It was Letty who reported how Hampstead was getting on. “We went to the broker’s in Theobald’s Road, Your Grace, the whole party of us, your lady mother and Miss Primrose and MissPoppy, and we bought a sofa.” She saidsofathe way someone else might have saidbarouche—with a hint of condescension and pride. “A green one, only a little worn at the one arm, with two chairs to match, and a long glass for the hall that’s hardly foxed at all except in the corner. Your mother said we were furnishing like the King himself, and we laughed so the broker thought us mad.”
Mrs Bickle’s own news included that she and Violet’s mother were scheming a business between them. Her ladyship lent respectability even if only on paper, and Mrs Bickle had the instincts of a woman born to sell. Between the two there was surely a living in selling honest remedies to honest people who could not afford a doctor. Cordials. Cough drops. A salve that took the ache out of a washerwoman’s hands like magic.
“I say there’s no shame in an honest penny. We’re to call it Thornwick’s. A baron’s name on the bottle carries, you know. Now, I’ve waited just enough, I think. Where is that stillroom of yours?”
So Violet took them down, and the house watched them go. Two housemaids stood aside on the landing and curtseyed to her, then forgot to lift their eyes from Mrs Bickle’s bonnet until she had passed. In the kitchen passage a footman flattened himself to the wall, his face arranged in the careful blankness servants assume they have occasion to laugh.
Mrs Bickle entered the still room ahead of everyone else, as if she owned it. She went along the shelves with her lips moving, making small sounds of reverence, for there was a duchess who had known her business.
She stopped at one jar, and her face changed.
“HAROLD’S COUGH,” she read aloud. She clicked her tongue and held it to the light. “Oh, the poor lady. Made it up for the boy, I don’t doubt, and small good it did her.” She set it downwith the tenderness owed a relic. “You’ll know the story, Your Grace, being family now.”
Violet did not know the story, so she said so.
Mrs Bickle, who had been waiting for a moment exactly like this one, told it.
“His Grace’s mother buried her husband one winter, his heart they said. So the elder boy stepped into the title. Young Harold. A fine young man by all I ever heard, and not above five-and-twenty.” She lifted four fingers toward the ceiling. “Duke not four months, the poor lamb, and then he took a cough. It settled on his chest and would not be shifted, not for love nor money. Not even with his mother physicking him day and night. He was dead by autumn. And the second boy, he was off soldiering in the far side of the world, so they had to send all that way to fetch him home and make him duke. A sweet boy, they had said. Well, you know better than I do if that’s still true of His Grace.”
Mrs Bickle set the jar back on the shelf.
“And the poor mother took to her bed and was gone inside a twelvemonth after,” Mrs Bickle finished. “Grief, my dear. There’s no physic for it on any shelf. Three of them in three years, the duke and the duke and the duchess, and that great title coming down on a boy who’d sooner have stayed a soldier. They say the great aren’t happy. I never believed it till I had the dressing of the tale.”
Violet stood with the cold of the stillroom on her arms and felt a pang of pity toward her husband. Father, mother, brother, then three wives in quick succession. It was no mystery why he was rumoured to be so ill-tempered.
And his brother’s death, she was relatively sure, was not the work of her husband. Did that mean the rest were not either?
The cold stayed on her arms and would not be reasoned off.
Mrs Bickle’s mind had already moved on to supply. A stillroom like this wanted stocking, if Violet meant to use it, and there wasonly the one place in London for the rare things. “You’ll have been to Renshaw’s, in Lamb’s Conduit Street.”
Violet’s fingers curled into her palms. “No, I have not been.”
By the time they came up again the light had gone amber in the hall and Kit had his eye on the clock. He said the four o’clock coach from the corner would not wait, and that the streets did not improve after dark for ladies on foot from the stage. Mrs Bickle protested they had only just come. Kit said nothing more and let the clock do his arguing, and presently she began the long business of gathering her shawl, her daughter, and her impressions for the road.
They were nearly at the door when it opened ahead of them and the duke came in.
He gave his hat and gloves to Patten, his coat after them. While he did it, his gaze caught the people filling his hall. The frown came down slowly and stayed. His eyes went last and longest to Kit. Kit looked back at him with no sign of reverence. Kit stood with his hat in his two hands and met the Duke of Iredell’s stare as if they were two equals. Violet could not decipher what was passing between them.
Then he looked at his wife.
She made herself smile and went to him, because that was what a wife did, especially when the whole room was watching.
“You are home early,” she said. It was the kind of thing married people said.
“I am home at this hour every day.” He said it plainly.
A flush went up the back of her neck. She did the only thing left to her. “Your Grace, may I present Mrs Bickle, a dear friend of my mother’s. Her daughter, Miss Bickle. And Mr Harris.”
Mrs Bickle came up out of a curtsey so thrilled that her bonnet shed a wax cherry on the marble, talking all the way. His Grace received it with a cool civility. Letty, not to be outdone, sanklower than her mother, caught her foot in her own hem coming up, and pitched forward.
Kit moved. He was quick and was halfway to her when His Grace put out a hand and set the girl on her feet again with the briefest of movements. Kit stepped back.
Letty, scarlet, in the arms of a duke and then very suddenly out of them, made a sound like a kettle coming to the boil.
Violet would have given a year of her life to have them gone, safely and at once, before anything further could befall them on her account.
Her husband took his letters from the salver in Patten’s hands and was already turning for the stairs.
