"Your grace," she said. Lady Marisette said today in front of six women that I was neither clever nor pretty nor wellplaced. I told her she was correct. You lied. I did not.
Miss Ashcom, I did not lie. Your grace, I am not wellplaced. I have no fortune. My father was a clergyman with a small living and when he died there was very little. My aunt has cared for me from a kindness she has never once mentioned.
That is what I am. That is what your friends will see when they look at me. And I will not pretend otherwise. I will not have them saying one day that I climbed by pretending I stood higher than I do. He did not answer at once.
He was looking at her in the blue dark and his face was hard to read. "That is not the answer of a woman who is not clever," he said quietly. "Your Grace—" "Miss Ashcom, may I ask you something?" "Yes."
"Would you allow me to call again?" She looked at him. She thought of Petra. She thought of Lady Mariset.
She thought of the pears in the grass and of the way his hand had covered hers for the space of one breath. "Yes," she said. "Once more." "Once more," he agreed. He mounted his horse at her gate.
He touched the brim of his hat. He rode off into the deeper blue, and the sound of the hooves grew small, and she stood at the gate with her hand on the latch and did not go in for a long moment. When she did go in, Petra was at the window. Petra did not say anything. She only put the kettle on.
He came four times over the next fortnight, not more. Never at hours when it would have been improper. Never alone in a room with her without Petra sewing in the chair by the window. Each time he stayed an hour. Each time he asked one small question about her life and did not ask a second until the first had been fully answered.
He was learning her the way a man learns a landscape he intends to walk in for the rest of his life. She saw this. She did not name it to herself, but she saw it. Between the visits, she went about her days. She cut flowers.
She helped Petra with the mending. She walked to the village for salt and thread. And each time she walked to the village, she felt eyes. The village was small. Word had traveled that the Duke of Ravenholm had called at the Ashcom cottage was known before he had ridden off after his first visit.
That he had called again was known before the second cup of tea had cooled. By the third visit, the shopkeeper's daughter had begun to curtsy to Vivienne in the street, and Vivienne had asked her very gently to please stop, which had only made the girl curtsy more. Lady Mariset did not come again to the vicarage. She did not need to. She had other places to be seen and other rooms to speak in.
And by the end of the second week, Vivienne had heard from three different women, each of whom claimed to be sorry to tell her the things Lady Mariset had said in those rooms. That Miss Ashcom was a country nobody. That she had thrown herself under a scaffold on purpose, that she was clever in the way certain women are clever, that the Duke, who was known to be a serious man, would come to his senses within a month. Vivienne did not answer any of it. She kept her mouth still.
She kept her face still. At night, she cried once, quietly into her pillow, and Petra pretended not to hear. And in the morning, Vivienne washed her face and went out into the garden and cut more marigolds because there were still marigolds, and the world had not stopped because a beautiful woman in a shell-colored dress wished it had. On the third visit, the Duke told her a story about his mother, who had died when he was nine. On the fourth, he asked whether her aunt would allow him to send a physician to look at Petra's knee, which he had noticed pained her when she rose from her chair.
Petra said she would allow no such thing. The Duke said he had thought as much and had brought a small jar of an ointment his own housekeeper made, which she was welcome to accept or throw at his head. Petra accepted the jar. When he was gone, she put it on the shelf without opening it and looked at it for a long time. "He is watching," Petra said.
Everything. Do you understand that? "Yes," Vivienne said. Does it frighten you? A little.
Good. On the fifth visit, which was not counted in the earlier four, because it was Petra who invited him this time, he did not come alone. He brought with him a small boy, perhaps 6 years old, thin, with dark hair and a scar along his jaw. The boy's name was Tomas. He was, the Duke explained, the son of one of the tenants on the estate, and he had lost his mother in the winter and had not spoken since.
He was staying at the great house because his father was working in the north. The Duke had brought him because Tomas had heard somehow about a lady who had caught a falling man and had asked in writing on a slate to see her. Vivienne sat down on the low stool in the garden. She did not stand over the child. She did not speak first.
She waited. Tomas stood at the edge of the flower bed and looked at the marigolds. After a long time, he came closer. He did not speak. He held out his slate.
On it, he had written in careful crooked letters. "Was he heavy?" Vivienne looked at the slate. She smiled. It was the first true smile she had smiled in a fortnight. "Yes," she said.
"He was very heavy." Tomas rubbed the slate clean with his sleeve. He wrote again. "Did you drop the pears?" "I did."
"Did they break?" Tomas nodded as if this satisfied something in him. He looked up at the Duke who was standing a little way off, pretending to inspect a shrub. Then he looked back at Vivienne.
He wiped the slate. He wrote one more thing. "He is not sad when he is here." Vivienne read it. She did not answer. She did not trust her voice.
She reached out her hand and Tomas took it and stood beside her for a while. not speaking, watching the bees in the last of the lavender. The Duke did not look at them. The Duke was she saw when she finally glanced at him staring very hard at the shrub. That night after they had gone, Petra said, "Did you know?" Know what? About the boy that he had not spoken.
No, he has not spoken in 8 months. They say he wrote for you within an hour. I did nothing. That Petra said is precisely the point. Vivienne did not sleep well that night.
She lay awake thinking of the child's careful crooked letters. "He is not sad when he is here." She thought about the Duke pretending to look at the shrub. She thought about the way at the very end of the visit when Tomas had climbed into the carriage first, the Duke had turned back on the path and looked at her only for a moment and had not said anything at all and had needed to say nothing at all.