“He would have married you himself, you know,” her mother said with a teasing look.
“So we can all starve together? Besides, marriage would have been strange between us.”
Her mother gave her a side glance. “That would have changed once you shared a marriage bed.”
“Mama! I already have a marriage bed.”
“And how is that, by the way? I believe Kit would have been a very generous husband.”
Heat rose to Violet’s face. “You are being scandalous.”
“Yes, but I would have given my blessing if—”
Violet put a palm up toward her mother and a finger to her lips. There were voices coming from the master’s chamber through the connecting door. A clipped male voice, and beneath it a woman’s, soft and low. Violet knew the woman’s. She heard it every morning at her dressing table, careful and deferential over the laces of her stays. The chamber door closed and footsteps retreated down the corridor.
“Oh dear. Do you think that was the duke? Who was that woman in his private chamber?”
“I am not sure.” Dread pooled in Violet’s stomach.
Just then the tea tray arrived. The two women drank their tea in relative silence, Violet distracted by Sarah’s presence in her husband’s chamber and fear that the duke may have heard their indelicate conversation.
Her mother stood up after dabbing the corners of her mouth daintily with her fingers.
“Now you shall show me this stillroom Mrs Bickle has told me so much about.”
“How does Mrs Bickle know about such a thing?”
Lady Thornwick stepped toward the door. “From the same person who told her about Egyptian myrrh, of course. The shopkeeper had boasted about the patronage of His Grace’s mother to several members of The Hampstead Botanical Circle.”
Violet got to her feet. “You will be disappointed, Mama.”
“I shall not.”
They went down the service stair together, Violet leading, into the corridor that ran from the kitchens. Violet opened the door of the stillroom and stood back to let her mother go in.
The baroness went in and stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly in place.
“It is a good room, Violet. The light is fair. The work bench is sturdy. The shelves are sound.”
She picked up a jar at random and put it back. “You have the makings of a useful working room in here. Mrs Bickle would be pleased with the bones of it.”
She did not look at any jar a second time. She did not pause at any shelf. She did not ask what the late duchess had kept here. Her mother made her circuit, came back to the door, put her hand briefly on Violet’s arm and said, “I am glad you have a place of your own in this house, my dear. Even if it is a small one.”
On the shelves behind her, the late duchess’s jars sat in their new alphabetical order and gave up nothing.
Chapter eleven
Renshaw’s
Violet
It was a small thing, a degree only, but the third taste in the tea was stronger. Another steeping, she told herself, a heavier hand at the caddy. She turned over every herb she knew that might leave such a print on the tongue, bitter under sweet, a coldness at the back of the throat after, and came to nothing. That in itself was strange.
When she was alone with breakfast in bed, Violet poured the cold dregs into a twist of paper, folded it small, and put it at the back of the desk drawer filled with half written letters to her mother and sisters. She did not know what she would do with it yet, but she knew she had to do something.
Sarah returned swiftly after alerting the butler of her mistress’s outing and laced her into the grey wool, talking the whole time about sleeves.
They were to be enormous this year, by Sarah’s account, the great gigot shoulder narrowing to the wrist, so wide a lady could scarcely come through a door without turning sideways.Madame Renard had promised three day-gowns and an evening dress, and Sarah had seen the patterns and could speak of nothing else: the sleeves, the waist drawn in close, the skirts shorter than the year past so a lady showed her foot, the hair to be dressed high on the crown the way the Frenchwomen wore it now. She spoke of it as though it were happening to her, and not to the plain woman she was lacing into wool a superior servant might wear on her afternoon out.
