She looked at the linen against his temple which was her linen from her apron which she had put there this morning without knowing that by evening it would be pressed against the head of a duke. "You are a duke," she said. It was not a question. I am. You were on a scaffold.
I was. Why? He almost smiled. His mouth did the thing that a mouth does before a smile and then he stopped it. Because his temple hurt or because he was a man who had learned not to smile at the wrong moment.
"That," he said, "is a long answer for a woman kneeling in wet grass." I am not going anywhere at present, she said. He looked at her again, not the way men had looked at her at the assembly in the town hall last spring, which was a way that had made her feel like a shelf of goods being counted. This was a different kind of looking. It was quiet. It went on for a beat too long.
She felt her cheeks warm, and she was furious with her cheeks. "You are not," he said. But my men are, and the surgeon is a mile off, and I appear to owe you rather more than a long answer. "You owe me nothing." "That will be for me to decide."
There was no arrogance in it. That was the strange thing, he said at the way a man notes the weather. She stood up. She did not know when she had decided to stand. Her knees were wet.
Her shawl had grass in it. The pears were still scattered in the lane like an insult from a fruit seller. "Your Grace," she said, and she meant it as a farewell.
"Your name?"
"Miss Vivienne Ashcom."
"Miss Ashcom. Yes. I will call on you."
"I do not think—"
"I will call on you," he said again in the same quiet way. And then Pel was beside him and another man was on his other side and they were lifting him with careful hands and he was leaning between them and walking badly toward the low road where a carriage waited that she had not noticed before. It was a very fine carriage. It was the kind of carriage she had seen only from a distance on market days going past the crossroads at a speed that said the person inside had no wish to see the village. She stood in the lane with grass on her skirt and pears at her feet and watched them help the Duke of Ravenholm, for she knew now that this must be him.
Everyone knew the name, though few had seen the face. He was helped into the carriage. The door closed, the horses turned, the carriage moved off. He did not lean out. He did not wave.
He did not need to. She bent and gathered the pears. She put them back into the basket one by one without hurrying. Her hands were shaking. She pretended they were not.
When the basket was full again, she lifted it and walked home. And she did not tell anyone what had happened because she did not know what had happened, only that a man had fallen and she had caught him. And he had said her name back to her as if he already knew it, which he had not, because she had only just given it. The cottage where Vivienne lived was small and warm. It stood at the end of the lane past the millers with a low door and a garden that in summer was thick with lavender and in autumn was thick with the last of the beans.
She lived there with her aunt, a woman called Miss Petra Ashcom, who had never married and who did not seem to regret it. Petra was in her 60th year and wore her hair in a plain knot and read novels she pretended not to read. When Vivienne came in with the pears, Petra looked up from her mending and said, "You are late." "I took the lane, which is shorter." "Yes, and you are still late."
Vivienne set the basket down. She untied her shawl.
She looked at her hands, which were still not steady, and she put them into the pockets of her apron so that Petra would not see. The kitchen smelled of the bread that was just out of the oven, and of the small fire in the grate, and of the beeswax Petra used on the table. It was the smell of the only home Vivienne had known since she was 10 years old, when her parents had died within a season of each other, and Petra had taken her in without a word of complaint. "There was an accident at the wall," Vivienne said. At the new wall on the Ravenholm side.
A man fell. Petra put down her mending. Was he hurt? He was. Did he die?
"No." "Who was he?" Vivienne opened her mouth and closed it and opened it again and said, "He was the Duke." Petra looked at her for a long time. Then she said, "Come and sit down."
Vivienne sat. Petra poured tea into a cup that did not match its saucer because none of their cups matched their saucers and put the cup in front of Vivienne and said nothing more until Vivienne had drunk half of it.
The tea was hot and strong and tasted faintly of the honey Petra put in without asking. Vivienne felt her hands begin to steady around the cup. "Tell me," Petra said.
Vivienne told her. She told her about the sound of the wood and the falling and the pears and the way the older man had gone to one knee. She told her about the eyes. She did not know why she mentioned the eyes, but she did. Petra listened without interrupting.
When Vivienne stopped, Petra was quiet for a moment. "You caught a duke," Petra said. "I did not know he was a duke." "That is not the point."
"What is the point?" Petra picked up her mending again. Her needle went in and out of the linen twice before she spoke. "The point," she said, "is that you did what you would have done for the miller's boy or for the vicar or for the Tinker who comes in September, and that is why he will remember you." Vivienne did not answer.
She looked at the tea in her cup. She thought about the Duke saying, "I will call on you." And she thought about how tired he had sounded. And she thought about the way his hand had covered hers for the space of one breath when she gave him the linen. And she felt something inside her chest that was not fear and was not joy and was rather closer to a warning. "Aunt," she said.
M. He said he would call. Petra did not look up. Then he will call. He should not.