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’smaid 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 thetonwill 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 shewould 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.
