up his hat. “She’s careful like it’s a trade.”
“Thank you,” said Violet.
Kit inclined his head and went out.