39. The Ball
Chapter thirty-nine
The Ball
Violet
The new maid was called Bessie. She set the cup on the table and stepped back, and Violet looked at it for longer than a cup of tea required.
Bessie was trying very hard. She had good hands and a willing disposition and a tendency to apologise for things that did not require apology, and Violet found that she preferred all these qualities to the alternative.
Bessie had been a housemaid at Iredell House for two years before Mrs Greer had elevated her, and her respect for the dressing table bordered on the worshipful.
“One moment, Your Grace. I have nearly got it.”
Violet sat before the glass while Bessie worked at the pins.
The gown was ivory silk, cut close the waist with sleeves full at the shoulder and narrowing to the wrist. She watched Bessie’s reflection and thought of the woman who used to stand where Bessie stood.
She made herself stop. She was behind a different sort of door, and the hands in her hair were clumsy and kind and entirely her own.
“There is a box come for you, Your Grace.” Bessie reached into the lower drawer of the dressing table and took out a small box wrapped in paper.
“Mr Patten carried it up himself. He said it was to go to you and to no one else.”
It weighed almost nothing in her hands. She unfolded the paper and found a box no larger than a snuffbox, and inside it, on a twist of cotton wool, a single hair pin: a pearl set in fine gold, round and pale and perfect.
A note was folded beneath it. She knew the hand before she had it open.
My Duchess,
This pin has been owned by no one before you. I chose it for no reason but that it put me in mind of you. Wear it tonight if it pleases you. If it does not, it is yours regardless. ~H
She read it twice. Then she set it face-down on the table before her tears fell on it.
“Your Grace, are you well?” Bessie asked.
“Yes, Bessie. I am very well, thank you.” She held the pin out across her palm. “Put in this one, Bessie.”
Bessie took it gingerly and worked it into the coil at Violet’s crown and stepped back. The pearl sat there catching the candlelight as though it had grown out of her. It was hers. Given to her by her husband who was also hers.
The ballroom was lit below them. She could hear the orchestra tuning through the floor and imagined that Cranbrook was issuing instructions to persons who had not asked for them.
“There, Your Grace.” Bessie stepped back. “Shall I fetch the pearl drops?”
“The small ones. In the left drawer.”
“Your Grace?” Bessie’s voice came from a great distance. “You are crying.”
Violet stood. “I need to see His Grace.”
It had been six weeks since the arsenic poisoning, and Henry had lost more than a stone, and the waistcoat had been taken in twice by a tailor who had the good sense not to comment. But the sapphire pin was in its place, and his jaw was set with stubbornness.
“You do not have to do this,” she said from the doorway.
“I am aware.”
“Dr Bainbridge said—”
“Dr Bainbridge gets paid generously to say many things. I do not owe him my obedience.” He straightened and released the bureau. He did not tilt. She watched for it. “I am giving your sister a proper come out, and I am doing it on my feet.”
She crossed the room and adjusted his cravat, which did not need adjusting. “If you fall down in the middle of the ballroom, I will leave you on the floor.”
“Noted.”
“I will step over you and continue the evening.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
She looked up at him. His gaze went to the pin in her hair.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
“Thank you. For the pearl pin. For Primrose. For all of it.”
He covered her hand with his. “It is the least a duke can do for his wife who saved his life and gave him everything he could possibly want.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
He then turned to the bureau and picked up a box she had not noticed—long, narrow, covered in dark velvet with shiny hinges. He held it out to her.
She looked at him. He smiled at her. His eyes held warmth she never tired of.
Violet opened the box. Inside, against a bed of ivory silk, lay a necklace of seed pearls set in fine gold, each pearl matched to the next in size and lustre, the clasp worked into the shape of a small flower. It was the twin of the strand in her hair. A set.
“Henry.”
“Turn around.”
She turned. His fingers found the clasp at the back of her neck. They were not steady, the arsenic had taken the sureness from his hands, but they were warm, and when the pearls settled against her collarbone, she felt the weight of them.
She faced him again. “It is beautiful.”
He bent down and kissed her lips lightly. “You, my duchess, make them beautiful.”
The ballroom at Iredell House had not been opened since Margaret’s last evening, and the servants had worked tirelessly to bring it back to life.
The chandeliers blazed. The orchestra was tuning in the gallery.
The flowers—roses, white and pale pink, because Violet had forbidden foxglove—spilled from every surface.
She had chosen each arrangement herself, standing in the flower market at dawn with Bessie holding the basket, because she was not yet ready to let another woman’s hands choose what went into the rooms of this house.
The guests had already begun to arrive when they descended the staircase together. Henry’s hand was at the small of her back. His pace was measured. She matched it without appearing to, close enough to catch him, far enough to preserve his pride.
She felt the whispers before she heard them.
They moved through the room the way draughts move through old houses, touching everything.
She had been the subject of whispers since the night Trowbridge had ruined her, and she had learned to carry them as she would a stone in her pocket.
But tonight they were not only about her.
They were about Henry who had not known a maid in his household had been the murderer.
Henry did not give them long. “Ladies and gentlemen.” His voice carried across the room with an authority that made her heart fill with pride.
“Her Grace and I are delighted to welcome you this evening. It is my honour to present Miss Primrose Linton, who makes her formal entrance into Society under the patronage of the Duchess of Iredell.”
The doors at the far end of the ballroom opened. Primrose came through them in white muslin with a blue sash, her auburn hair dressed simply, her chin lifted. When she reached the centre of the room and made her curtsey, she did it with a grace that owed everything to her poise.
Violet’s hand found Henry’s arm. She did not trust her voice. “She is magnificent,” she managed.
“She is a Thornwick woman,” Henry said. “Was there any doubt?”
Her mother and sisters had assembled near the south windows.
Lady Thornwick was in a blue silk, the younger girls scrubbed and wide-eyed, in brand new ball gowns.
The ton glanced at them, whispered, laughed behind their fans.
A baron’s daughters dressed by charity, Mad Madelyn, the Hampstead nobodies.
She had heard worse about herself. But hearing it in her own home from the guests who were drinking her champagne, was a different kind of cut.
Henry released her without a word and crossed the ballroom.
She watched him go. Every pair of eyes in the room followed him.
He reached the south windows, and he stopped before her mother and he bowed.
Not the shallow inclination a duke offers to an inferior.
A proper bow, the bow of a man greeting his mother-in-law with the deepest respect.
She could not hear what he said, but she saw her mother’s face startle and soften. She saw Henry offer his arm, and she saw her mother take it, and she saw her husband lead her mother into the room as though she were the most important woman in it.
Violet pressed her fingers to her mouth. She would not cry in a ballroom. She would not.